The New York Times is ready to shut down Times Select, its subscription service that hosts its premier columnists behind a paid firewall, according to the New York Post. The service has signed up 221,000 subscribers and the numbers are dropping, the paper reports.

Media Post says Times columnists were grumbling, too. They felt that the lost readership didn’t make up for the relatively paltry revenue. An Alexa traffic graph indicates that nytimes.com traffic has been dropping steadily, although not dramatically, over the last year.

If the Times ends Times Select, it will be a blow to whatever hope there is for a paid Web content model for newspapers. At this point, The Wall Street Journal stands alone among daily papers, although quite a few specialized publications charge for content or require visitors to subscribe in print.

Recent headlines:

Post-Dispatch offers more early retirement – “Calling 2007 a ‘difficult year for the newspaper industry,’ the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said yesterday it will offer employees early retirement packages. The offer comes less than two years after about 130 employees, including about 40 in the newsroom, retired early…[the publisher said] ‘This is a great market. Our actions now will enable us to face 2008 and beyond in a much better position.'”

Sadly, no. Early retirement incentives don’t solve a systemic problem where costs are wildly out of synch with future revenues. This is putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

Sun-Times Media Group Weeklies Target Jittery ‘Daily Herald’ Employees – “In an unusual ad campaign targeting employees facing what might be the first layoffs in the newspaper’s history, the Pioneer Press group of weeklies is offering jobs to staffers of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.”

Kind of a good news/bad news scenario. I think it points to the growing strength of localized media. It’s actually getting cheaper to publish in print and this could lead to a resurgence of activity at town/community levels. The death of metro dailies could be accompanied by a rebirth of small-town weeklies.

AP to Shut Down Premium ‘Asap’ Service – “The Associated Press is closing down a 2-year-old premium multimedia service that emphasized nontraditional methods of storytelling, saying that it had failed to gain enough traction with newspaper clients.”

Good for AP for trying this idea, even if it didn’t play out financially. These “nontraditional” methods are the future of journalism, even if the economic model hasn’t yet evolved fully.

And finally…

At the New York Press: Layoffs, Circulation Drop, and No More Hooker Ads!– Manhattan Media, new owner of the New York Press, says it’s going to challenge the Village Voice and build a high-end audience. For starters, sex ads are gone, a move that could cost a million in lost revenue per year. Hooray for a vote of confidence in print and a decision to take the high road.

The New York Observer has an excellent piece about the gallows humor that set in at The Wall Street Journal during the Murdoch negotiations. Journalists are a cynical bunch, of course, so it’s not surprising they saw the worst possible outcome of the deal and also invented some of the cleverest sarcastic devices to describe it. The question is whether this will be a watershed event in journalism. Murdoch properties aren’t known for editorial excellence so much as for sensationalism and right-wing politics. While the Journal has always been politically conservative, it has never let its editorial page openly influence its news coverage. Will all that change under Murdoch?

To read the Observer piece, you’d think the reporters at the Journal are all about to abandon ship, but my experience is that journalists generally see most glasses as half empty to begin with. If there are large-scale defections at the paper, it will become apparent over a period of 12-18 months. If that happens, it will be interesting to see what new management comes in to run the newsroom and whether the Journal‘s austere, highly formatted news pages begin to change. That’s what makes this a potential watershed. If the Journal loses the reputation for editorial excellence that it has enjoyed for some 50 years, we will all be the worse for that.

From a story in Editor & Publisher:

Just 13% of the 1,100 U.S. adults surveyed in June and July said the occupation of journalist had “very great prestige,” while 16% said it had “hardly any prestige at all.” The plurality of respondents, 47%, grudging conceded there was “some prestige” in being a journalist. Contrast that to America’s most prestigious occupation, firefighter. Fully 61% of those surveyed said that job had “very great prestige.”

I guess journos have a reputation for starting fires, but these days people are more interested in putting them out. Thanks, Jayson Blair!