There’s more grim news from Rhode Island’s beleaguered newspaper industry.

R.I.S.N. Operations Inc., which owns nine daily and weekly newspapers in Rhode Island, recently eliminated seven full- and part-time jobs at the Kent County Daily Times and its sister papers, WPRI.com has confirmed.

The employees worked in several different departments, publisher Nanci Batson told WPRI.com. “The restructure was a business decision based on the current economic climate,” she said in an email. “We value the welfare of all our employees and we’re especially sensitive to those who lost their jobs as a result of this restructuring.”

“We appreciate the positive contributions they made to our newspaper team and their presence will be sorely missed,” Batson added.

R.I.S.N. Operations paid $7.6 million to buy the Daily Times, the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times and the Wakefield-basked Southern Rhode Island Newspapers group of weeklies from the Journal Register Co. in 2007. R.I.S.N. is incorporated in Marion, Illinois.

The layoffs come as R.I.S.N.’s papers face more competition. In addition to Edward A. Sherman Publishing Co.’s South County Independent and the Breeze Publications papers, AOL’s hyperlocal Patch network has created websites for Coventry, East Greenwich, Narragansett and South Kingstown, North Kingstown and Woonsocket.

The Valley Breeze reported last month that multiple reporters and other employees were recently laid off at R.I.S.N.’s Pawtucket and Woonsocket papers, as well.

• Related: Publisher: Kent County Daily Times staff down 28%, not 75% (Jan. 17, 2011)

(photo: Echo Media)

This morning I stopped in at the studios of WOON 1240 AM, Woonsocket’s venerable community radio station, to be a guest on the “Coffee An’” show, the long-running morning roundtable program hosted by Mike Sheridan, along with Dave Balfour and sponsor Ed Careau.

How long-running? According to WOON’s president and general manager, Dave Richards, “Coffee An’” premiered on Nov. 11, 1946, and is now the longest-running panel discussion program still airing on American radio. To put that in perspective, WPRI 12 didn’t even start television broadcasts until nine years later.

What struck me about my visit to WOON was how it’s managed to remain a traditional community radio station, with lots of local programming, years after many of its brethren disappeared. In a sense, WOON was hyperlocal long before Patch was a gleam in AOL’s eye and continues to be something out of a Fannie Flagg book.

In a 1985 Providence Journal article, WOON’s then-owner was already calling the station “an anachronism from the 1940s.” The paper described the “love-hate relationship Woonsocket’s politicians carry on with the city’s two radio stations”:

Though they often bristle when their actions get criticized on the air, they seldom turn down opportunities to take part in the programs. Hardly a day goes by that a city official or state legislator can’t be heard on the airwaves.

As an Attleboro native, I also found the visit bittersweet because it brought back memories of WARA 1320 AM on North Main Street, which was my hometown’s station from October 1950 until new owners unceremoniously dumped local programming in 1997. WPRI’s own Walter Cryan worked there for a time, and it was a vital source of local information during emergencies such as the Blizzard of ’78.

(photo: Ted Nesi/WPRI)

I asked Benenson Strategy Group to send me the demographic breakdown for the 450 likely voters who were interviewed for Engage Rhode Island’s pension poll so I could get WPRI 12 political analyst (and pollster) Joe Fleming’s take on whether the Washington-based firm captured the local voting population accurately.

“They look good,” Fleming told me in an email after giving the screening questions a look, though he said the number of union households and college graduates surveyed might be a little high.

Pensions aside, the most interesting statistics to me in the demographic breakdown were the questions about where the 450 likely voters surveyed get their Rhode Island political and government news.

The top online source was local broadcast TV news websites like WPRI.com at 29%, followed by none (28%), local newspapers sites like Projo.com or national news sites (tied at 26%), or search-engine portals like Google News and Yahoo! News (17%).

The top source in general for political and government news was television (37%), newspapers or magazines (27%), followed by the Internet and radio (tied at 14%). That mirrors the findings of national studies by the Pew Research Center.

You can check out the demographics for yourself by downloading the PDF from WPRI.com.

Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up an interesting take last week on a new FCC-commissioned paper that revealed “miserably low levels of online news consumption” in cities across the country. According to the paper, the top local news site in a typical U.S. market reaches just 18% of local Web users each month, and those people only spend about five minutes on it. That’s five minutes a month.

For somebody who spends his days churning out local news, those statistics are a little disheartening. But Benton went on to make this solid point:

If raw readership totals equaled impact — on political discussion, on democracy, on the culture — then USA Today would be more important than The New York Times and Reader’s Digest would be more important than The New Yorker. Reaching the “right” people — and by that I mean the people who have disproportionate influence in political discussion, democracy, or culture — can make an outlet’s reach more potent than traffic numbers would suggest.

So for sites like MinnPost or Voice of San Diego, which write extensively about politics and local government, it’s possible to be both a must-read in the corridors of City Hall or the statehouse and still reach an audience that’s disproportionately influential.

My humble outpost here on WPRI.com operates along the same lines. I realize the vast, vast majority of people have never heard of Nesi’s Notes, let alone clicked on it, and the chasm is beyond enormous compared with the hundreds of thousands who watch a local newscast or pick up the paper on any given day. On the other hand, I know from my emails and phone calls that the people who do read the blog include a lot of movers and shakers in politics and media. Who knows? Maybe a really sweet chart will help them do their jobs better.

Like any writer, I’d like to have the biggest audience I can. But I’m also realistic. In the fragmented media landscape of 2011, nobody is going to have the reach the Projo did back in 1960, when one paper was sold for every four Rhode Islanders. But hopefully, if you do good work and engage in a little shameless self-promotion, you can put together a quality readership that finds value in what you do. Plus, as Barry Ritholtz suggested a few months back, such a group could be extremely desirable to advertisers.

Not that there aren’t downsides to this trend. A veteran observer of Rhode Island politics mentioned to me recently that she worries about the local media landscape becoming a closed ecosystem, with insiders writing for other insiders. That could lead to a hermetically sealed conversation that excludes unorthodox thoughts from the public discussion. And it raises concerns about democracy, since most citizens won’t be engaging with the information influencing their leaders. I’m not sure what can be done about that, beyond being on guard for it.

Anyway, those are my two cents. Now back to your regularly scheduled non-navel-gazing.

(photo: Ben Sutherland/Flickr)

Phil Lombardo

There is “no way” the New York company that’s emerged as the top bidder for WLNE-TV ABC 6 would close the station’s newsroom to save money if it takes over the channel, the firm’s founder and CEO told me this morning.

“We are very committed to news,” Citadel Communications Co. Ltd. CEO Phil Lombardo said in a phone interview with WPRI.com. ”All of our properties are very committed to news.”

Matthew McGowan, ABC 6′s court-appointed receiver, revealed Thursday that Bronxville, N.Y.-based Citadel is the “stalking-horse” bidder for the station. Other potential buyers have until March 18 to submit their own offers, and the new owner will be selected March 22, WLNE said.

Lombardo confirmed that Citadel has offered to pay $4 million for ABC 6. That’s 70% less than the $14 million that Kevin O’Brien’s Global Broadcasting of Southern New England paid to buy WLNE from Freedom Communications in 2007.

Citadel owns four TV stations in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, three of them ABC affiliates and the fourth a CBS affiliate, Lombardo said. The company is not related to radio giant Citadel Broadcasting, which owns WPRO-AM and other local stations.

“I think Providence is a great market,” Lombardo said. “It’s a state capital, and I think that we can take that facility and make it into a very competitive and good citizen of the community.”

ABC 6 has struggled financially for years. Its revenue from advertising and other sources fell from $15.1 million in 2000 to $5.9 million in 2009, according to BIA Financial Network Inc., a Virginia research firm. But Lombardo said he was confident his team can turn it around.

“I know the station has had problems in the past and that doesn’t deter me at all,” he said. “I think that the way we operate can make it a very successful entity and a good citizen of the community.”

Lombardo also said Citadel would move quickly to convert WLNE-TV to a high-definition signal, which no station in Providence has done yet. “We’ll be the first ones,” he declared.

