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Not to be missed: Alan Mutter's superb evaluation of the Cablevision deal for Newsday—and how it compares to Rupert Murdoch's offer. As Alan suggested in an earlier post this week, it wouldn't be surprising if Murdoch winds up with Newsday in a year or so after Cablevision runs headfirst into reality.

When I took a temporary gig as VP-Editorial at Philly.com a few months ago, I wrote that I probably wouldn't be able to say much in this blog about what we were doing while we rethought the site. Well, now I can: We launched the new version of Philly.com this weekend, and I think we've broken some important new ground in what it means to be a newspaper Web site.

To start with, the new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

And this is really only the beginning. As with any redesign and relaunch there were a few things that didn't make the deadline, most notably some social features, which will be phased in over the next few months. Philly.com will continue to grow and improve, but it's already light years ahead of where it was before this redesign. (For a glimpse at what it used to look like, see the screen-grab at left. The change is really dramatic.)

There are a number of people who deserve great credit for the new site, starting with Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who have strong ambitions for what the site can be and how it has to move from simply being a "newspaper site;" the aforementioned Avenue A/Razorfish, which delivered a great design (further polished by Jill Hoover and Jeff Aiken); Jennifer Musser-Metz, who did an incredible job project-managing the design and launch process; and the talented and hard-working production and tech teams at Philly.com, who brought it all together and will keep the site evolving and growing over the next weeks and months.

As you can tell, I'm very proud of what's been accomplished with the new Philly.com, and I'll be excited to see it get even better in the future. We're defining what makes a great newspaper site. Up next: Philly.com does hyperlocal. Watch this space.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (and again): Managing comments on newspaper Web sites isn't exactly rocket science. But newspapers seem to keep thinking that it is.

Today's hapless example: Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, which turned on comments and discovered that, HORRORS, contributors were posting horrible things (even on wedding announcements, which is actually pretty funny). So what did The Bulletin do? It turned the comments off—while The Day, in neighboring New London convened a public forum about online comments, replete with various experts and editors (not necessarily the same thing), along with an earnest followup story in the paper that talks about "the relatively new and challenging world of online reader comments."

Relatively new world? Really? Maybe to The Day and the Bulletin. But there have been online comments for more than two decades now, beginning at places like The Well, Compuserve and AOL, and advancing through too many online forums to mention—some of them even run by newspapers. There's nothing new about comments. The only thing new is the newbies in the newspaper business that don't do their homework before turning them on.

What those veteran sites have learned—which papers like The Bulletin only seem to bother to find out through trial and error—is that fully anonymous, ungoverned comments turn into chaos. Surprise!

Let us count the ways—and the ways it could have been prevented: The Bulletin said it had trouble with profanity (try a profanity filter), "irrelevant ranting" (try registration and moderation) and "vitriol" (see previous recommendations). Yep, that's pretty much the usual list of complaints. And they all could have been avoided from the jump. (I'll link to my previous post on this again.)

To repeat: This isn't rocket science, and it's hardly a new field. The Bulletin says it is going to relaunch its comments with user registration and staff moderation (the latter is probably unnecessary if registration and user-policing are used); no word about a profanity filter (highly recommended). And like other newspapers before it who have taken these steps, The Bulletin will discover that the comments aren't as difficult as they first appear. Gee—maybe The Bulletin's editors could have avoided these problems if they'd just done a little research first.

The New York Times has an interesting story about International Data Group, the tech industry trade magazine publisher, which is transitioning its print magazines to a Web-only model. Results: losses turn to profits, online ad revenue outstrips print, and revenue is growing 10 percent a year. Surprise!

Stewart Alsop, the journalist-turned-VC who once edited IDG's flagship, InfoWorld, gets the kicker quote: “What’s happening at IDG is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

I'm not sure why this hasn't gotten more industry media attention (or maybe I've been so busy I've missed it), but the eBay-craigslist relationship has finally hit a bad patch.

This fracas has been fairly predictable since eBay purchased 28.4 percent of craigslist in 2004, reportedly from a former employee (though eBay now hints that it bought the shares directly from the company). Everybody involved talked about how amicable and friendly it all was, but you had to wonder how long it would take before tensions bubbled up between the auction giant and the classifieds behemoth.

