More so than any other large media company, the New York Times is doing a phenomenal service for the unemployed by prominently highlighting the job scams that prey on job seekers. Over the past few weeks, the Times has run a number of stories that describe the most common job scams and ripoff services that are thriving as job seekers become increasingly desperate in their job search. Unfortunately, most of these scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (especially high traffic ones) to lure unsuspecting job seekers by posting fake job ads.

In a New York Times story yesterday, the Arthur Group was identified as a scam headhunting firm that posted ads throughout Careerbuilder to attract and dupe its victims. That story accompanied a front page Times story that exposed ITS and Benchmark Professional Careers as bogus ‘career management’ or ‘career marketing’ companies that add little to no value for their clients yet charge absurdly high fees (paid up-front, of course). The companies, and others like them, have been sued by and banned from doing business in various states, but they still manage to survive and thrive like cockroaches.

In another Times piece from August 8th, entitled ‘Online Scammers Target The Jobless,’ Riva Richmond identifies the most common job scams that plague traditional pay-to-post job boards today. These scams include up-front payments for materials or training, links to online forms that result in identity theft, mystery shopper positions, work-from-home scams, and ‘money-mule’ or reshipper scams. In all of these cases, the scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (Geebo.com was cited as one example in the article) to find and dupe their victims.

In that article, one of the pieces of advice that Richmond offers is to use niche job boards rather than the large mega-job boards like Careerbuilder and Monster. This is decent advice and probably would eliminate a sizeable chunk of risk, but even better advice for job seekers would be to use job sites such as LinkUp that do not allow companies to post jobs directly onto the site. LinkUp is a job search engine that only lists jobs that are found on company and employer websites themselves. Equally as important, LinkUp also does not list job openings from other job boards (which carry the same risks therefore as the mega-job boards themselves), which makes LinkUp entirely unique among job search engines.

In any event, I applaud the New York Times for prominently highlighting the fraud that unfortunately afflicts a large portion of the recruitment advertising industry. I wish more people in our industry were doing more themselves to protect job seekers.

As I indicated yesterday, I have a huge backlog of daily newspaper, media, and advertising news items that have accumulated over the past few weeks and am trying to get through them in as few blog posts as possible, so here’s day two of cleaning out the closet…

• McClatchy is scrambling on multiple fronts to stay ahead of the avalanche crashing down around it. The company has restructured its debt, accepting a 3x increase in the interest rate it’s paying (5% to 15%) in exchange for an extension on the debt of a few years. In the head-scratching department, the company is also experimenting with an additional charge for subscribers who want the TV Guide with their newspaper. Really?!?!?!?

• There is little doubt that the Wall Street Journal will be out front leading the charge in charging readers for its content online. This is a good thing (if done the right way), and in one form or another it will work and it will be an important component allowing certain publishers navigate towards a long-term, sustainable business model online. Circling the wagons and working out an industry-wide program might be the answer, but the dailies just need to make sure they stay out of trouble with anti-trust regulators in the process. The trick will be balancing the need to generate a decent value proposition that warrants a paid fee and the urge to maniacally police the web for ‘pirated’ content.

• Another component of that sustainable business model will be individualized news. There has been countless attempts of this, and many, many failures, but eventually publishers will figure it out and it will become a standard component of news delivery, both in print and online. The latest attempt in this effort comes from MediaNews.

• Newspapers are now less liked than airlines. According to a recent report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, newspapers ranked below airlines and cell phone companies in customer satisfaction. That’s pretty low.

• With all the chaos swirling around newspapers, it remains an active area for deal activity. This is likely to increase as papers work through bakruptcies, consolidate, shut down, develop new models, and begin arriving at new models that provide some prospects for growth and value creation. Despite the collapse of the industry, print remains an incredibly appealing media channel for consumers and advertisers alike, and that will likely remain so for decades to come. But at some point, all the newspaper debt holders that are quickly becoming equity owners are going to realize that they have less chance of successfully managing a daily paper than industry veterans (who deserve about a D- for their effort even with an exceedingly generous curve applied to the grade) and are going to have to sell at whatever price they can muster. Debt holders who hold out hoping that good days are going to return are delusional. Selling now at $.10 on the dollar is far better than nothing down the road, no matter how painful the write-down might be today.

• The New York Times continues to experiment with new advertising formats on its site. While some may be annoying and hopefully short-lived, readers should be patient and forgiving and let the Times keep experimenting until it eventually arrives at workable solutions. If brilliant campaigns like the Mac/PC ads are any indication, the future is solid for online advertising. I also credit the Times for raising its prices. I haven’t a clue if this will work long-term, but at least they’re aggressively trying to figure out what to do with their business to stay solvent.

