Three recent items of note:

MediaPost reports that newspapers have a surprising new competitor in eBay. The auctioneer’s new classified advertising service, which facilitates transactions between people who live near each other, is a potentially powerful force in classified advertising, which is newspapers’ most profitable business. The article goes on to suggest that newspapers should partner with eBay, which is kind of like thanking your host for the glass of poison he’s just offered you.

The VP of Marketing at Eluma makes a case for news organizations to get local again. In an iMediaConnection opinion piece that’s otherwise a shameless pitch for his company’s products, Joe Lichtenberg cites a B&C/Magid Media Labs study of 2,000 Internet users that found that only 13% use the Web for local news. However, 60% said they’d be likely to use a local TV site for topics that include health, real estate, in-depth sports and local events. Yes, it’s all about local. Years ago, a lot of papers got New York Times-envy and decided to expand their international coverage. They’re paying for that now. The few newspapers that survive the coming nuclear winter will be those that refocus aggressively on local issues and leave White House press conferences to the AP.

Editor & Publisher, whose coverage of the meltdown of its core market has been largely uninspiring, does come through with a provocative argument by Steve Outing that newspapers should get over their obsession with objectivity. Harking back to the finest days of muckraking, Outing argues that the media’s efforts to tell both sides of the global warming issue is as dumb as telling both sides of the polygamy issue. The fact that some whackos still believe global warming is just a cyclical atmospheric change is no reason to give them equal time. Newspapers should advocate for their readers to get active and do something, Outing says. It’s interesting advice. In the new world in which everyone is an opinion writer, not having an opinion may make newspapers look clueless.

N. Christian Anderson III leaves after 27 years as the paper is consolidated its into parent’s community newspaper division. According to the Mercury-News:

“Two weeks ago, the Register announced layoffs and expense cuts after a 14 percent drop in revenue and a 38 percent decline in profit from the year before. Anderson, 57, joined the newspaper in 1980 as editor and led it to its first Pulitzers in 1985 and 1989.”

Quite a loss.

From MediaPost: “Some of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers reported their July revenue on Monday, and the news isn’t good. The third quarter is shaping up to be as bad as the second…[at McClatchy,] classifieds, …dropped 15.3%, and national revenue…tumbled 19%. Real-estate classifieds suffered the biggest percentage drop, plunging 26%.

“[Gannett said] newspaper revenue slid 6.1% to $408.2 million, due mostly to the 8.3% decline in classifieds and the 9.1% drop in national ad revenue. In terms of its individual properties, the most alarming results came from USA Today, where total ad revenue slid 15.9%.

“[Lee Enterprises said that among ad revenue declines,] automotive was down 17.4%, employment 13.6%, and real estate 13.2%.”

From Editor & Publisher: “At USA Today, advertising revenues plunged 15.9% on paid ad pages that fell to 276 from 334 in the year-ago period. Gannett said growth in the entertainment, pharmaceutical and restaurant categories at the national paper was offset by declines in the automotive, technology, retail, advocacy, and home and building categories. “

This remarkable exercise in community journalism from last June just came to my attention from reading Jay Rosen’s PressThink post. Working from a terse report by the Greensboro News & Record of layoffs of 41 of its own employees (why are newspapers so timid about covering their own bad news?), Ed Cone decided to let the people affected by the layoffs tell their own story.

And they did. As you can see from the frequent updates to Cone’s original post, affected staff members named names, told of the subdued atmosphere in the newsroom and fretted about the future. Some of their comments are touching. This account certainly adds depth and clarity to the unspecific report from the newspaper itself.

But I guess Ed Cone shouldn’t be taking seriously. After all, he isn’t a “journalist.”

Jay Rosen at PressThink has amassed an interesting list of triumphs of citizen journalism that he plans to post in response to Michael Skube’s rather self-righteous essay on the difference between bloggers and journalists.

The debate over whether bloggers are journalists strikes me as pointless because it’s so subjective. Wikipedia defines “journalist” as “a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people.” But is a person who contributes an essential fact or perspective to a story also practicing a form of journalism? For that matter, isn’t Wikipedia acting in a journalistic capacity with coverage of events like the Crandall Canyon mine disaster?

Earlier this year, CNN and other major news organizations turned to bloggers and camera phone users to help with coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Was it wrong to rely on these eyewitnesses because they weren’t professional journalists? Does someone have to carry a press card to contribute meaningful reporting?

This is a debate over terminology that is increasingly meaningless in a new world in which everyone is a publisher. Yes, news organizations will always have a vital role to play in disseminating credible, balanced, well-researched information, but individual citizens and groups of people who choose to act as journalists should also be heard. Ultimately, the checks and balances of a free debate will expose inaccuracy and bias. Shouldn’t the decision about what constitutes “journalism” be left up to the person who consumes the information?