Craigslist is run essentially as a cooperative, with little focus on profit or stockholder value. At some point, there had to be a flashpoint with a big, publicly owned investor like eBay, which would want to see some return on its investment (the price was never disclosed, but it was said to be a few million dollars; in theory, it's now worth hundreds of millions, at least). Capitalism vs. communism—it never ends happily.

There were a couple of signs of problems in the relationship over the years, most notably eBay's promotion of its own classifieds site (and craigslist competitor), Kijiji. But now, eBay has filed suit (PDF) in Delaware alleging that craigslist has diluted eBay's share in the company by issuing new stock. Craigslist, in turn, allegedly tried to adopt a "poison pill" provision to head off an eBay takeover, and has been trying to buy back eBay's stake.

Game on.

“The recent actions by the craigslist directors have disadvantaged eBay and its investment in craigslist,” eBay General Counsel Michael Jacobson said in a written statement. EBay's Delaware complaint--with some key numbers and details oddly redacted--argues that craigslist's actions "robbed eBay of valuable economic and non-economic rights" and accuses founder/namesake Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster of breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Counters craigslist, on its blog: “Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflicted shareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating online classifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.”

"Dominating online classifieds?" Hmmm. Who does that sound like? Newspapers, devastated by craigslist, should be watching this legal battle closely. Though it may be too late--this is a case of two big players fighting over a business newspapers wish they still had. The outcome could be a change in ownership structure and control at craigslist. It would be interesting to see how different a company craigslist would be if it had to focus more on the bottom line.

Oh, and memo to newspaper executives: The company's name is craigslist (lowercase), not Craig's List. It's comical how many newspaper company presentations get that wrong. If you don't even know the proper name of one of your biggest competitors...

There are glimpses of the past and future of the newspaper industry in today's media headlines.

The past: Yet another six-month period of circulation declines, averaging 3.5 percent daily and 4.5 percent Sundays among the nation's top papers, including some real whoppers like a 9.3 percent drop in The New York Times' Sunday circulation. Even people I know who cancel daily newspapers say they'll hang on to the Sunday Times; maybe not so much.

But a few posts away on Romenesko today is a glimpse of the future—or at least one popular future. Today's the day that the Capital Times, in Madison, Wisc., switches to essentially all-online publication, a move it announced a couple months back.

The Cap Times isn't a major newspaper by any stretch, but it's taking the lead in a transition I suspect we'll see more of in the next (very) few years. (In some ways, it's already underway overseas.) Those ongoing declines in circulation and revenue are going to force print newspapers to come to grips with their future, and in many cases, that future will be online. And only online.

More reading: Ken Doctor has a good take on the circulation numbers and what they portend.

For years, Rupert Murdoch has done battle with The New York Times using the very imperfect weapon that is the New York Post—a classic scrappy tabloid, provocative and fun to read, but no match for the Gray Lady in clout, circulation or ad revenue.

Now, however, Murdoch has re-armed, and the Times should be afraid. Very afraid.

Murdoch's near-deal to buy Newsday for $580 million means that the Australian-turned-American press baron has the Times surrounded and hemmed in in a manner that any military strategist would appreciate.

Assuming the Newsday deal goes through, here's how Murdoch threatens the Times:
• From below, and in New York City, with the New York Post.
• From the side, in the Long Island suburbs—with potential to move elsewhere—with Newsday. Imagine Murdoch dusting off the old New York Newsday plan and giving The Times a real run for its money as the quality local newspaper in New York. Or what if Murdoch decided to expand Newsday beyond L.I. 'burbs and takes it into affluent Connecticut, New Jersey or Westchester, encircling The Times in markets in which it now has hegemony?
• From above, with top-notch financial and national coverage—and national distribution and influence—with The Wall Street Journal. You think the Journal's recent changes and expansion into broader coverage, especially of politics, is designed to increase it appeal to its core business audience? Of course not. It's a direct strike at The Times' strength as the only serious national newspaper.
• Bonus: Murdoch owns a couple of New York City TV stations, as well.

Put all those pieces together, as the savvy Murdoch is doing, and voila, The Times is surrounded. Everywhere it turns, it will see Rupert Murdoch. Checkmate

It's a fascinating scenario, and it still could be derailed by antitrust concerns (doubtful, really) or further deterioration in the advertising market. But if he can get Newsday, Murdoch will have the final weapon for a pincers attack on the nation's premier newspaper, in both its home and national markets.