While WLNE isn’t located near Citadel’s other TV stations, Providence and Bronxville are not too far from each other, Lombardo pointed out. “That’s part of the attraction – I can be there in no time at all,” he said.

Lombardo is a former joint board chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters, according to his biography. He said he founded Citadel in 1982 with a cluster of East Coast stations. Those were later sold and the Midwest stations were picked up.

Disclosure: My employer obviously has a vested interest in the future of the Providence television market.

Update: Looks like Citadel made a much smaller acquisition recently. RBR.com reports the company paid about $150,000 for W48CN, a low-power station in Sarasota, Fla., last month.

(photo: National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation)

I reached out to Nanci Batson, the Kent County Daily Times’ publisher, to see if she had a response to the column I highlighted earlier by its former editor Louis Hochman, who alleged the Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers publication has cut its editorial staff from 17 to four in recent years.

Not true, Batson said. The Kent County Daily Times had the equivalent of nine full-time editorial employees in 2007 and has about 6.5 now – a decrease of 28%, not the roughly 75% estimated by Hochman.

When Hochman was there, the editorial staff was producing two newspapers: the Kent County Daily Times and the Warwick Daily Times. According to Batson, at the time the Warwick paper had three full-time employees and one part-timer; the Kent County paper had seven full-timers and one part-timer; and the two papers shared three full-timers. Batson said she checked the papers’ employment records to be sure.

The Warwick Daily Times stopped publishing in 2007, so two of its three full-time editorial employees were transferred to other Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers outlets, Batson said. The Kent County paper currently has six full-time editorial employees and one part-timer.

I sincerely appreciate Matson’s transparency and her quick response. Numbers aside, though, Hochman’s larger point still stands: a newsroom that once employed 15 journalists to produce two newspapers is now employing seven to produce one. That means less journalism any way you slice it.

Update: In a follow-up e-mail, Matson praised her paper’s staff while acknowledging the challenges they’ve faced recently:

I’m very proud of all our employees at the Kent County Daily Times including those on our editorial staff. This daily newspaper has four full-time reporters covering local news, sports and important events in the communities it serves – far more reporters than the other news media in our market.

I think all news media (print, television, radio and Internet) have been affected by ongoing economic conditions and we’ve all been asked to do more with less. I believe our local business communities and readers can relate to that. But the Kent County Daily Times is a healthy newspaper and its staff is dedicated to delivering the best local news and sports coverage to its readers – as it’s done since 1892.

The Daily Times is facing a new challenge on its home turf from AOL’s Patch, which has sites in two of the four towns the paper covers: Coventry and – following the Patch-My02818 merger - East Greenwich. Patch isn’t in West Greenwich or West Warwick – yet.

Louis Hochman is currently a regional editor for AOL’s hyperlocal news network Patch in New Jersey. Back in 2007, though, he was managing editor of the Kent County Daily Times in West Warwick.

Gannett’s announcement last week that it would slice by half the number of journalists at three suburban Garden State newspapers led Hochman to pen some reflections for Patch about the grim news. In the course of doing so, he offered a stark take on what’s happened to the Daily Times in recent years (emphasis mine):

What’s truly tragic, and frightening, is that this sort of thing is happening everywhere. Before my time with the Daily Record, I worked at newspapers that have since downsized significantly or disappeared entirely. I recently visited the offices of a small daily paper in Rhode Island where I’d been the managing editor for a year. The newsroom itself was abandoned; there weren’t enough people left to fill it. The editorial staff of 17 had been whittled to four. The paper was a shell, with one or two original stories to report each day. It was heartbreaking.

If the numbers cited by Hochman are accurate, the Kent County Daily Times’ editorial staff has shrunk an astonishing 75% in the last four or so years. The paper is one of many around here that was damaged by the troubles of the Journal Register Co., its former parent, which sold the Daily Times and seven other local publications to Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers in 2007.

I write a lot about The Providence Journal’s challenges because of its high profile and statewide reach, but if anything the cuts made at suburban papers in Rhode Island and Bristol County, Mass., have been even deeper and more damaging to civic life. Hochman’s new employer, Patch, could pick up some of the slack if its sites find an audience and AOL continues to fund it, but that remains to be seen.

