The Wall Street Journal reports on the continuing decline in newspaper circulation in the United States, in particular at the larger metropolitan dailies, but points out that some publishers are shedding circulation in places where it is less profitable and attractive to advertisers.
This is a longstanding technique. At times newspapers will inflate circulation through sponsored bulk distribution in hotels, airport lounges and schools. At other times they scale back on circulation to harder-to-reach areas for home delivery.
What is interesting is to see this phenomenon at a time of serious stress in the business. Clearly the tactic aims to cut costs, plain and simple, and not be concerned about the strategic implications of keeping papers in the hands of those who might stay loyal over the years ahead.

The conventional wisdom --- or what stands for it in an unconventional and developing digital sphere --- was that full RSS feeds somehow keep people from eventually clicking to your site. Why do so when the full story is before you on a feed?
But the Guardian has opted for the full feed and is asserting the impact isn't harmful. The head of Guardian's development suggests, in fact, that the move will better engage users. It's a bold move and it'll likely prompt others to follow suit.

Christian Science Monitor, one of the most contextual and literate of newspapers, is moving from a daily to a weekly paper  in April 2009. a weekly print format and a more aggressive online posture (at the moment its site is a greater reflection of the print product).
The news organization is financed by the Christian Science church and its subsidy will be reduced in the years ahead. The move heavily reduces production and delivery costs of the print edition.

It sounds simple enough: Don't proceed without a plan.
But Jay Rosen of NYU joins the legion of observers who are watching newsrooms hitch themselves to social media without knowing exactly why they want to use it. The join-for-the-sake-of-joining club is pretty large, with a lot of Facebook groups, Tweets, Second Life occupants and Flickr galleries lingering with no real principle guiding the activity. In short, the hipsterism has nil effect.
Rosen's podcast on BusinessJournalism.org has some salient points: Figure out why you want to use it, use it properly, don't bother with it otherwise. Common sense lost on many.

The U.S. newspaper industry is in such turmoil that Forbes writes of the need to consider dismantling some of them to permit the more nimble pieces to forge ahead.
Forbes looks at the brutal financial results and surmises that the rebound, when it comes, will be too late to help some firms stay in their current incarnations. Best to start disassembling and looking at new models.

It's the final frontier, a reason print media asserts supremacy --- the portability of the product.
But a new British survey indicates a growing number of people are bringing their electronic work to the toilet. One in 10 report sit in the bathroom and use their broadband connections.
Insert joke here.

The Monday Note reviews the challenge as journalism shifts online --- the loss of revenue, the small advertising and large editorial inventory --- and what this portends. The argument is to reduce the dependence on an ad network as a priority for online publishers, instead of lowering price to widen volume.

If there were easy assumptions in the new media world order, it was that the iPod and other MP3 players were killing radio as the source for music among young people.
Not so fast.
A recent U.S. report from Paragon Media Studies suggests 14- to 24-year-olds  listened to more radio in the last year --- after saying last year they listened to less. It may just be a blip in a downward trend, or the music might be connecting better (or the music might be better), or it might be that radio has already absorbed all it will from the new technology.

Ten years ago today we launched the first edition of the National Post newspaper and its then-ambtious nationalpost.com site. I was its Executive Editor, working for Editor-in-Chief Ken Whyte (now publisher and editor of Maclean's), publisher Don Babick (now interim publisher of the Toronto Star) and proprietor Conrad Black (now writing columns while serving a jail term related to financial wrongdoing).
Whether you are a friend or foe of the Post, it is inarguable that Canadian media were made better by its arrival. The Post was not a breath of fresh air but a new oxygen supply to Canadian journalism, and even its most bitter rivals should thank it for either regenerating their moribund newsrooms or improving their resources to perform at a higher level.
I connected with the project more than a year earlier while editing The Hamilton Spectator, mainly due to geography. Whyte, then editor of Saturday Night magazine but clearly the anointed leader of the project, needed a newsroom with access to wires and pagination software and Hamilton's was the closest to Toronto. He brought along Michael Cooke (then editor of The Province in Vancouver, now editor of the Chicago Sun-Times), Brian Kappler (then national editor, now editorial page editor of The Montreal Gazette) and Carl Neustaedter (then design chief of The Ottawa Citizen, now a top designer at the Globe and Mail). We were joined eventually by my successor at Southam News, Giles Gherson (who went on to be editor of the Star and the Edmonton Journal and now is a top Ontario public servant) and a few others. A couple of Spectator colleagues helped us with some of the grunt work of pagination, and I became increasingly brought along because I knew the chain's newsrooms (which were going to be vital in contributing content) and had a good Rolodex in Canadian media.
By April of 1998 I was into it full time. By then we had prototyped two full editions, both bearing Times Canada as the title. We'd played around and tested The National (associated too much with CBC), The Sentinel and The Reporter. As I was being hired the Post was making a play for Ed Greenspon, then the Ottawa Bureau Chief (and eventually the editor) of the Globe and Mail, but when that fell through, Ken enlisted Martin Newland from the Daily Telegraph as Deputy Editor (who later returned to England to be editor of that paper and now has launched The National in Abu Dhabi).
We plucked dozens of great journalists here and abroad for the team, paid them competitively, and made them work feverishly. The scale of the enterprise grew from an anticipated staff of 35 to 40, to one of 60, then 80, then 100, then (when the big deal was done in July to trade newspapers and cash for the Financial Post newspaper, which would anchor the business coverage), upwards of 200. The budget grew along with it.
I kept a diary for about six months before and three months after the launch, and it'll likely go to my grave. But when I look back on those days there was an exceptional sense of journalistic mission. Sure, there were miscues and nearly-missed deadlines and many laughers of journalistic pursuits that were goofy mistakes, but there were also breathtaking columns, stories, packages and pictures, and a Web site that made the first real attempt in this country at connecting with a new audience.
Newland and I looked over the atrium that first day and realized that likely nothing would be good as that first day. But the Post has done some extraordinary things since that day, certainly since I left to return to Hamilton and since Newland and Whyte and others left, and to this day it fights well above its weight class.  It has been challenged in making a profit, but that day will come.
The news approach has been ferocious, the editorial tone conservative, and the overall impact positive on our journalism and its ambition. It deserves a happy birthday.

Alan Mutter's blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, has the potential most days to send you into deep depression. But he's been on the mark many times with an understanding of how the media economy is reshaping.
His latest entry dispels the casual approach some are taking to difficulties in newspapering. He asserts we're in a secular change of declining readership, advertising, high fixed costs and online competition, not a mere advertising slump. And he also knocks a hole in the recent CUNY conference's enthusiasm for dropping a print product: Print advertising might very well flee if only an online option were available and free alternatives abound.
His earlier post this week on innovation is also a good shot across the bow for some news companies that took too long to enter the digital age passionately.