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 […]

Leaders from the 13 unions representing Boston Globe employees say that parent company New York Times Co. is demanding they agree to $20 million in concessions within thirty days — “or else the paper will be shuttered,” according to union officials who met with parent company management. NYTimes Co. executives met Friday with union leaders […]

Republican blogger and strategist Patrick Ruffini is looking for “a few good bloggers” to help cover local political races and grassroots initiatives from a conservative perspective. “Project Battleground” is Ruffini’s initiative to gather activist bloggers and conservative websites at the state and local level in “every battleground state and every competitive Congressional district” throughout the […]

The Bivings Group today announced their latest report on the use of the Internet by US newspapers, and, while newspapers are rushing to catch up blogs and new media sites – they are rushing to catch up with blogs and new media sites.  According to Bivings Group’s Jesse Johnson, “Our study shows that newspapers are trying […]

In what the newspaper deems a “groundbreaking” move, the Detroit Free Press and News announced that they are cutting home delivery to three days per week. The Free Press and The Detroit News are the first first “big city papers” to make the shift from mostly-paper to mostly-online news publishing, citing a steep decline in […]

Popular GLBT website and podcast Feast of Fools: Gay Fun Show has changed its name, and will now be known as Feast of Fun: Gay Talk Show, or, as creator and host Fausto Fernos says,”just “Feast of Fun” or just plain FOF.” Fernos, who hosts the weekly show with his partner Marc Felion, explains the […]

In a bid to stay afloat in an industry in crisis, magazine and newspaper publishing giant Hearst Corp. is getting set to launch an “electronic reader” later this year, a device designed with periodical-reading in mind. Hearst publishes a number of titles, including magazines Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle. Fortune […]

The Commons Video is a 3 minute 46 second animation (licensed under CC BY), making the case for an expansive conception of “The Commons” as a means to achieve a society of justice and equality. From the video’s description: In a just world, the idea of wealth–be it money derived from the work of human […]

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?