Morning Call employees may have dodged the layoff bullet slated for April 19, but it looks like the countdown is on again for Sunday May 3. The rumor is that 26 out of 126 will get the ax in Editorial, with the company-wide total around 100.

Also on the chopping block is the Northampton Bureau (nee Easton), the only survivor of the four bureaus from last year's cutbacks.

And how's this for a misleading headline from the April 28, 2009 Morning Call: 

Morning Call readership rises by 9.2 percent

"The paper's daily print circulation, a measure of people paying for the newspaper, dropped 8.9 percent to 99,111 compared with a year ago. Total Sunday print circulation, which is typically the most profitable day for newspaper advertising, dropped 7.2 percent to 130,693."

Gee, am I that bad at math that I don't see -8.9 and -7.2 adding up to a +9.2 percent increase? The headline should read "Morning Call online readership rises by 9.2 percent." And thanks to fellow blogger Bernie O'Hare for pointing out that "[t]he daily circulation is under 100,000 for the first time in 38 years." I guess a lot of people have better things to do with their time than read a non-newspaper.

You know, I just keep hoping, in my starry-eyed-kid optimistic hallucinations, that some (preferably handsome and single) super hero would come along and sweep away the goats from the sheep in The Morning Call's management structure and make them all just go away. That's it. Pfffftt! You're gone. See ya—wouldn't want to be ya. But alas, that's only in fairy tales, isn't it?

If anyone can make a defense for a flower more beautiful than a tulip, go ahead and have at it.

Enjoy these as I have.

When Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell bought Tribune Company in December 2007, he no doubt thought he could turn the ailing media giant around in six months. Part of the deal was a leveraged buyout that saddled Tribune with nearly $13 billion in debt by taking the company private and creating an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Zell and his head honchos, Randy Michaels and Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams, known for his hallucinogenic ramblings about newspapers being the “new rock and roll,” set out to reinvent the news.

Zell’s cowboy style, replete with f-bombs and calling his employees “partners,” was at first a relief from stuffy former CEO Dennis Fitzsimons. But the self-professed Grave Dancer didn’t anticipate the double-digit declines in revenue and advertising that plagued all media companies, especially the newspaper sector, throughout 2008, and by December, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "It's the deal from hell," Zell said in a Business Week interview. "And it will continue to be the deal from hell until we turn it around."

The cuts started almost immediately.  Newsroom staffs were slashed.  Foreign and state bureaus were closed.  Employee benefits were reduced or cut out entirely.  The news-to-advertising ratio went from 60/40 to 50/50.  National and world news became a bullet-pointed half page.  Flashy redesigns of everything from the front page to the Op/Ed’s attempted in vain to draw in younger readers from the Web site. Subscribers, disgusted with rising subscription rates and cuts in everything from local news to the comics, canceled in droves.  Real estate advertising, once a staple of newspaper revenue, fell victim to the housing crisis and the downturn in the economy. Help Wanted ads dribbled away as the unemployment rate rose to over eight percent.  Other advertisers moved away from expensive print to free Internet sites like Craigslist, Yelp and Citysearch.

It’s not just Tribune that’s suffering; it is across-the-board bad news for newspapers all across the country.  On January 15, the Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy. On February 21, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com, and the Yardley, Pennsylvania-based Journal Register Company, owner of 20 dailies, both filed for bankruptcy. February also saw the closing of E.W. Scripps Rocky Mountain News and March the end of the print version of Hearst Corp.’s 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which moved to an online-only publication, seattlepi.com, with a skeleton staff of 20. Add decreasing advertising revenue and circulation to the rising costs involved with actually producing a physical newspaper, like newsprint, ink, delivery trucks and staff compensation, and the picture getsbleaker.

Even the mighty and heretofore seemingly-untouchable New York Times is feeling the pinch, responding to revenue loss by selling part of its Times Square headquarters to W. P. Carey and Co. for $225 million, eliminating dividends, laying off 100 workers on March 26 and announcing “temporary” wage cuts for management.

What caused the meteoric mass exodus away from daily print newspapers? Had the paradigm shifted?

