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.

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.”

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.'”

Newspapers are losing the most ad dollars to the Internet, says a new report from Wachovia Equity Research. The declines are most alarming in newspapers’ traditional advertising strongholds. Newspapers got 24% of telecom advertisers’ spending in 2006, compared to 31.6% the year before. The percentage of auto advertising spent on newspapers fell by half in a single year, from 9.2% in 2005 to 4.6% in 2006.

Interestingly, television is actually benefiting from this budget flight, perhaps indicating that the increasing irrelevance of daily newspapers is an isolated phenomenon, rather than a result of competition from online media. While mainstream media in general continue to feel pressure from online competition, the problems facing newspapers appear to be uniquely daunting.

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?

Media Daily News analyzes NBC co-chairman Marc Graboff’s offhand comment about canceling original programming on Friday evenings and sees it as emblematic of the networks’ overall financial woes.

The networks are turning to reality TV for the same reason newspapers are turning to blogs: it’s cheap programming. The problem is that it’s also largely undifferentiated and boring after a while. Maybe hooking up with YouTube to find some new talent would be a good idea.

Alan Mutter gathers up the dismal earnings reports of the major newspaper companies and asks the tough question: how long can these businesses survive?

He writes:

“While everyone in the newspaper business acknowledges that the good old days are gone, few people viscerally understand how rapidly the industry is coming to the point that it cannot sustain itself without farther-reaching – and likely more wrenching – structural changes than such relatively modest efforts to date as scrapping stock tables, outsourcing telephone ad-takers or even down-sizing newsrooms by 50%.

“Absent plans to pare entrenched bureaucracy, eliminate archaic work rules and speedily implement bold strategic initiatives to build significant and sustainable new revenue streams, the industry could find itself on a hopelessly irreversible trajectory. If it isn’t there already.”

I asked much the same question in my essay, “How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism” earlier this year. The point is that the economics of newspapering – with its high fixed cost – doesn’t scale down very well. At some point, it becomes impossible to meet operating expenses, and when that happens, the whole model collapses very quickly. We will barely know what hit us.

Alan Mutter writes perceptively on the recent plunge in newspaper revenues on his outstanding Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

“Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11,” he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.

First quarter revenues for classified advertising – the most profitable part of the newspaper business – were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers’ Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it’s not coming back.

I’ve characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a “death spiral” in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter’s statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It’s too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes “has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad,” this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.

Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it’s only the first of many to do so.

Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:

“In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go.”

Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.

“Tribune Co. April Ad Revenue Plunges 10.3%” says Editor & Publisher, noting that classified ad revenues fell 14.9%, real estate ad sales plummeted 20%, help wanted declined 13%, and automotive ad revenues were off 12%.

This kind of drop-off is dramatic in an industry that’s usually so predictable. Most worrisome was the decline in classified advertising, the most profitable business newspapers have.

This brought to mind Sam Zell’s acquisition of the Tribune Co. back in early April and the Trib’s interview with its new owner, in which the word “Internet” appeared only once. My views on that rather curious omission are stated here.