New Haven Independent

Chang, who spoke Wednesday afternoon at the Pierson College Master’s House at Yale, said one video is enough. After all, he’s a newspaper reporter, not a performer.

Which puts him on thinning ice.

The problem with newspapers, Chang said, is that they must be purchased. This puts print at a disadvantage to the web, which can be viewed for free.

The Times is keeping its head above water, unlike other newspapers that are casting off employees like so much ballast as they prepare for the final glide to the bottom.

Even so, circulation at the Times is off significantly.

“Newspapers are not doing terribly well. But we aren’t General Motors,” Chang said.

“People are still reading the Times, about one million people a day,” he said. However, circulation is down 33 percent, and like many papers, the Times is trying to make money, somehow, from the World Wide Web.

About 20 percent of the Times’s audience reads both the newspaper and the online version.

In fact, readership is up, counting the online operation, he said.

Here’s the catch: Subscribing to the paper costs about $275 a year. Reading the website is free.

The Times staff, the legion who report and write, costs the company $130 million a year.

That’s right. They could cut that by about 90 percent and save a ton of money. But then the quality would plummet, and readership would collapse.

Sort of a shoot yourself in the foot to spite your nose kind of move.

The web is not generating enough revenue to to support the newsroom.

“That’s sort of why we have a problem,” he said. “Newspaper websites are way up. The interest in news is there. So how is The New York Times going to pay my salary?”

Chang meant that as a rhetorical question. As a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale, a Princeton graduate,and with an almost-PhD in physics, he’s too valuable to chuck.

Of course that’s how we all feel until we’re sitting in the human relations or whatever office, watching a career compressed, compacted, and slipped into an official manila envelope.

So, how is the Times going to pay Chang?

Somehow, the newspaper will have to advertise effectively online, or charge for copies the same way iTunes charges for songs, he said.

“If you got five million people to pay $1 a week, that would be $250 million a year,” Chang said. Charging for content would make newspapers profitable.

On the other hand, why pay even $1 when you can get the same information for free?

Just find a way to advertise effectively online, a few Yale students suggested.

Like what? Intrusive cartoons? Figures doing strange dances? People who work in advertising have thought about this a lot without much success.

Newspaper readers encounter ads unexpectedly. “It’s much easier to ignore ads on the web. No one looks at the ads,” Chang said.

Just count the clicks. The web itself allows you to see that your web ad is going nowhere.

Often there are zero clicks to the righthand column on the computer screen, where the ads go, Chang said. The space is so poisonous that news is passed over when placed there.

Consequently, websites have turned to personalized news, RSS feeds, podcasts, blogs, and other electronic ephemera to add value and demand.

But when people click on The New York Times science section, they do not immediately head for blogs, slide shows, or videos, Chang said.

“Most people are coming to read words on a white background,” he said. He knows this because web sites record all of those clicks.

As for the future of science in newspapers, like everything else, it’s headed to the web.

“More writing is being done on the web. There are more outlets, but you need to go look for them,” he said.

However, the problem remains that it’s possible to sell print on paper. We’ve all seen it done. Selling electrons — not so easy.

Somehow, sitting down with a cup of coffee and rows of ghostly electrons just isn’t the same as turning pages.

Abram Katz, the New Haven Register’s science reporter, was laid off last week after decades at the company as part of the paper’s continuing financial meltdown.