• What is sure not to work, however, are weak attempts to launch new publications that are aborted before issue #1 even hits the street.

• As if more evidence is needed, Pew just released a new study showing how badly newspapers dropped the ball with online classifieds. This news comes just as online employment classifieds are beginning to rise once again.

One of the most frustrating experiences I have with newspaper sites is trying to find a story on a newspaper’s website that I just read in the print edition. It happens quite regularly that I will read something interesting (I still read 3 newspapers a day) and decide that someone I know would benefit from reading it, too (and who most likely doesn’t read a newspaper every day). So I’ll go to the newspaper’s website to find the URL for the story and at least 30% of the time, the search results will not return the story that I am looking for (and I always take the time to type in the exact headline of the story from the newspaper that day). I then usually search on Google by typing in the newspaper name and the headline, and the first result is invariably the story that I am looking for.

It happened again yesterday with a story in the WSJ about applicant tracking systems. The story I read (here) was entitled “Resume Overload” and the search results on WSJ came back as follows:

Google’s search results returned the following results:

The story I was looking for was the FIRST search result.

The New York Times is no better. I recently searched on their site, again using the exact headline from the story I was looking for, and got the following results:

How the NYT’s and WSJ’s search functionality on their own sites can be so awful as to not return a decent search result is beyond me, but it’s further proof (as if anyone needed more) that the newspapers are completely ill-equipped to climb the hill online that they need to climb in order to have any chance of competing. It’s all the more laughable in light of the recent flap that all the newspaper moguls (Rupert Murdoch included) are making about shutting their content off from Google. Were Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton to make good on their threats, not only would their site traffic plummet, but no one would ever be able to find anything to read on their site given their horrendous search functionality. If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be comical how pathetic the search functionality is on newspaper websites.

In honor of Paul Dailing, I am going to continue to be lazy on occasion and simply dump a pile of stories and headlines into a blog post regarding the death of the daily newspaper (and maybe on the recruitment classified front as well). It continues to be fascinating to me to watch an industry implode, and the story continues to evolve in interesting, educational, and amusing ways. So here are the most recent stories that caught my attention….

• The dailies’ problems may finally be solved! Washington is on the case, and bailout funds may be just around the corner…

• Another ‘Innovate or Die’ story (and some even have a decent idea or 2)

• John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, likes newspapers but only because they’re important to his baseball franchise. Strange timing that the New York Times (which owns the Boston Globe) is also looking to sell its stake in the Red Sox to generate some liquidity

• McClatchy is at risk of being delisted from the NYSE

• Winning the ‘No Shit’ award for the decade, Sam Zell declares that his acqusition of The Tribune Company was a mistake

• The idea of generating micro-payment revenue for newspaper content gains steam  with new venture Journalism Online

• Yahoo prepares HotJobs for eventual sale

• Shareholders of The New York Times are at risk of being seriously diluted….and there was also an excellent, excellent story about Arthur Sulzberger in the current issue of Vanity Fair

• The Cincinnati Enquirer is cutting the number of days that it runs classifieds

• The web tops newspapers as a source for news (didn’t this happen in like 2002?). Guess not….

• Newspapers are selling buildings to raise cash, but no one is buying….

As usual, I have fallen behind on my posts and am resorting to the easy (and somewhat lazy) tactic of posting headlines that caught my eye over the past few weeks.

• As if print media didn’t have it tough enough these days, distributors are clamoring for a price increase to get magazines onto the newsstands. With the recent slate of titles that have been eliminated and many titles on the ropes for lack of advertisers, this battle couldn’t come at a worse time for either side.

• The Stanford Group is bullish on big media’s ability to weather the current storm. Too bad that the current economic typhoon pales in comparison to the tectonic shifts taking place in the industry. They might last through one, but both?

• Lee Enterprises gets a waiver on its debt covenants, allowing the beleaguered company to delay the inevitable.

• Meanwhile, Gannett’s problems continue to get worse with a Q4 revenue drop of over 22%

• And the seemingly intractable conundrum of growing web readership and declining overall revenue continues to confound.

• Luckily, Henry Blodget has a plan to save at least the New York Times. It appears to be as sound as anything I’ve seen, and far better than management’s lack of any clearly articulated plan and the gradual (or rapid depending on your perspective) decimation that will eventually crush the paper. The details can be debated ad nauseam, but Blodget’s basic premise is absolutely accurate, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is keeping newspaper companies from implementing something along those lines. The current issues were obvious at least as far back as 1993 (thanks Jim), and the solutions are just not that complicated. They may not be enough, and it may be too late, but a hail mary at this point cannot possibly hurt any more than throwing in the towel and taking the hit.