Print advertising revenue was off 7.2% at The Wall Street Journal on a nearly 21% fall in ad volume compared to a year earlier. BtoB Magazine reports that technology advertising revenue was off a jaw-dropping 75%. Tech ads, of course, have been a mainstay of the WSJ’s business since the 80s.

It would be convenient to chalk up the stunning fall in tech business to a cyclical downturn in that industry. While the market does appear a little soft right now, things aren’t nearly bad enough to justify that kind of disinvestment in print advertising. What’s happening is that tech companies are shifting their ad dollars aggressively to the Internet. In doing that, they are simply leading a trend that will spread throughout many other industries in coming years.

“Newsosaur” Alan Mutter writes of an interesting phenomenon that takes place in the blogosphere and which may be indicative of how little newspapers understand the culture that exists there.

He notes how a single link from a blog called Small Dead Animals drove more than 1,000 visitors to his blog in a single day. Meanwhile, mentions of his blog in several major newspapers and magazines over the previous week drew hardly any visitors at all.

Mutter suggests that this is because Small Dead Animals is a creature of the Web, which it very much is, while the mainstream media sites are trying to transplant their standards of professional publishing to a medium that doesn’t care much about them. Essentially, newspapers are republishing columnists and op-ed contributors as bloggers, but aren’t changing the style or tone of what they say, and that’s going to fail in the blogosphere.

I think it’s an excellent point. I’m still amazed that, more than a decade into the Internet revolution, many newspapers still don’t include hyperlinks in the stories that they post online. Not only is this a disservice to the reader, but it makes them look aloof and clueless, which is not something newspapers can afford to be any more.

Robert Scoble told me last year that a tech company had relayed to him that a single mention on his blog had driven more than 1,400 visitors to the company’s site. In comparison, a much longer article in an industry trade publication had delivered no traffic at all. I suspect that the cult of personality around Scoble has a lot to do with that. Walt Mossberg could probably wield that much influence in the blogosphere, but precious few other journalists could.

Is this a problem for newspapers? I think so. If all your growth is going to come online and if the community you’re trying to engage perceives you as an outsider, I don’t see how that serves your interests. The American public already sees the news media as biased, inaccurate and uncaring. So why take that unpopular formula and transplant it online?

Two published items caught my attention today because they focus on issues that are so microscopic in the context of the newspaper industry’s accelerating collapse that they barely seem to merit attention. Both appear in Editor & Publisher.

Letter writers Leo J. Shapiro, Erik Shapiro, and Steve Yahn argue that “There ‘Auto’ Be A Change for Newspaper Ads” because of changing demographic trends. People are keeping their cars longer, which will lead to declining auto sales in the long term and fewer auto ads, they say. But there’s good news: more people are riding bikes and taking public transportation! So get out there and sell those bike ads. And you circ directors, start marketing more aggressively to commuter rail stations!

Auto advertising, a profitable staple of newspaper income statements, was off a disastrous 13% last year. The overall decline in US auto sales will only worsen that very bad situation. I don’t see bicycle ads picking up much of the slack. As far as public transportation goes, the authors’ characterization of the increase in mass transit ridership from 2% to 2.8% of the US population over the past decade as a “sharp” rise needs no comment.

Also in E&P, editor Joe Strup asks “Will Consolidation at MediaNews Group Kill Guild?”. This issue is over the consolidation of two northern California newspapers, a business decision that will almost certainly lead to layoffs.

Questioning the impact of a move like this on the power of the Newspaper Guild is like worrying about a dent in the fender of your car that was just stolen. Of course the Guild will lose influence. Newspaper publishers are fighting just to stay alive. Who cares about the Guild’s bargaining power when the publisher has nothing to bargain with? We don’t hear much from the once-obstreperous United Auto Workers any more, do we?

You have to wonder what service E&P believes it’s providing by focusing on minutiae like this when much weightier problems face its readers.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is the latest casualty of the overall decline of newspaper advertising. The paper, which is one of several in south Florida owned by The New York Times Co., will consolidate several offices and lay off an unspecified number of people.

While shutting down one of its regional print editions, “[T]he Herald-Tribune will start new interactive Web sites geared toward allowing the public to share their news, photos and videos.” Hmmm. Photo- and video-sharing might have been interesting two years ago, but it’s very me-too today. And what’s this about “share their news?” Is this a citizen journalism experiment?

Mark Hamilton notes the difficulty newspapers have reporting this kind of bad news about themselves. It is indeed a fine line to walk. While the reporters and editors no doubt have strong opinions about this story and its importance, they also have a responsibility to their readers to keep it in context and to report it straight. The WSJ’s coverage of the Murdoch takeover is particularly challenging in that respect.

It’s interesting to see the paper deciding to scale back on local coverage in favor of big features. In my opinion, local newspapers will be the big growth area in the business in coming years. Who needs another food section? But perhaps the economics just didn’t work here.