And at that point, the end game for The Times is....what? Wow, suddenly the unthinkable, selling out to Murdoch, might be the inevitable outcome. This multi-front newspaper war is going to be interesting to watch.

More reading: Veteran media analyst Lauren Rich Fine has a slightly different take on what Murdoch is up to.

And another interesting opinion, from Alan Mutter, who believes the real threat is to the New York Daily News.

In professional sports, the kiss of death for a coach or manager going through a losing streak is when the team owner or general manager comes out with a rah-rah vote of confidence for the beleaguered leader. Phrases like "Joe will always be our manager" or "We have full confidence in Jim" generally presage Joe or Jim's firing, usually within a few days.

And with that preamble, I bring you today's votes of confidence in two big names in the newspaper business: "This company is not for sale," declares New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger. "Don't worry--McClatchy is decidedly not going bankrupt," proclaims McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt.

OK. We believe you. For now.

Seen the latest numbers from the newspaper companies? They're pretty heinous. Gannett: Revenue down 10.3 percent overall in the first quarter, with real estate, job and auto classifieds tumbling 26.3 percent, 24.2 percent and 12.8 percent, respectively (that's an 18 percent overall drop in classifieds). The New York Times Co.: Revenue down 6.4 percent in the first quarter; classifieds down 22.6 percent.

Those are big drops, especially in classifieds. Not surprising, but large nonetheless. We all can agree there's a serious problem in the newspaper industry—and it will get worse in the second quarter as the economy worsens—but even more disturbing is industry executives' seeming inability to do anything about it.

Sure, you can argue that there are structural and economic forces beyond the industry's control that are causing these scary declines, but if you really want to get scared, check out this story from Poynter.org, in which four publishers on a panel at last week's industry conference in Washington are asked for an example of radical ideas they've heard recently to transform the business. The response? Crickets, basically. Silence. Well, there was one half-hearted answer about getting newly placed ads into the paper quickly. Oh yeah, that's going to move the needle. Sheesh. That's what passes for big thinking these days?

Look in the mirror, newspaper execs. One of the big problems is you. You're surrounded by dramatic, earth-shattering industry change, your core numbers are dropping by double digits, and you're all still working off the same old, boring playbook. Try something new, people. Roll out some groundbreaking new products, target some attractive audiences, experiment with new technologies, try involving the readers more in content creation. Take a chance, for crying out loud. Roll the dice. It really can't be worse than what's already happening. And who knows--it might work even better!

Maybet there's a subliminal message in the Pulitzer judges' failure to pick a winner for editorial writing. It's probably unintentional, but perhaps the conclusion that can be drawn is that the unsigned newspaper editorial simply has become an anachronism.

Newspaper editorials made some sense decades ago when papers were run by proprietor/publishers who wanted to advance their personal causes, or when readers had far fewer voices of opinion to help them shape their own views.

But today, most newspapers are corporate-owned and have no proprietary axes to grind, and there's no shortage of opinions for readers to choose from—courtesy of columnists, blogs, TV's talking heads, talk radio, etc. Hell, we're drowning in opinions. In that atmosphere, the stately unsigned newspaper editorial seems superfluous, no matter how well-executed. Ironically, in an era when there seems to be an appetite for opinion, personality-free newspaper editorials seem quaint—and unnecessary.

Moreover, editorials cause problems for the rest of the newspaper. You can explain the separation of editorial opinion-makers from news reporting until you're blue in the face, but readers still believe that the paper's editorial stance drives news coverage (that itself is a throwback to the proprietor/publisher era, when it indeed was true). Even where that separation is most structurally distinct, at the nation's largest papers, there is consistent reader confusion. It's even worse, no doubt, at smaller papers where the line between the editorial page and the news operation is more blurred.

This confusion is most apparent in an election year, when newspaper editorial pages take it upon themselves to endorse candidates—another unfortunate anachronism. It's hard for the average reader to believe that a paper that has endorsed candidate A is capable of objectively covering candidate B. That's just human nature. It's bad enough that critics of mainstream media see bias in every sentence of every story; layering editorial opinion on top of that is just asking for trouble.

There are a handful of papers that have done away with institutionalized editorials—USA Today is perhaps the most notable to eschew them—but it's time for all papers to look hard at this dinosaur. In a time of stringent cost-cutting, the editorial board and its unsigned opinions may be an unaffordable luxury (and I'm not even sure luxury is the right word, for all the damage editorials do to credibility). In a few years, maybe the Pulitzer for editorial writing will finally go the way of this editorial dodo.

