Photographer Will Steacy has released a somewhat painful photo essay that shows the paper’s dramatic decline. As Wired magazine describes, Steacy’s father worked at the Inquirer for almost 30 years until he and many others were downsized. The shrinking of the Inquirer‘s staff was just a microcosm of the much larger decline of the U.S. newspaper industry as a whole, with the number of full-time media employees now at its lowest level since 1978.

After its bankruptcy, The Inquirer moved its newsroom from the massive, 87-year-old, 526,000-square-foot headquarters known as the “Tower of Truth” in downtown Philadelphia to a single floor of a former department store near Chinatown. Steacy took photos of both the old newsroom and the new — and of everything in between, including most of the remaining staff, the paper’s old printers and the cluttered desks of various editors and reporters.

The new Inquirer newsroom looks like somewhere a high-school paper would be produced, not a newspaper that serves a city of 1.5 million. And Steacy tells Wired that when his father was laid off in 2011, he actually had to put the project on hold because it became too emotional for him. He believes — as many do — that the future of journalism is a question mark as great newspapers like the Inquirer continue to be downsized or even go bankrupt. As he puts it:

“The internet, for lack of a better metaphor, makes up the branches of the tree. But newspapers have centuries-long traditions of being the roots of the tree. If the roots of tree rot and crumble the rest of the tree will fall with it.”

Photos courtesy of Will Steacy

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Rumors of widespread staff reductions at the publishing conglomerate have been floating around in media circles for several days, with some estimates of the cuts running as high as 700 people. According to a number of reports, the layoffs will hit virtually every aspect of the company, including most of its 21 magazine titles such as People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

At the eponymous magazine that started the empire, Time editor Rick Stengel said he was looking for half a dozen staffers to take a voluntary buyout, and if that number isn’t reached by Feb. 13, there will be mandatory layoffs. People magazine, one of the company’s top titles in terms of subscribers, said that it was looking for nine people to take voluntary buyouts — three writers and six reporters or researchers — or there will be layoffs.

Lang says Time needs to be more nimble

The bleeding is apparently so bad at the media giant that there was even a report from Reuters that Time may sell its iconic headquarters in New York City. Lang said in her memo that the cuts were required in order to transform Time into a more nimble, multi-platform company:

“With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.”

The broader story at Time is the same as it is at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post: print advertising revenue, which has been the company’s bread-and-butter for decades, is in free fall — and digital advertising and online revenue have not even come close to making up the difference. In the nine months ended in September, revenues at Time fell by 6 percent, and operating profit dropped a whopping 38 percent.

Since Lang arrived as CEO a year ago, the former ad agency executive has made a number of moves to try and boost Time’s digital revenues, including a deal with Apple to sell subscriptions through the company’s iOS Newsstand app. But the benefits of such arrangements — whatever they may be — don’t seem to be enough to stem the ongoing damage.

When his main competitor Newsweek announced that it was shutting down its print edition after a merger with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast online venture, Stengel said that Time magazine had “done very well and we’ll continue to do well.” But given what we’ve seen at other media entities, these cuts are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Time Inc.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Aperture 51

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Facing declining advertising pages and the need to emphasize “digital, mobile and video platforms” over print, the company said that it will stop selling Everyday Food as a standalone monthly publication. Rather, subscribers to the monthly Martha Stewart Living will receive an Everyday Food “supplement” five times a year, and more of its content will be available online starting next year. MSLO will try to sell Whole Living, but if it can’t find a buyer its content will be folded into Martha Stewart Living.

The New York Times‘ Media Decoder blog reported that 70 MSLO employees, out of about 600, are being laid off: “Employees at Martha Stewart Living have not been able to return to work this week because Hurricane Sandy flooded the basement of their downtown offices. As a result, many of them learned of layoffs by phone and e-mail.”

MSLO expects the combined changes to save $33 to $35 million annually. The company also announced a handful of digital initiatives: a new PBS show, “several exciting new digital video series made for the web” and more apps.