Update: Publisher Nanci Batson tells me the Kent County Daily Times’ editorial staff is down 28%, not 75%, though that excludes the shuttered Warwick Daily Times.

Chafee at a press conference Wednesday

In all the talk about Governor Chafee’s ban on talk radio appearances, one point I haven’t seen made is this: There’s nothing to stop those shows’ hosts from finding the governor (or any other public official) at a press conference or other event to put their questions to him on the spot.

I mention that because it wasn’t clear to me until today whether Chafee’s ban was on taking questions from talk radio hosts, as opposed to just making a guest appearance on their programs.

Chafee’s spokesman, Mike Trainor, told me the governor would take questions at events from any of the hosts – rather than ignore them or refuse to call on them – the same way he takes questions from reporters like my colleagues and me, or members of the public.

I know, for example, WPRO’s John DePetro and Dan Yorke have both come to press conferences in the past – and judging by what Trainor says, Chafee won’t freeze them out.

“We think it might be healthy,” Trainor added, “for the talk show hosts to get out of the studio once in a while.”

Update: A-ha. I’ve been too snow-focused this week and missed this – the terrific Michelle Smith of The Associated Press made the same point via Trainor in a story she filed Tuesday evening (emphasis mine):

Chafee said he will still speak with the [talk-radio] stations’ news reporters and will take questions from talk show hosts who come to his news conferences or other public appearances. He said the ban on talk shows wasn’t “ironclad,” and the administration would make exceptions on occasion when warranted, such as in a public emergency.

Forgive me, Michelle – all I can say is that by the time your story ran, I was already dreading my 3 a.m. snowstorm wake-up call.

(photo: Tim White/WPRI)

Patch, AOL’s growing network of hyperlocal news sites about individual cities and towns, is quietly but quickly expanding its presence here.

Patch sites are now up and running in 12 of Rhode Island’s 39 cities and towns, with the latest additions being Barrington, Bristol-Warren, Cranston, East Providence, Narragansett, North Kingstown, South Kingstown and Woonsocket.

Across the border, Patch sites are now live in Attleboro, Easton, Norton and Seekonk – in fact, I see that Norton’s Bill Gouveia has moved his “Inside Look” column about the town out of print and onto Patch. The company says more sites are on the way in both states.

I noted back in September that Patch was preparing to create sites for half of Rhode Island’s communities, plus more in the Bay State, and WRNI’s Ian Donnis followed up earlier this month with news that the company was poaching talent from My02818.com, an independent hyperlocal site launched last year in East Greenwich.

It remains to be seen whether Patch will prove worthy of AOL’s $50 million investment – skeptics abound – but the site is certainly aiming to make its presence felt here in Southern New England.

The Providence Journal’s publisher, Howard Sutton, issued a memo yesterday explaining what’s happening with the paper’s long-gestating plans to make readers start paying for some Projo.com content, Dave Scharfenberg reports. Although Projo executives have been cagey about what they’re planning – and they never speak to the press – this looks like an evolution of their paywall strategy, not an abandonment of it.

The old plan was apparently to keep some of the paper’s lengthier local stories off the free Web altogether – no HTML version would go on Projo.com at all. According to Scharfenberg’s report, the new plan is to post short summaries of those stories online, but only offer the full versions to print and (eventually) electronic-edition subscribers. Think of it as “Diet Projo.”

With print circulation and revenue still plummeting, the question is whether this will help The Journal stabilize its finances. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other paper that offers abbreviated stories online with full versions available to subscribers. I asked Dan Kennedy, the Northeastern professor and prominent press critic, what he thought of the idea, and here’s what he said:

The Journal is sacrificing its website in order to bolster its print edition, which is where it makes most of its money. I understand why Journal managers are doing this, but it’s a short-term solution that could prove harmful in the long term. I also wonder whether it will even accomplish anything. Newspaper readers are skimmers, and a headline and brief synopsis of a story may be all that they want.

That’s a good point. Although I know all of you linger over each lovingly chosen word that appears here on Nesi’s Notes, in most cases people skim, skim, skim.