One of the complaints you sometimes hear about newspapers has nothing to do with what they say (or don't say) or how well they reach their audiences; it has to do with the paper they're printed on. Clear-cutting forests' worth of trees to crush them up and smear ink on them is less and less politically correct in these increasingly "green" times we live in. Many people who've canceled their newspaper subscriptions complain about papers piling up in a corner, having to be recycled, and have chosen to end their participation in this environmental waste.

There's another industry going through many of the same technological changes as the newspaper business, and it's starting to face a real backlash about wasting dead trees: the Yellow Pages directory business. With thick Yellow Pages (and White Pages) books more and more irrelevant in many households and businesses (sound like anything we know?), there's a growing movement to ban or at least restrict the distribution of phone books. And the directory business is starting to respond, at least paying more lip service to the green movement. One of the leading organizations opposed to Yellow Pages distribution, YellowPagesGoesGreen, says, "Municipalities and local government that provide trash services are extremely concerned about the landfill cost and why they have to absorb the cost of handling the telephone directories."

It's not hard to imagine the same sort of rhetoric directed toward the piles of newspapers that readers put into their recycling bins (at best) every week. Newspaper companies need to be watching this closely. The environmental impact of newspaper printing and distribution has been a ticking time bomb for years, and the rapid growth of interest in all things green could start putting more pressure on the industry in short order. That could lead to more use of recycled papers, smaller papers, or even pressure to switch more quickly and aggressively to online distribution.

Newspapers have been lucky to dodge this bullet so far—largely because their newsrooms, in their aggressive coverage of and editorializing on the environmental movement and the need for things like more fuel-efficient cars and cleaner industrial emissions, have conveniently chosen not to look too closely at their own industry's environmental impact. But the activists are now coming for the phone book business; can increased scrutiny and criticism of newspapers' crushed-dead-tree practices be far behind?

Courtesy of Online News Squared, some good news, finally, on (some) progress against the idiotic efforts by sports leagues—especially baseball—to restrict use of photos taken at games:
"Moderate" success in the negotiations between media companies and Major League Baseball over heavy-handed content rights restrictions it wanted to impose via credentials this season. MLB backing down on trying to limit online photo galleries and use of content on sibling web sites, makes things a little bearable.
More details here, from the AP Sports Editors. Good work by the editors who stood up to fight this insanity.

Comes now a survey sponsored by Associated Press Managing Editors that contains a couple of interesting conclusions: 1) That newspaper Web editors much prefer user-generated comments and contents that are not anonymous, vs. how non-journalists feel, and 2) that 58 percent of the Web journalists surveyed worry that "letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism," while only 36 percent of readers agree.

Leaving aside the somewhat odd methodology of the survey—which talked to more than 1,200 newspaper print and online journalists but just 500 readers (which seems very low as a sample size)—this study shows that we're making progress in some areas of letting our readers contribute online, but still have lots to learn in other areas.

Let's all agree, please, that pure anonymity in comments is bad. I've written about this before, and a lot of Web journalists agree, as the survey shows. But there are still way too many newspaper Web sites that are sloppy about handling comments, starting with a failure to require registration—which is the first step in combatting anonymity. The result, as one Web editor friend calls it, is "a sewer" in comments (perfect example: the Tribune papers using registration-free Topix as a comments engine).

Look, you're probably never going to fully do away with anonymity in comments—not and get any real participation—but requiring registration at least means that site managers have some idea who's behind specific comments, and can control them appropriately. It's really not that hard—but too many newspaper Web sites still seem to think that anonymity is part of the Web ethos, for some reason, and don't take the proper precautions to register the people they allow to comment on their sites. Result: the aforementioned sewer. It's nice to see that a majority of editors surveyed by the APME agree, though that opinion still doesn't necessarily square with industry practice.

Far more troubling is this notion that journalists shouldn't join online discussions. I've heard this anecdotally recently, as well, from reporters who don't think they should be interacting with readers online. Huh? Sure, I understand the concern about reporters expressing opinions in online forums, comments and discussions. That's probably a realistic—if overblown—concern.

But the best online forums on newspaper Web sites are two-way conversations involving reporters and other journalists interacting with readers, answering questions and generally making themselves available. Just look at WashingtonPost.com's fantastic discussions area for daily examples. Or check out some of the better newspaper blogs, where the authors are regular participants in the comments.