The answer is lots of things. Daily newspaper reading trends are following a decades-long decline. In 1964, over 80 percent of adult men and women read a daily newspaper. By 1997 that figure dropped to 58 percent and by 2007 it dropped again to 47 percent.  A second study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press drops the rate of print-only daily readership down to 27 percent for 2008. That means that little more than a quarter of the adult population still read a physical daily newspaper. And there are fewer daily newspapers to read. Journalism.org states that “after 35 years of television, the cold war, Vietnam, the Me Decade, Howard Cosell and the "Gong Show," in 1980 there were 1,745 daily newspapers in the United States, only four fewer than the number in 1945. After 1980, however, the situation changed, and the number of newspapers began an uninterrupted annual decline (-0.8 percent). By 2002, there were just 1,457 papers left in the country, 17 percent fewer than 22 years before.”

What has changed? Sources say it’s not just that big bugaboo, the Internet, that’s stealing print readers away. Basically, it’s the way we get our news. This is the world of instantaneous news, of citizen journalism and “new media” competitors like bloggers (Politico, The Huffington Post), nonprofit online news sources (Voiceofsandiego.org, St. Louis Beacon) and social networking sites (Twitter). Theodore Glasser, professor of communications at Stanford University, “doubts that such ventures can compensate for the loss of newspaper newsrooms.  ‘I've seen nothing in the blogosphere that provides the sustained, systematic coverage that a good newsroom provides. Not even close,’ he says.” Philadelphia entrepreneur Brian Tierney, one of a group of wealthy investors who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News three years ago, agrees.

"We had a series recently on the EPA and the Bush administration; it took several months to do it, it cost a quarter of a million dollars to do that. I can't do that with two bloggers," Tierney said. "I can't do that the way all-news radio in this market does it, where they basically buy our paper and then paraphrase our stories every day. We are the originators of the investigative work that needs to be done."

And who can forget Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose research uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought down a president? Can a blogger handle (let alone afford) such in-depth investigation?

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Word is coming in from several sources that The Morning Call will host another large-scale layoff in less than two weeks. Rumor is over 100 workers are set for the axe,with word coming down on Sunday, April 19. Oh, joy! Another weekend surprise, eh?

However you look at it, it's sad news for a lot of people.  But best to be informed, I say.

Does this mean our Tribune granddaddy is gonna turn the Call into a Web-only publication like the Seattle P/I? Some new software might be in the works.  And something's up in Easton. Hmmmm . . . my ear is to the ground.

But seriously, folks, the best to all of you in the coming weeks. I remember what it was like back in July 2008 when we were all left hanging in the wind whether we had jobs or not until late Sunday night. Some still didn't know until the next day. That's a hell of a way to do business. It's time for a change.

My sister Evelyn lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and for the most part loves it, but there are two things she really misses about Pennsylvania—the changing leaves in the fall and the lilacs in the spring. I would have to agree. There is little else to compare with the heady fragrance of a lilac in bloom.

While walking through my garden after the rain today, I spotted these delicate buds just forming on my two lilac bushes and rushed inside for the camera. It's hard to believe that each of these buds is smaller than a fingernail yet packed with such fragile beauty and intricate texture. So these are for you, Effie, in the hope that you can come north next April to experience them in full bloom for yourself.

George Washington grew lilacs, and since the bushes can grow to be hundreds of years old, there may arill be one surviving out there. Washington supposedly has slept in half the homes and inns around Philadelphia, so it just might bear out that one of his lilac bushes lives on. 

Speaking of lilacs, The Morning Call had a great article by Diane Stoneback in the Sunday travel section about the Lilac Capital, Rochester, New York (Blooming lilacs!). Check it out if you can't get enough of these early spring beauties.

Recently a good friend bought me a subscription to the New York Times weekend edition after tiring of listening to me gripe about the lack of relevant news in the local rag. The first paper arrived on Friday morning. I read through the A section and put it down, impressed but not overly so. The rest of the paper went under the cats' litter box (well, they're starved for news, too, you know).

On Sunday night, I had some free time and picked up the Sunday Times after going quickly through the Sunday Morning Call and finding nothing to hold my interest. I started with the NYT Magazine, then read the entire business section. Every single article was relevant, interesting and so darned well-written that I couldn't put it down (DO check out Virginia Heffernon's article "I Hate My iPhone" if, like me, you are about sick of Apple snobs). The only thing missing was the local and state news, but hey, with all the cutbacks, that's pretty much missing from the Call, too.

It just goes to show that there is good journalism out there after all. And to think I didn't have to go surfing the Web to find it; it came right to my door. (Sorry, folks, I'm old school when it comes to newspapers.) Now I can't wait for Friday to bring the next batch of real news to my door.