Podcasting pioneer Dave Winer posted some interesting thoughts last week on reinventing journalism: I have the same feeling about journalism today that I had about computer science in the 1970s. Sure, we had textbooks and teachers, and projects and grades, but there was also an opportunity to invent it as we were going along. Computer […]

Print Media Deathwatch: The Newspaper Association of America has released its latest numbers on Web traffic to newspaper sites, and while the numbers sound impressive, they reveal a fundamental challenge facing the industry – getting your attention. Highlights of the NAA’s stats: The total U.S. unique Internet audience: 195,974,309. Of these, 70,340,277 or 35.89 percent […]

Online marketing research firm eMarketer released its latest report Wednesday, a study that indicates a growing number of Americans Internet users are publishing their own blogs, for a growing blog-reading audience. The cloyingly named The Blogosphere: A-Twitter with Activity, report indicates that the number of American Internet users making their own blogs is growing: 27.9 […]

In four Michigan cities, the daily newspaper is becoming little more than a nostalgic memory.  The Flint Journal, The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times, will now come out only three days per week: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Even more drastic changes are coming for the 174 year-old Ann Arbor News. The entire paper […]

Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce considered news publications that relied on ad revenue as “morally abhorrent”. If a publication was dependent on advertisers to survive, it could not cover news, independent of its advertisers.

As people move their attention online, fewer and fewer people are paying for newspapers and news magazines and more and more news publications are relying on ads for their revenue.

Can ad supported news sites cover news as effectively and independently as traditional news sources – or is the future of news doomed to be “morally abhorrent?

Venerable newspaper The New York Times is considering charging readers for access to its website, less than two years after discontinuing an earlier Times Select online-subscription service. In an online question-and-answer session, Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, discussed how the newspaper has been debating whether to charge for online access to the newspaper’s content: […]

The Cleveland Leader, a competitor of grand old newspaper stalwart, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, reports that the Plain Dealer is considering renting out downtown office and parking space — space no longer needed due to “staff reductions.” The Leader claims that Plain Dealer employees received a memo Monday about leasing space in its newly-constructed building […]

Chicago-based Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today.

The publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times cited a $13 billion debt load and a “perfect storm” of declining advertising revenue in a worsening economy, which led to today’s filing.

The company hopes to keep its newspapers and television and radio stations in operation while restructuring goes on.

Who’s next?

Want a safe job in journalism? Work in television. The Committee To Protect Journalists reports that, for the first time, more online journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists working in any other medium. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, the Committee found that 45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, […]

Newspaper print advertising sales have fallen to their lowest level in a decade, according to statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. Print revenues in the first six months of this year totaled $20.3 billion, the lowest since the $19.7 billion in sales recorded in the first half of 1997. Print ad sales in the […]