Yes, sometimes these toe the line of allegedly objective journalists expressing opinion (it's not a problem when the participant is a columnist, incidentally). But far more often they enrich the conversation—not to mention the readers' understanding and the reporter's beat—by fomenting a healthy, interesting, helpful dialogue. Oh, and by the way, journalist participation in comments and forums tends to improve the quality of the discussion in general—a factor almost as important as banishing anonymity.

This study shows that we still have a ways to go in understanding how best to deal with the new participatory styles of journalism. Some of these opinions reflect fear of the new, of what it means to interact with the audience. But the upside of doing so is phenomenal, and most journalists I've talked to who've taken the plunge into conversing with their readers have become big fans of the idea. To those 58 percent of newspaper journalists who worry about participation in comments and discussions: Get over it. Fast. You're missing out on an important part of the online revolution that's fundamentally changing our business. A large majority of readers wants you to interact with them. Start doing it.

Oh, and one more way that journalists are still a little disconnected from the Web: The full version of the survey is available only as a PDF download, you know, so it's easier to print out. Hey APME: Why not put it up in HTML so it can be read online?

Steve Outing has a good column up about ending his subscription to the Boulder Daily Camera because the paper was a) increasingly irrelevant and b) getting more expensive. Others of us have taken similar steps to stop our print subscriptions over the past few years, but Steve's column has a very telling kicker:

Editor's note: Daily Camera publisher Al Manzi and editor Kevin Kaufman were invited prior to publication to comment publicly on this column, but both declined.

That's not good. A semi-prominent subscriber cancels his subscription in a very public way, and the publisher and editor have nothing to say about it for the record? Not smart. It must be nice to be so cavalier about losing a reader that way. I guess the newspaper business is going so well that publishers can be casual about reader retention.

Now reread those last two sentences and substitute "customer" for "reader." And wonder why any business would let a customer walk. That's how you go out of business. It's why newspapers are going out of business.

Good companies don't let customers get away. They fight to retain every customer, and add more. They're not casual about keeping customers' business. Newspapers don't seem to get that. When I canceled my Washington Post daily subscription a few years ago, the clerk at the other end of the phone said, "OK." There was no effort to get me to stay, no special offers, no questions about why I was canceling, the latest in the list of 200,000 readers the Post has frittered away in the past five years. There was just acceptance that another customer had stopped subscribing. Manzi and Kaufman's acquiescent no comment is tantamount to the same thing.

To the Camera's credit, Outing did get a call from the circulation department asking him to resubscribe—at the same rate. Not exactly a killer sales appeal. I should be getting deluged by the Post, in mail and by phone, with attractive offers to add to my Sunday-only subscription. But it doesn't happen. Instead, every few months, I get a half-hearted call from the Post offering me a free daily paper to go with my Sunday subscription. I say "no," and get no pushback (well, except once when it was suggested that my Post delivery person would appreciate it if I'd subscribe to the daily paper. I still don't understand that pitch).

You simply can't let readers—customers—go quietly. That's a recipe for disaster, in newspapers or any business.

The latest edition of the Newseum opens in Washington in a couple of weeks, and John Robinson points out that admission will be $20 for adults.

Twenty bucks? Excuse me??

Look, I know museum construction and operation is expensive, and somebody's got to foot the $450 million bill for multiple interactive news displays. the "4-D time-travel experience," the TV news chopper hanging in the middle of the museum and all of the other bells and whistles. But I thought that was why Freedom Forum, Gannett's house charity, and other corporate sponsors were paying for this exercise in news industry self-indulgency in the first place. (A notable omission from the major donors list: The hometown Washington Post and the various Graham/Meyer family charitable trusts.)

The Newseum will be operating in the center of Washington, D.C., mere blocks from the Smithsonian's dozen or so museums, not to mention hallowed tourist attactions like the White House, Washington Monument and Capitol Building.

And here's the perfect irony: Admission to all of these competitors for tourist time (and dollars) is, um, free. Yes, free. Just like Craigslist and news on the Internet are free. And we know how well that's worked out for the news industry. (I suspect the 4D time-travel experience overlooks that.)

Good luck, Newseum, and your $20 admission fee. Maybe you can garner attendance by offering weekends free to those who buy daily admission or by shoving tickets under the doors of Washington hotel rooms or something.