“As a whole, MSLO’s total digital audience has grown an average of 20 to 25 percent year over year every month since January 2012,” president and CEO Lisa Gersh said. “Following a careful evaluation of our media portfolio, we are responding to clear trends we are seeing across the industry to give our consumers what they are telling us they want: more video, more of the inspiration, solutions and expert advice and how-to content our brands offer in digital formats, across more platforms and on a more frequent basis.”

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TeliaSonera is basically getting hit from two sides. Not only is the economic climate taking its toll on European operators, in some countries like Spain, people are even ditching their mobile phones. But even before the recession hit, most European operators faced the problem of saturation. Every man, woman and child has a mobile device – in many cases more than one — leaving no new customers to sell to.

That problem is particularly acute in TeliaSonera’s core Nordic markets. Finland and Sweden are home to Nokia and Ericsson and have long been hotbeds of mobile innovation and rapid adoption. It was in those countries that device penetration levels first topped 100 percent in the previous decade.

So TeliaSonera’s subscriber base isn’t growing; neither are its revenues. However, its costs are increasing as those subscribers do more with their devices. TeliaSonera was the first operator in the world to launch LTE, and mobile data traffic on its network has ballooned. Furthermore, customers are moving away from TeliaSonera’s traditional voice services to VoIP applications like Skype, cutting deeper into the carrier’s revenue stresses. That led to TeliaSonera’s controversial decision this summer to charge customers extra for using over-the-top communications services.

TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg justified these new policies as necessary steps operators need to take to adjust to the new wireless world order. He said in the carrier’s earnings statement:

“Our customers’ behavior is changing rapidly and we must change our business models from being voice to data centric. As an example, we launched new subscriptions in Sweden in September where our customers can continue using Skype and other mobile IP-telephony services just like before. At the same time, we have adjusted our data prices to better meet the growing demand for data communication.”

In the next few weeks we’re probably going to see a lot of poor earnings reports from European operators, many of which are facing the same issues of poor economic conditions and market saturation.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user kaarsten

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The news was first reported by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital. In a blog post, Daily editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo confirmed the changes to the sports and opinion sections, and News Corporation issued a press release (below) confirming the layoffs.

Sports and opinion “garnered the lightest traffic and reorganizing them will allow us to focus on the areas that have proven most popular,” Angelo writes. The opinion section will be folded into the rest of the news pages, and the sports section will sacrifice original reporting for “[offerings] from our friends and partners like Fox Sports.”

As a further cost-saving measure, The Daily will be locked in portrait mode — though the company notes in a press release (full release below) that’s also “the mode in which the vast majority of its readers view content.” The Daily still plans to launch its weekend magazine, WKND.

The Daily, which launched in February 2011, is reportedly “on watch” as News Corp plans to spin off its publishing unit. In a recent letter to staff, Daily editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo told them to ignore “the latest misinformed, untrue rumors of our imminent demise.” The Daily has been vague about sharing its number of paid subscribers — the most recent figure is “over 100,000,” suggesting just a small increase since the beginning of the year.

Release:

The Daily Announces Content Changes, Staff Reorganization 

New York, NY, July 31, 2012 – The Daily, News Corp’s daily national news publication built exclusively for tablets and touchscreen devices, today announced content and personnel changes at the publication designed to streamline its production, focus resources on its most popular features, and reflect the changing business environment for news and media.

The implemented changes to The Daily include the following:

 Ø  A total of 50 full-time employees, 29 percent of the full-time staff, will be released.

Ø  The Sports and Opinion sections, which saw the lightest traffic, are being reorganized.  Sports reporting will now be provided by content partners, like Fox Sports, while existing features like photo galleries and the ability to track favorite teams via a customizable sports page will remain. The Daily will no longer have a standalone Opinion section. Opinion pieces and editorials will appear in the news pages, clearly marked, from time to time as appropriate.

Ø  The Daily will move to a portrait-only orientation – the mode in which the vast majority of its readers view content – though video will still be viewable in landscape mode.

Ø  The Daily will continue to invest in the content its readers use the most: original reporting, strong visual elements, great photography and video, award-winning design, infographics, and interactivity.  These are the features that continue to make The Daily unique and that have seen heaviest traffic; they will make up a greater percentage of each edition going forward.