In fact, what the new Projo.com strategy reminds me of most is The New York Times’ TimesDigest, a nine-page synopsis of the daily paper the company publishes primarily for cruise ships and hotels. (Here’s a PDF example of it.) “TimesDigest indicates that making New York Times stories shorter while retaining their essential news value ain’t really that hard,” Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote in 2007. Will some people be content with an online “ProjoDigest” and opt to skip a subscription?

There were other interesting tidbits in Sutton’s memo. The Journal has retained two of Providence’s savvier firms to help it move forward: ExNihilo is designing a new version of Projo.com slated to debut next summer, while Nail Communications is helping the paper “strengthen the graphical representation of our brand.” And the release date for the paper’s new iPhone and iPad apps, which will use the NYT’s new Press Engine system, also has been pushed back a bit to next summer.

It looks like 2011 will be the Year of the Paywall for the newspaper industry, with The New York Times and its sister paper The Boston Globe among those planning to stop offering their entire print edition for free online after New Year’s. I’ve reached out to a few other media analysts to get their thoughts on the Projo’s plan, and I’ll update when I hear back.

The Projo’s paywall plan may be in some sort of holding pattern, but other papers in the region aren’t sitting still. A top executive at The Boston Globe’s parent company says the company could announce plans to start charging for Boston.com before New Year’s, the Boston Business Journal reports:

When asked about paid models and iPad subscriptions for Globe content, NYT Co. CEO Janet Robinson had this to say at a Wednesday conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs:

“We are moving pretty quickly in regard to the Globe as well. There is more work — we have certainly done more work in regard to NYTimes.com. But the Globe has a paid app out there. In regard to big picture, you’re going to be seeing introduction of apps going in this quarter, in fact, in regard to Boston.com. But from a standpoint of evaluating what we plan on doing in regard to paid models, they are, that is under evaluation right now, in fact.”

The metered model, as explained by NYT Co. senior vice president of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz, is basically where a certain amount of content articles are provided free on a running, 30-day basis. And after they hit that number, readers are asked to subscribe.

Patch, AOL’s growing network of hyperlocal news sites about individual cities and towns, is preparing a rapid expansion in Rhode Island and Massachusetts that will pose a new competitive threat to area publications from The Providence Journal and The Sun Chronicle to The Woonsocket Call and The Westerly Sun.

Patch’s footprint in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts is light at the moment. Its first three Rhode Island sites – for Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth – launched last month, a move likely influenced by the Newport Daily News’ decision to eliminate its free HTML site.

But that will change soon, if the company’s job postings are any indication.

In Rhode Island, Patch is looking to hire editors to oversee sites it plans to launch in 18 more of the state’s 39 communities: Barrington, Bristol, Coventry, Cranston, Cumberland, East Greenwich, East Providence, Johnston, Lincoln, Little Compton, Narragansett, North Kingstown, North Providence, Smithfield, South Kingstown, Tiverton, Warren, Westerly and Woonsocket. (Little Compton and Tiverton will share an editor, as will Bristol and Warren.) A regional editor to oversee the 12 East Bay sites is also being sought.

All told, that would mean just over half of Rhode Island’s cities and towns would have Patch sites if all these new editors get them up and running.

Patch has a bit more research to do before it’s ready for prime time around here, though – one of the job postings listed my hometown of Attleboro as a city in Rhode Island. (For the uninitiated, it’s over the border in Bristol County, Mass.)

The postings also mislabel the two Kingstowns as “Kingston”s – which, in classic Rhode Island fashion, is actually the name of a village in South Kingstown. (“You know you’re a Rhode Islander when…”)

There’s a reason Attleboro is listed, though – Patch is planning an expansion in the Bay State, too, and my alma mater The Sun Chronicle is one of the news outlets in AOL’s crosshairs.

Patch is looking to hire editors in Attleboro, Foxboro and Mansfield – three of The Sun Chronicle’s core circulation areas. It’s also got openings posted for Dartmouth, Franklin, Swansea, Waltham, the southern half of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and dozens of other Massachusetts cities and towns.

Beyond inside baseball for media-watchers, what’s the significance of all this? The Phoenix’s Dave Scharfenberg explained it well last month: