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.

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.