Eight months ago, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton was predicting a 40-percent drop in U.S. advertising and paring back accordingly: He laid off 19 writers and, by selling some blogs and consolidating others, shrank his blogging empire from 13 titles to 9. Well, that dire forecast hasn’t quite come to pass — least of all [...]

Our colleagues over at the Nieman narrative program have posted the latest edition of their Digest, and it’s got a connection to the kind of stuff we write about here. They look at how two recently closed newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle P-I, memorialized themselves through video.
You can see the videos [...]

The Rocky Mountain News is tweeting its last day of production, and it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about newspapers. It’s also a lesson in the power of realtime narrative journalism. Twitter and live-blogging won’t save journalism; they wouldn’t have saved the Rocky Mountain News. (The paper has dozens of its reporters on Twitter, [...]

I’m not sure how much J.P. Morgan likes their brokerage research reports making their way out into the world through document-sharing sites such as Scribd, but the firm’s investment overview for 2009 — entitled “Nothing But Net” — is available (for now) through that service, and it has some sobering things to say about the [...]

Continuing from yesterday’s self-introduction: When I started my original blog, News After Newspapers, just four months ago, evidence of the doom of the newspaper business was limited to the ongoing layoffs, buyouts, revenue declines, cost cuts and occasional shut-downs being chronicled then, as now, in Paul Gillin’s blog Newspaper Death Watch. Today, the evidence is [...]

Remember Nick Denton’s doom-mongering predictions of a coming major decline in online advertising? And how the most optimistic point in the evidence he used to back his claim was, as our Zach Seward put it:
…that search advertising continues to grow, both in CPM (how much advertisers pay per thousand impressions) and share of online advertising.
In [...]

Danny Sanchez and Joe Murphy both wrote recently about the need — in an era when your employer may not be around tomorrow — for reporters to keep copies of their clips. They focus on keeping your online-only clips, which are more likely to disappear without notice, but the same advice applies for regular ol’ [...]

— Martin Langeveld makes his predictions for 2009 in the news biz. I’d agree with most, although (a) I think there will be at least one other newspaper company bankruptcy, (b) I think Q3/Q4 revenue numbers will be down from 2008, not flat, (c) circ will be down, not stable, (d) newspaper stocks won’t beat [...]

Some 50 newspaper executives met in Reston, Va., Friday for the American Press Institute’s “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis.” McClatchy, Hearst, E.W. Scripps, and The New York Times Co. were there, along with many others. Did anything come of it? Well, they agreed to reconvene in six months, but media blogger Steve Outing [...]

— David Weinberger liveblogs a talk by Craig Newmark (of his List) at the Berkman Center. “Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. ‘It has to do with the culture of trust we have.’”
— In case you hadn’t noticed, Mark Potts points out that Wall Street doesn’t like newspaper [...]

Borrell Associates has released its outlook for local online advertising in 2009, and as you might imagine, the picture is not particularly pretty. Here’s the executive summary; the full report costs big bucks. Some highlights:
– “For local interactive media, the big ad slowdown has begun a year earlier than we anticipated.” After a 47 percent [...]

Two top sites for political junkies, FiveThirtyEight and Talking Points Memo, have announced their October stats, and they’re astounding. To put them in context, I’m inserting them into E&P’s list of top newspaper sites’ unique-visitor totals for September. (October numbers for the newspapers won’t be out for a couple weeks.)
New York Times: 20.07 million unique [...]