 “These are important changes that will allow The Daily to be more nimble editorially and to focus on the elements that our readers have told us through their consumption that they like and want,” said Editor-in-Chief Jesse Angelo.  “Unfortunately, these changes have forced us to make difficult decisions and to say goodbye to some colleagues who have worked hard to make The Daily successful.  These moves were driven by the needs of the business. The Daily is the first of its kind, and it remains the best of its class.  We are still in the infancy of this innovative new media platform, but we have delivered excellent content, steadily increasing readership, quality reporting, and award-winning design. Our standards will not diminish as we move forward, nor will our enthusiasm for creating an outstanding daily digital publication.”

“We continue to believe in the future of tablet publications because we know the market for tablets and touchscreen devices will only expand,” said Publisher Greg Clayman. “As more and more people buy and use tablets in their daily lives, The Daily will grow with them. We have consistently remained one of the top-ranked paid news apps since our launch, we have steadily grown our subscriber base, and we have the world’s largest media and publishing company behind us.  Like all good digital products, however, we must change and evolve to remain fresh, competitive and sustainable.”

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But not everybody is taking their fate lying down.

In fact, more and more of the engineers, are starting to look for ways to build — and rebuild — a new identity out of the ashes of Nokia’s burning platform.

The Verge reported this weekend that a small team of former Nokia staff have linked up to work on Jolla, a startup that’s looking to extend the life of MeeGo — the mobile OS cut loose by Nokia and Intel. It’s pulling together a team of former MeeGo executives to do what Nokia decided it couldn’t.

The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.

Together with international private investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.

And they aren’t the only ones looking for something positive out of Nokia’s implosion.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on a team of engineers who were now looking for work after building the company’s secret Linux project for low-end phones, Meltemi. Fired en masse when the company closed its research facility in Ulm, Germany, they had banded together to under the name of “Kyvyt” to try and find new jobs (it’s Finnish for “talent” in case you were wondering).

In fact, there are actually dozens of startups coming out of Nokia over the last few years, either from those who were forcibly moved on or those who chose to get out. Some are more traditional spin-outs like enterprise mobility service Newelo, others are more consumer-focused, like Tellyo and Skimm.tv, two different sorts of interactive TV services.

Among the most interesting is Uplause, a Helsinki startup that creates games meant to be played by huge crowds on big screens at a stadium — effectively taking the joystick to the Jumbotron. It was founded by a duo who took the chance to leave Nokia at the start of its cutback programs in 2009.

And then there are those who have turned into an opportunity. Mobile Brain Bank was founded by Petra Söderling — who previously worked on Nokia’s Symbian team — to help mobile industry workers who lost their jobs find something new.

Earlier this month she told local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that she couldn’t have started without Nokia’s help — but that there are plenty of people crying out for the kind of knowledge and experience that former staff at the company have acquired.

Let’s not blow this up too much: it’s still very much early days, and it will take a few successes of huge proportions to make up the gap that Nokia has created. But in the end, the company’s struggles could be opening up the door to a generation of entrepreneurs who would otherwise have remained locked inside the business.

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Google announced Monday that it has purchased Meebo, the social media and advertising company, to add a team of engineers and some publisher-friendly social tools to its Google+ efforts.

In a statement, Google said Meebo (see disclosure below) would work closely with its Google+ team after the purchase:

With the Meebo team’s expertise in social publisher tools, we believe they will be a great fit with the Google+ team. We look forward to closing the transaction and working with the Meebo team to create more ways for users to engage online.

In a blog post on their site, Meebo announced news of the purchase:

We are happy to announce that Meebo has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google! For more than seven years we’ve been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging. Together with Google, we’re super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike.

BetaBeat reported that much of Meebo’s staff was let go before the purchase was announced. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on personnel changes at Meebo, but a source familiar with the company’s plans said that Seth Sternberg, Meebo’s CEO, and Sandy Jen, the CTO, will join Google in the purchase as well as an unspecified number of engineers from Meebo’s product team.

Meebo, founded in 2005, was originally known for its web chat client called Meebo Messenger. It has now expanded to provide a Meebo Bar on webpages that encourage readers to share a site’s content through social media. Individual consumers are also encouraged to create profiles where they can mark their likes and dislikes and receive articles that reflect these preferences.

