Shaking off the newspaper shakedown

More links from the newsaper/print death rattle that’s clanking a bit louder these days:

• Time is going to cut 600 jobs through layoffs and will undergo a massive overhaul in its magazine division.

• The transformation of the Christian Science Monitor to a mostly online edition will be closely watched to see whether “a paper has to be on paper.” But for most newspaper companies, maintaining a print product is essential to staying in business.

• A veteran media reporter laments the decline of “old” media. So does a young journalism student ready to step into the profession and who’s seriously worried about how democracy will fare in the midst of this newspaper shakedown.

I post these not to pile on to the gloomy mood that’s percolating among journalists and in the newspaper industry, but to illustrate the necessity of embracing new ways of thinking about, and doing, the news. Those are no less troublesome and challenging but as I wrote yesterday, there really isn’t much choice but to forge ahead.

• The founder of a celebrated Twin Cities-area news website, staffed primarily by laid-off and bought-out newsaper journalists, is frank about the prospects for the success of his editorial and business model:

“At the national and international level, some good will come out of this, because of the way the Web favors national and international coverage. I’m more worried about the local and regional levels. And it’s why I think there’s going to be need for non-profit journalism at the local level. The dynamic of the Web is not very favorable to spending money at the local level.”

• A young web journalist/entrepreneur urges starting small with a news venture and creating it with community, an intended audience, in mind, and being fearless about breaking free from past conventions:

“Journalists and journalism right now is a diaspora, we’re sort of been kicked out of the homeland of newspapers, and we need to figure out where we can go from here.”