The advent of reporter blogs, online chats, podcasts and video is adding new volume and depth of coverage to many key beats. But it's also creating an interesting phenomenon: Some of the best information being uncovered by journalists is showing up in these newfangled venues rather than in traditional publications. And since the average reporter's blog or chat generally is read by a much smaller (if more devoted) audience, you have to start wondering about priorities. Should the reporter's best stuff appear in the newspaper? Or is it OK for it to show up somewhere else?

Here's a quick example, from an online discussion conducted this week by legendary Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell. The subject was John Patterson, a sore-armed pitcher cut loose by the Washington Nationals a couple days before:

When I saw his forearm after his first major surgery, last spring, I guess, I gasped. He'd lost much of his basic musculature. Gone from "Wow, bet that guy is a baseball pitcher" to just a normal guy. He didn't seem aware of the change. I doubted he'd get his fastball back unless he somehow rebuilt the whole forearm. Then, this spring, he had another four-inch scar on the forearm. Great interview, really nice guy, but not universally popular in the locker room because he looked like a star and didn't fit the team's blue collar play-hurt mold. Hope he makes it back in Texas. But I doubt it. And I've doubted it for a year.

Um, hello? That's a collection of fantastic insights about the guy who was supposed to be the Nats' No. 1 pitcher before his release—and it's information that never appeared in the print Washington Post, from Boswell or the Nationals beat writers, over the past year. Or anywhere else, as far as I can tell.

Arguably, this is one of the reasons newspapers are suffering: They seem afraid to tell the full story, warts and all. As many pundits and readers have complained, that shirking of journalistic duty applies to important topics, like the Iraq war and the Bush Presidency, not just the sports section. I can think of countless insightful anecdotes and opinions that I've read on reporter blogs or discussions—or heard expressed in journalist TV appearances—that don't seem to make the paper.

The possible reasons for this range from dire to innocent. Is it reporters trying to protect a source? Is it reporters feeling freer with their opinions and inside info in the less formal atmosphere of a blog, chat or TV gig? Whatever, it's frustrating as a reader or viewer to find out that you weren't getting the whole story from traditional coverage.

I think there's a real challenge for editors and reporters here to try to make sure that this sort of deeper reportage finds a much broader audience. If that means moving some of the informality of blogs into the newspaper, fine. If it means reminding reporters that they ultimately work to serve their readers, not their sources, even better. But as long as the good stuff isn't getting into the paper, the industry's decline is just going to accelerate.

If you haven't seen them, Editor & Publisher has the latest Newspaper Association of America numbers on newspaper ad revenue, and they're pretty heinous: Down a total of 9.4 percent in 2007, with Classifieds down a whopping 16.5 percent. And most of that happened before the economy started going south. Compared to 2008, 2007 was supposed to be a good year. Well, not so much.

A full scan of six decades of this data show only one dropoff like this, in 2001, when newspapers were hit by the triple-whammy of the bursting of the Internet bubble (bad for ads, especially employment classifieds), the resulting stock market plunge, and 9/11. Eventually, the business recovered a bit. This time, though, that ain't going to happen.

Good news, sort of: Newspaper online revenue went up almost 19 percent. But that was off from (admittedly unsustainable) 31 percent increases each of the previous two years, and of course, online revenue is still a drop in the bucket (7.5 percent of total revenue).

Hang on, folks. The ride gets even bumpier from here.

A lot of news organizations talk big, at least internally, about user-generated content (UGC), but very few are doing anything really interesting with it. A lot of this is a result of editorial fear: "What if those horrible audience people write offensively? Don't tell the truth? Use bad words?" Oh, the horrors. Sheesh. Get over it.

So newspaper Web sites dip their toes into UGC, very reluctantly, with maybe a heavily edited user blog or two, or a photo contest (yawn), or cautious comments, or—and people, no matter how you want to define it, this is NOT UGC—a daily poll.

What they should be doing, of course, is giving the audience a full voice in the coverage and discussion of hyperlocal issues, building active audience communities around beat reporters and columnists, and tapping into existing bloggers for supplemental content.

Or, they can try something simple, and fun. To that end, I bring you Instant Daily, an extremely popular feature in the University of Connecticut's newspaper, the Daily Campus. The paper asks readers to send it (via AOL Instant Message) short anonymous thoughts and observations. Submissions are culled and edited, and then posted—unsigned—a few at a time in the paper and on its Web site.

The result is a fascinating, readable, entertaining combination of graffiti and haiku, a snapshot of life on campus, with one- or two-sentence comments like:
• "To the kid who walked out of the dining hall with the wrong backpack: Was it a blue Northface from South Dining Hall? I want my backpack back!"
• "The words 'I love Lisa' are written on a bathroom stall in the women's bathroom in the library. Either this Lisa thinks very highly of herself, or some guy was really, really lost."
• "I don't understand what's so fun about kite flying."
• "At what time is it OK to stop being quiet in your room if your roommate sleeps until 4 p.m. every day?"

Is this journalism? Hell no, and neither are comics or Sudoku. It's silly, charming, refreshing and sometimes an interesting insight into what's going on in the world of the Daily Campus' readers. It's a format that, with some refinement, could be used at almost any newspaper site. Ask readers to share what they're seeing around them, thinking about and/or talking about, and then post the highlights for everyone to see. Voila, instant user-generated content. Hint: It's more interesting to readers than at least 90 percent of what you're printing now.

(Hat tip to my Philly.com colleague Jonathan Tannenwald, who came across Instant Daily in his insatiable wandering through media.)

The boys (and girls) on the bus in the 2008 Presidential campaign could fit into a much smaller vehicle, according to The New York Times: Far fewer news organizations are staffing the campaign this year, largely because of cutbacks in newsroom budgets.

This isn't a bad thing. There's not a lot of original reporting in pack journalism of this type, and most newspapers are better served running AP coverage of the campaign (readers don't notice, really they don't) than spending the $2,000-plus a day to fly somebody around on Barack Obama's campaign plane. At a time when papers need to be much smarter about how they use their dwindling resources to serve readers, that's just good management. There's really no reason for regional newspapers to be staffing national campaigns, unless there's a distinct local angle. The money is better spent elsewhere. (Does Sam Zell realize that both the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are staffing the campaigns? Just asking.)

But there's another angle to these sorts of cutbacks that represents a cruel fact of newsroom life: There are far fewer plum jobs for reporters to aspire to these days. And there goes one of the great perks of journalism.

A decade or two ago, young reporters at many papers could hope they'd work their way up the ladder to a Presidential campaign, or the White House beat, or a domestic or foreign bureau assignment. Never mind that some of these jobs were actually fairly crappy—they nonetheless reeked of prestige, and made it worth climbing the newsroom ladder if you didn't want to go into management.

But no more. At most papers, there's a hard ceiling on this sort of advancement. Bureaus, especially overseas, are a thing of the past. Washington bureaus have been (generally) slashed to the bone. Getting a ride on the Presidential campaign bus? Forget it. Heck, even the ability to dream up a great out-of-town reporting assignment and live off the newspaper's expense account for a few days (ah, the old expense-account tales) is severely limited these days. And none of these prizes is ever coming back.

This could have significant impact, over time, on recruiting and keeping good young reporters. Without these traditional goals, many may feel trapped and leave the profession. Newspaper managements need to be creative about finding some sort of consolation prize: With the much-overdue shift to emphasis on local coverage, compensation and other rewards need to be redirected at key local beats, to make them worth aspiring to. But the idea of striving for a gig in Washington, or overseas, or in a foreign bureau, is now about as antiquated as portable typewriters and the telexes that traveling reporters once used to file their copy. R.I.P.

Ever watch CNBC wildman Jim Cramer? He's a veteran Wall Street trader with an outsized personality who does an entertaining and informative hour of market analysis every evening. He comes off as nuts, but he knows his stuff, and when he goes after a company or a CEO, he often draws blood.

Last night, one of his targets was McClatchy—specifically, CEO Gary Pruitt. Cramer called Pruitt "a walking disaster...a one-man black hole for shareholder value," and pointed out that McClatchy's stock price has resembled a very steep ski slope for the past year or so—not coincidentally, since Pruitt-led McClatchy bought Knight Ridder. "He has wrecked the company himself," Cramer declared, practically foaming at the mouth (imagine how McClatchy shareholders feel!).

Give the video clip of the segment on CNBC.com a look—it's very entertaining television that makes a devastating case. And make sure you stick around for the very end, when he, um, eggs Pruitt on.

(Chart from CNBC.com)