Meebo has attracted significant funding from investors, raising more than $60 million, including $25 million in a 2010 fourth round.

AllThingsD originally reported last month that Google was in talks to purchase Meebo for $100 million, and TechCrunch reported Monday that the final number was in that ballpark. A Google spokesperson declined to provide information on the terms of the purchase.

Disclosure: Meebo is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Here’s T-Mobile statement:

“T-Mobile previously announced its intent to restructure and optimize operations throughout the company in order to best reposition the company, given today’s demanding and rapidly evolving marketplace.

This week we are communicating to our employees a series of additional organizational changes to best position T-Mobile to powerfully compete and return to growth.

We are restructuring the organization and optimizing operations so that we can make critical decisions better and faster in response to market and customer demands. Further, by reducing our cost structure and streamlining operations, T-Mobile will be able to invest in areas where we anticipate the strongest return: modernizing our 4G network; aggressively pursuing the B2B segment; and re-launching our brand.

These changes resulted in a restructuring of key functions and departments across the company including the elimination of some positions and the outsourcing of others. While difficult choices had to be made, restructuring our organization will help us better respond to market and customer demands and bring opportunity for continued career development and growth for many of our employees. We appreciate the contributions of our affected colleagues and will provide them with assistance and support during this transition.”

In the last round, T-Mobile cut 3300 jobs as it consolidated 24 regional call centers into 17. It hired 1900 new staff in the remaining call centers, resulting in a net cuts of 5 percent of its workforce.

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284

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Yesterday, T-Mobile made the sad announcement that it would be closing seven call centers, laying off thousands of workers, and that more layoff announcements may follow. Normally, we’d not comment on something like this. But I feel this is an exception for one big reason– only a few months ago AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved. We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs.

“At that time, the current FCC not only rejected our pledges and predictions, they also questioned our credibility. The FCC argued that the merger would cost jobs, not preserve them, and that rejecting it would save jobs. In short, the FCC said they were right, we were wrong, and did so in an aggressive and adamant way.

“Rarely are a regulatory agency’s predictive judgments proven so wrong so fast. But for the government’s decision, centers now being closed would be staying open, workers now facing layoffs would have job guarantees, and communities facing turmoil would have security. Only a few months later, the truth of who was right is sadly obvious.

“So what’s the lesson here? For one thing, it’s a reminder of why “regulatory humility” should be more than a slogan. The FCC may consider itself an expert agency on telecom, but it is not omniscient. And when it ventures far afield from technical issues, and into judgments about employment or predictions about business decisions, it has often been wildly wrong. The other lesson is even more important, and should be sobering. It is a reminder that in government, as in life, decisions have consequences. One must approach them not as an exercise of power but instead of responsibility, because, as I learned in my years of public service, the price of a bad decision is too often paid by someone else.”

So what is AT&T trying to prove here? That T-Mobile is a struggling company? Of course it is. It wouldn’t have tried to sell out to Ma Bell if its profits were surging and its customer base were booming. But is AT&T actually implying it would kept all 24 of T-Mobile’s call centers open in the face of enormous redundancies?

For AT&T to continue to maintain the fiction that it would somehow of created more jobs if it acquired T-Mobile is ridiculous now that the merger is dead. The Federal Communications Commission; the U.S. Department of Justice; and numerous industry, public policy and consumer groups have all refuted those claims, accusing AT&T of simply making up numbers in a lousy economy to further its consolidation ambitions.

AT&T, it’s time to move on.

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When all is said and done, T-Mobile will be 1,900 employees smaller and will lose about 5 percent of its U.S. workforce.

“Concentrating call centers is an important step to achieve competitive cost structures to successfully compete as [a] Challenger and value player in the wireless market,” CEO and President Philipp Humm said in a statement.  “These are not easy steps to take, but they are necessary to realize efficiency in order to invest for growth.”

The centers to be padlocked are in Allentown, Penn.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Frisco and Brownsville, Texas; Lenexa, Kan.; Thornton, Col.; and Redmond, Ore. T-Mobile said its employees at the seven facilities can transfer to another call center if they wish and that it would help those workers with relocation expenses.

Image by sxc.hu user thadz.

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