In looking at the pile of headlines to catch up on regarding the daily newspaper industry, it’s obvious that December was another horrendous month for the daily newspaper business. Unfortunately, it’s going to be even worse in 2009 for them. But here’s one last pile of stories for 2008…

• The Seattle Times is freezing non-union pensions

• The most recent Pew Survey indicates that the web has, for the first time ever, overtaken newspapers as the more preferred source for news. This could be seen as a positive for daily newspaper web sites, but unfortunately, people are spending less and less time on those sites.

• The New York Times is selling its minority stake in the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park to raise cash. This is just the latest trend of the dailies selling anything and everything they can to generate some liquidity. The problem is, they’re selling at absolutely the worst time, and no one is buying anything. The NYT has even  registered to sell stock at a massive discount which will result is ridiculous dilution.

• Things are so bad, in fact, that some papers are even losing money on their classifieds. The Cincinnati Enquirer has reduced the number of days per week that it runs its classifieds section because the paper cannot generate enough classified advertisers to cover the incremental costs associated with that section.

• All in all, it was just a brutal year for the industry.

• And already, just 2 days into the new year, 2009 is proving that things can get even worse. AsianWeek newspaper announced that they are shutting down their newspaper. Just more proof of the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same…

In the November edition of Portfolio (the best business magazine in the market), Kevin Maney interviews Netscape, Loudcloud, and Ning founder Marc Andreessen. Never a big fan of daily newspapers, Andreessen had this advice for the New York Times:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The question is, which daily paper will have the courage to take Andreessen’s advice? Or more likely, which daily newspaper will have no choice but to shut down the print side of its business?

In the October issue of Portfolio magazine, an article by Sheelah Kolhatkar covers at some length the recent investment in the New York Times by Harbinger Capital Management, a hedge fund founded by the Harbert family of Alabama. The article is fascinating for a variety of reasons, among which is the internal family issues surrounding the Harbert family and their wealth. But the article also provides interesting details about the way the fund is approaching their 20% stake in the Times’ class A shares (worth about $360 million).

One quote in particular caught my attention and made me chuckle out loud. It comes from Scott Galloway, a New York University marketing professor best known as the founder of internet retailer Red Envelope. Galloway and his company, Firebrand Partners, have acted as the public face of Harbinger’s investment in the Times in exchange for 10% of the profits. His investment thesis centers around his belief that the New York Times brand is grossly undervalued and that the company should be thought of as ‘Yahoo with content.’ But in describing the rest of the industry, Galloway states:

“Let me be clear: I think the [daily] newspaper business is a shitty business. The Sacramento Bee, the Chicago Tribune – I think a lot of those newspapers are fucked.”

A rather blunt yet accurate assessment and one with which I could not agree more.

From a great editorial by Frank Rich in Sunday’s New York Times entitled Obama Outwits the Bloviators…

YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then.

It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

It is jaw-dropping to step back and think about how rapidly and how dramatically the media landscape is being transformed by the web.

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Carr wrote an excellent piece entitled All of Us, Arbiters of News, in which he perfectly articulates the dramatic way in which the web is fundamentally transforming news and journalism. The story of the web obliterating the old, traditional economic model behind news has been often-told, but what is just becoming apparent in the past few years with the proliferation of blogs, social media, web-only news sites such as Slate.com and the Huffington Post, and even sites like Youtube, is that the impact of the web on news, media, and information is far deeper than dollars and cents. The days of editors being the only ones who decide what is news are dying as quickly as the daily newspaper itself, and the new models not only leverage mass engagement, participation, and contribution, they depend upon it. The really successful models in this new era thrive on it.

It is this precise reason that daily newspapers that simply take their print edition and throw it on the web, maybe adding a few videos, a blog or two, and some room for comments from readers (as if this is what is meant by interactive), wonder why no one cares at all about their site. These sites may live slightly longer than their print cousins, but not by much. And for good reason – they are just as obsolete, irrelevant, and antiquated and they deserve to die a similar death. It isn’t enough to simply give equal weight to both media vehicles (Carr’s story about Michael Leary of the Philadelphia Inquirer is why I cheer passionately for the demise of the weak, inept, and doomed among the dailies). What is required in the new model is a complete transformation in the way whole communities gather, filter, think about, create, produce, shape, publish, participate in, interact with, and publish news, data, information, and opinion. There is still an extremely valuable role for editors, experts, and pundits, but the winning models in the new era not only make room at the ‘Arbiter’ table for entire communities of people, they recognize that the newly constituted table is vastly superior to the old one.