Almost all of the hand-wringing about this week’s front-page Los Angeles Times ad has been focused on journalists, and how hard this is for them to swallow.
“There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” [...]

It’s shorthand for the chief problem of transitioning a local news operation’s business model from print to online: Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies. Despite increasing readership online, advertisers continue to pay a much higher price when they place their ads in print.
A lot of that has been laid to inertia on the part of [...]

It’s not terribly surprising to me that Google has given up on its two-year-old program to funnel print ads to newspapers.  As a newspaper publisher, I provided pre-alpha feedback to Google on this program in 2006, and was involved in it from its earliest rollout until I left the business last spring.
No paper that I [...]

— Mathew Ingram at The Globe and Mail writes about their new experiment with using wikis to get public input on policy issues. More from Mathew in this space tomorrow.
— I recognize the need for innovation in the news business, particularly in advertising, but I am unsold on this idea (fourth item down):
US Ink is [...]

Fishbowl DC has obtained an in-house Politico memo about the web site’s post-election future. Lots of interesting stuff, but I want to highlight a few points and what they tell us about their business model. (Politico is privately held, so hard numbers are hard to come by.)
In our first 21 months, Politico has frequently achieved [...]

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 [...]

After thinking about the Christian Science Monitor’s plan, the most puzzling part is the (non-free, price TBA) daily PDF edition, delivered over email. PDF editions have always felt to me like a poorly reasoned set of training wheels for the transition online. They look like familiar print editions, and they speak the same design language, [...]