The New York Times will narrow the width of its broadsheet format by 11%, shrinking from 13.5 inches to 12 inches in August instead of next April, as originally planned. The move will save $10 million a year, according to E&P. Fewer and fewer people remember the days when reading a broadsheet newspaper involved infringing on the personal space of seat mates on airplanes and trains. Today’s broadsheets are increasingly looking like tabloids.

Of course, the 11% cut in space will involve corresponding reductions in the news hole at the Old Gray Lady, which is already looking at staff cuts to address its budget problems. This should accelerate that process.

Mark Potts prescribes a half-dozen radical changes newspapers must make to survive. All of his ideas make perfect sense and five years ago they might have actually saved some newspapers. Unfortunately, the industry collapse is gathering speed so rapidly that it’s too late to make the kind of strategic, structural changes he suggests. People on sinking ships can’t choose that time to initiate repairs to the hull. Potts cites “fear gripping the industry and, unfortunately, the unimaginative responses to it.” Has anyone seen a newspaper really get out front of the digital and demographic revolution and do something imaginative to cope with it? Share your comments.

Google will sell AdWords placements in 225 newspapers. There’s an irony in this announcement. A few years ago, newspapers gave away online classifieds to its print customers. Now they run print ads from online ad sellers at a steep discount.

Highlights from today’s e-mail newsletter:
Report: Young Adults Avoiding Newspapers — and Other News Outlets – E&P’s take on the Shorenstein study referenced earlier on this blog adds the interesting stat that only 9% of teenagers say they read a daily paper. Among people over 30, that figure is four times as high.
Scripps Makes It Official: ‘Cincy Post’ Folding With End Of JOA – No surprise apparently, as circulation had dropped a stunning 85% since the JOA was signed 30 years ago.
Pioneer Press Editor Won’t Rule Out More Cuts in ’07 – A Minnesota fixture for decades, the paper has cut nearly 20% of news staff in a little more than a year and may cut further. Quoting E&P: “If the predicted 15 newsroom employees leave through this buyout, that will mean the news staff had shrunk from 202 before the 2006 buyout down to 165 at the end of the latest one. When asked if a third buyout is more or less likely before the end of 2007, Fladung said, ‘I am not into predicting the future. I sure hope it is less likely.'”

Highlights from today’s e-mail newsletter:

Report: Young Adults Avoiding Newspapers — and Other News Outlets – E&P’s take on the Shorenstein study referenced earlier on this blog adds the interesting stat that only 9% of teenagers say they read a daily paper. Among people over 30, that figure is four times as high.

Scripps Makes It Official: ‘Cincy Post’ Folding With End Of JOA – No surprise apparently, as circulation had dropped a stunning 85% since the JOA was signed 30 years ago.

Pioneer Press Editor Won’t Rule Out More Cuts in ’07 – A Minnesota fixture for decades, the paper has cut nearly 20% of news staff in a little more than a year and may cut further. Quoting E&P: “If the predicted 15 newsroom employees leave through this buyout, that will mean the news staff had shrunk from 202 before the 2006 buyout down to 165 at the end of the latest one. When asked if a third buyout is more or less likely before the end of 2007, Fladung said, ‘I am not into predicting the future. I sure hope it is less likely.'”

The Trib covers its own no-doubt controversial decision to publish front-page ads in this balanced piece of reporting. The Wall Street Journal’s earlier move to put ads on page one no doubt will open the floodgates to others, as that prime property commands the highest advertising rates. The question editors are asking is whether this is opening a Pandora’s box? But as the dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism is quoted as saying in this story, “The alternative is no newspaper, and I’m happy to make that trade-off.”

Quoting directly from Bloomberg, because there’s really not much else to say:

“The Los Angeles Times had ‘one of the worst quarters we have ever experienced’ as advertising fell and cash flow dropped 27 percent, the newspaper’s publisher said in a memo to employees.

“Second-quarter sales slid 10 percent, Publisher David Hiller wrote yesterday. A slump in advertising pages overwhelmed gains in Web ads and newspaper supplements, he said.

“The landscape for newspaper publishers has become ‘extremely competitive and dramatically changed from what it had been not so long ago, with an explosion of options and choices for readers and advertisers,’ Hiller said.”

Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark writes about what he calls the “Big Lie.” It’s the story being told by many newspapers these days about how budget cuts and layoffs will make them better, stronger, more innovative, faster on their feet. Why can’t they be honest with their readers and tell them that these cuts are hard to accept but that the paper has dealt with adversity before and survived, and it can survive this challenge, too? Tell positive stories about adversity and achievement, he says. Readers want more positive stories.

While I’m not so sure I agree with that last point, Clark is dead on with his comments about newspapers’ reluctance to be straight with readers about their own woes. Dennis Earl comments upon the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s decision to bury news of its own layoffs in a trend piece on hard times in the industry. How hypocritical is it of newspapers to crusade for truth and clarity on the one hand and then cover up their own bad news on the other?

American Furniture Warehouse of Denver bucks the newspaper advertising trend by running big in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, notes Denver Westword. The reason: too many electronic gadgets now exist to bypass advertising. With a newspaper, you know readers are going to see your ad, reasons the furniture dealer.

If you read this page, though, note the story just below it, which talks about why some young Post reporters are bailing out as the paper’s cutbacks continue. One scribe mentions that working at the Post wasn’t cool with his twentysomething peer group but “won him points with readers ‘in their sixties.'”

In a post that’s curiously date-stamped 10 days in the future, BusinessWeek’s, Jon Fine asks if the San Francisco Chronicle will be the first major metro daily to give up the print ghost. I suggested much the same thing a few weeks ago, noting that the Chron’s decision to eviscerate its news staff amounted to committing suicide.

I’m not a media critic, but I’ve always been surprised at how awful the SF Chronicle is. It seems to me that a great city like San Francisco deserves a better paper, but the two dailies in that area seem to have ceded that title to the Mercury News down the peninsula. I can’t speak to the quality of the Chron’s website, but if, as Fine suggests, it’s a better product than the print edition, you have to wonder how much longer the Hearst Corp. will commit to producing an inferior product on paper when its audience is one of the most digitally hip and wired in the world. Why not pull the plug and invest in an online franchise that has the potential to dominate a lucrative market?