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The magazine Editor & Publisher has long been the must-read trade rag for anyone in the U.S. newspaper business. Which is another way of saying: Like the industry it covers, Editor & Publisher in print has been fading for years. E&P in print switched from a weekly to monthly in 2004, while its web site [...]

Alan Mutter, an astute analyst who formerly served as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, now puts the combined value of ten major news companies at only $3.6 billion. Mutter documents the $3.9 billion plunge in the value of newspaper stocks since the first of this month - a period marked by successive new lows [...]

Reporter: If you could’ve found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would’ve explained everything.
Other reporter: No, I don’t think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost.
With the curse of memory, a current roundup [...]

Years after the rest of of us knew it, New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani coronates Jon Stewart as “a genuine cultural and political force.”  The three-page spread, nearly literary in scope, acknowledges the fake anchorman and his satirical The Daily Show as an important news source. Stop the presses.
“Is This The Most Trusted [...]

In an open letter to craigslist, Steve Outing asks its founders and operators to help save the newspaper industry from itself. My response:

Steve,
It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers [...]

The Orange County Register confirmed it will outsource copy editing and page layout to an editorial services company based outside New Delhi, India. So much for local knowledge and the sense of place that only local publishers can deliver.

Jay Rosen has posted his cogent take on “semi-pro journalism” on TechPresident. Provocative metaphor about the news tribe and its survival drama.

Check out the News Cube on the redesigned Washington Times site. Click the arrows on the left or right and the Cube flips to the top stories of day, presented magazine-style with strong photos, headlines and links. Click the bottom and the Cube delivers related stories or “Dig Deeper” choices. Click the “Dig Deeper” logo [...]

No need to fret over those troubling layoffs, sinking revenues, tanking valuations, migrating audiences, declining influence, or even that pesky Internet. Newspapers are a growth business. So proclaims World Association of Newspapers CEO Timothy Balding. Inky execs apparently like Tim’s story. They turned out in record numbers for WAN’s annual meet-up in Gothenburg, Sweden. Our [...]

Last week we described the newspaper business as a satellite falling out of orbit. This week it appears to be burning up in the atmosphere.
The latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report showed a 3.5 percent drop in circulation – to about 50 million — for the largest U.S. newspapers over the six-month period ending in [...]

Is Craigslist insignificant? I’ve weighed in to a small debate:
Publishers underestimated Craigslist once with devastating results. Newspapers, which derive nearly 80 of their revenue from classified advertising, lost half or more of their lucrative classified business over the past five years, a loss that now threatens the economic stability of the industry. So while, [...]

It is a big deal, or at least it used to be, when the nation’s publishers and editors gather at an annual conference to talk about business, craft, the role of newspapers in democracy, information technology, and the future. The latter has dominated the conversation lately so the mood has been decidedly somber.
But the despair [...]

Here are the slides (PDF) from Dale’s presentation today at the NewsPaper Association of America conference in Washington, DC. (Current membership and login required for download. To join or renew, click here.)

What would you do to provide a better news service for your community? Or for any community? David Cohn, one of our We Media Fellows at this year’s We Media Miami conference, is trying to ferret out good ideas for one community, San Jose, California, from an obvious source: people who live there.
On April 19 [...]

Sponsored by Washington Post - newsweek Interactive
Location: Storer Auditorium at 4:15 pm
Session Chair: Hal Straus, Interactivity and Communities Editor, Washingtonpost.com
Robin Miller, Editor, Slashdot/SourceForge
Slashdot has a multilayered moderation system for ranking comments. “If you ever get into a content rating system, do *not* call it ‘karma’.” Slashdot moderators are selected at random, and these moderators [...]