The drumbeat of bad news in the journalism industry continues. Here are the headlines just from this week:

• The Los Angeles Times laid off 75 newsroom employees.
• The Christian Science Monitor announced it would discontinue its daily print edition, and go all online.
• The Gannett Co. announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce, about 3,000 jobs, across its 80 local newspapers.
• Time Inc. will cut 600 jobs across its magazine empire, and reorganize the company's corporate structure.
• The Newark Star-Ledger announced it would offer buyouts to 151 newsroom employees - 40 percent of the staff.

David Carr, The New York Times' media columnist neatly summed up the feeling in the news industry: "Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it."

(Kim Voynar, on her Film Essent blog, offers up another appraisal of the situation.)

The problem is money - namely, the lack of it coming into print publications from advertisers, who are cutting back on spending and putting their money into cheaper alternatives.

One of those alternatives is the Internet, which is where more and more people are getting their information. Newspapers are trying to make that transition, but figuring out how to make it pay. As Carr writes, "a single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it."

Some outside the news industry say journalists should stop whining. It's a new world, and if this industry has to either keep up or be relegated to history along with the buggy-whip manufacturers who lost their jobs when people started driving cars.

Newspapers - some methodically, some flailing about like a drowning swimmer - are trying everything they can think of to stay competitive and move with the times: Interactive features, reporters' blogs, video, continuous updates, you name it. The question is whether any of them will work, and what will be left of the news when all the dust settles.

Labels: journalism