Editor & Publisher says: “United Press International is cutting 11 positions from its Washington, D.C., bureau, including its lone White House correspondent, Richard Tomkins. The move marks the first time in its history that UPI will have no one on that beat.”

That was Helen Thomas’ beat, remember? Maybe it’s just a reflection of the lack of news coming out of the current administration. Or the fact that fewer and fewer people care what goes on at the White House any more.

Editor & Publisher says: “Harvard University has released a study that concludes that 60 percent of American teenagers pay little attention to daily news, Reuters reports. After interviewing 1,800 people from January through March, researchers at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government found that 28 percent of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 said they pay “almost no attention” to daily news. Another 32 percent told researchers that they pay “casual attention” to only one news source on a daily basis.”

It seems that teens have grown accustomed to getting only the news they want online and so bypass the front page that tells them the news they need to know – but don’t necessarily want to know. This will present a special challenge to news organizations going forward: If you can’t force your audience to absorb the most important news of the day, how do you get them interested in it?

The Business magazine out of the UK reports that Rupert Murdoch has succeeded in his bid for Dow Jones, paying $5 billion for the world’s most prestigious business publisher.

It’s interesting that this deal was sidetracked over issues of editorial independence rather than price. Dow has always considered the integrity of the Journal‘s news operation to be a corporate jewel and that’s reassuring. Somewhat.

Still, you can’t ignore the Murdoch legacy. He turned the NY Post into a British tabloid-style scandal sheet whose outrageous headlines are still its best-known quality. Fox News’ right-leaning, sensationalist reporting makes a lot of people in the TV news business wince. The Times of London, another Murdoch acquisition, has never regained its reputation as one of the world’s great newspapers.

Of course, the Journal already has a conservative political bent and it has done the best of any national newspaper at keeping its editorial voice relevant to changing audience tastes. But you have to wonder what the paper will look like in five years.

The International Herald Tribune reports that Journal staffers are worried about layoffs, and well they should be, given the precipitous drop in business-to-business print advertising noted in the article. IBM’s magazine and newspaper ad spending fell from $144.6M in 2004 to under $37 million last year, the article notes, citing TNS Media Intelligence figures.

Fortunately, Dow Jones has been ahead of the pack in moving its ad business online. Media Post reports that online revenues now account for 30% of Dow Jones’ total sales. There’s no question that the Journal will survive the coming newspaper meltdown. The question is: in what form?

Mark Glaser offers “10 Reasons There’s a Bright Future for Journalism” touching on many of the themes I outline in my own essay on this topic. If one can stop mourning the end of the traditional model of one-to-many journalism and think about the exciting possibilities of involving multiple voices and perspectives in the process of reporting and presenting the news, then the future looks pretty exciting.

Doug Frantz quits for a job at The Wall Street Journal just months after urging staffers to stay the course when the paper’s editor was fired for refusing to cut more jobs. That can’t be good for morale. The LA Times is still fighting back from its efforts to become The New York Times of the west coast in the 80s and 90s, a campaign that caused it to run ponderous stories that were irrelevant to the Latino audience that should have been its source of growth. This is a paper in serious trouble, while the Journal at least stands a chance of surviving the industry meltdown.

The New York Times‘ David Carr writes of an experimental online publication called AssignmentZero.net that uses collaborative, iterative process to build a news story in real time and with contributors from all walks of life. A recent package on “crowdsourcing” is now live, which is appropriate, since crowdsourcing is essentially what AssignmentZero is doing.

The whole idea of having news reported by citizens and aggregated with work done by professional reporters gives a lot of journalists the willies, but I believe this is the future of journalism. Why would you want to ignore the observations, insight and feedback of knowledgeable sources just because they don’t know what an inverted pyramid is? Increasingly, the job of the editor will be to pull together information from many different sources and organize it into a coherent package that can be looked at from many different perspectives.

Most news stories online today are versions of print stories with a few hyperlinks. In the future, news packages will be constructed from the ground up with the links in mind. The reader should have many access and jumping-off points, and the narrative should permit the reader to dive down where he/she wants and resurface somewhere else. Check out the AssignmentZero package for an example of how this might look.

The publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette argues passionately in the WSJ that newspapers are sealing their own doom by giving news away for free. He notes that the American newspaper industry collectively spends $7 billion a year on editorial operations.

He has some good points and great statistics, but the horse has already left the barn. Once you start giving something away, it’s very hard to reverse course and charge for it again. With a few notable exceptions, the paid content model is pretty much dead in the area of general news. Special-interest publications, of course, will still be able to charge fees.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, once one of the finest newspapers in America, has started running sponsor logos around its editorial content. The paper’s editorial staff has been cut in half since its peak in the early 90s, when it consistently won Pulitzer Prizes.

According to MediaPost, “McClatchy saw total classified ad revenue drop 12%, with automotive down 10%, real estate down 18.6% and job recruitment down 12.7%.” The company blamed the declines on market weakness, but Craigslist says business is just fine.

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