My only experience on a college newspaper was a mandatory one-semester period, the highlight of which was the adviser rejecting most of my stories for not being "serious" enough, and telling me menacingly, "People who work with me tend to do better professionally." (Confidential to that lady: Suck on the splendor of my cramped studio apartment, yea!). Some people parlay the editorship of their school papers into a nice journalism job—for example, every last employee of the New York Times was once editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson. Which is fine! Although it does increase your risk of being kind of a twit. Now college papers, like real papers, are having serious financial troubles. How to save them? Don't save them! The University of California- Berkeley and Syracuse University both had to cut their print papers back to four days a week recently, since they were losing money. Howard University had to stop printing its daily paper completely for several months earlier this year, until it was bailed out to the tune of $48,000. Of course, all these papers continued to publish online. The editor of the Syracuse paper said that "online readership was as high as it usually is" even when print publishing got cut. So tell us again: Why the fuck is it necessary for a college paper to publish a print edition at all? They're serving an audience where every last person has access to the internet. If a print edition isn't profitable, cut it. It's that simple. College papers are there for training purposes, primarily. There's no reason at all a college paper can't sell ads online, put all its content online, and be just as widely read as it was before. Print editions of college papers are either fully subsidized by advertising (which is getting harder, obviously), or they have some kind of endowment, or the university kicks in money to help them pay their expenses. Why not take that money and hire some laid-off journalists to teach these kids journalism? This way another former journalist would find a job, and janitors would have fewer things to pick up after entitled college kids, thereby cooling the simmering class war on campuses, leading to fewer administration buildings takeovers by young leftists channeling their rage into fair wage campaigns for university employees. College papers almost all suck, anyhow. [Inside Higher Ed]

The total number of magazine ad pages fell more than 7% in the first half of this year. So the magazine industry says to itself, "You know what we need to sell more magazine ads? An ad campaign." Makes sense, right? And so does the message of this new campaign: "Magazine ads: they make people want to buy things." They're not beating around the bush here, people. Naturally, a big part of this new campaign is online. Hypocrisy in action? Not really!: The new ad campaign (including the pictured spot, which shows, apparently, my apartment), is nothing but images of people who bought a lot of shit after they read about it in an imaginary mag. But all the spots are designed to drive traffic to a website where there are a lot more stats on magazine advertising's effectiveness. Is this ironic, considering online ads are one major reason for the decline in magazine ads? Actually no, since part of the appeal of magazine ads is their ability to drive traffic to websites. It's right there, on the website! Also, magazines are far less threatened by the migration of advertisers to websites than newspapers are, because magazine ads are more appealing as a physical thing. Newspapers are the canaries in the ad coal mine. So magazines have nothing to worry about until newspaper advertising starts drying up, which... oh, right. The Times explains this mysterious business like so:

Ha. The illustrious Columbia Journalism Review, stuck in the no-fucking-news months with the rest of us, tracked down John Quinlan, the Sioux City Journal reporter who wrote the most Onion-like real news story of all time, which will forever stand as our single favorite work of journalism. ("Olive Garden arrives" in Sioux City. That guy!). And he's very even-keeled about his newfound internet fame. "I wanted to have a little fun with the story," he says...

The New York Times is always looking for a way to save a little scratch, since the paper is losing revenue like a Bible store in a whorehouse, for lack of more time to think of a better metaphor. So today NYT publisher Arthur "Pinch My Moose" Sulzberger announced the paper is going to be combining the metro section with the main news section, and the sports section with the business section on most days of the week. This will save printing costs but will not shrink the news hole, they say. Full memo from Pinchy to the staff after the jump [UPDATE: And an even more detailed memo about the changes from Times editor Bill Keller]: From Sulzberger:

Do arts organization have an unhealthy relationship with the New York Times? Probably! Tyler Green wrote in the Arts Journal blog about how the NYT and art institutions deals with art news: "In return for receiving stories first, the NYT provides coverage... If the NYT doesn't discover major arts news stories first, it doesn't report on them." Well, yeah—otherwise, it's just kind of embarrassing. While reporting on a story about the National Gallery of Art, he noticed that everyone was holding or keeping off-record the information about their latest major project: "the NGA's chief spokesperson wanted the Villareal item to debut in the NYT."

A select group of New York's "most discerning readers" have been invited to receive a free, one-year, no strings attached subscription to the failing, soon-to-be-nonexistent New York Sun! Their marketing department's belief that a taste of the Sun will cause you to "spread the word about our rare journalistic and literary excellence" is sort of funny but more sad. This is possibly the least valuable free offer of all time. The full exciting letter, below:

Where does the Wall Street Journal's Tina Gaudoin find the time for her hectic trans-Atlantic lifestyle? She'll tell you, in book form! Gaudoin, the yoga mogul who edits the business paper's new glossy weekend magazine, somehow found time to write an autobiographical book about "the ins and outs of the most glamorous and bitchy of industries" (magazines!). After the jump, the semi-grammatical Amazon summary of Gaudoin's Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines (Paperback) [sic]:

Is it possible that the dying newspaper industry can be saved by skillful advertising? No, but it can certainly be helped. This ad for Australia's The Age is visually enthralling, and captures the promise of a paper that brings the entire world to your door. Though it's too bad that it also reinforces the fact that video is way more exciting than print. And, you know, it's not an American paper. Still worth watching. [Fitz & Jen]

The New York Post reports that local broadsheet the New York Sun is doomed. Their investors have lost money for more than 6 years on what was always basically a vanity paper for right-leaning ultra-hawkish pro-Israel New Yorkers, and they've given founder Seth Lipsky a month to line up new funders. The Sun will reportedly announce something—the end?—on their website in just a minute. Leaving aside their insane editorial page and wacky style guide, the Sun did have some of the best arts coverage of all the New York dailies and a good local section. (And, you know, Lenore Skenazy and John McWhorter.) So, like, sad. Right? Without a Murdoch or a Reverend Moon, it's almost like a hilariously right-wing daily can't make it in this crazy mixed-up world. Update: The statement.

We have some natural sympathy for anybody locked in a battle against Page Six. Although that sympathy recedes when the P6 opponent is Chaunce Hayden, the rad tat-sporting editor of Jersey gossip rag Steppin Out who was denounced by P6 boss Richard Johnson for feeding him bad tips. Because Chaunce's rage is now leading him to send out mass email blasts about "news" that he, uh, just kinda made up! Or maybe he's always done that? Either way, now he's pissed off the Post even more. Here's the full story of one errant shot in the gossip war: Today Chaunce sent out a big email blast that "New York Post, Page Six scribe, Marianne Garvey, has been fired!" Chaunce wrote that Garvey used to write for him at Steppin Out (which she describes as two pieces when she was in college for $40 each), and that she had recently turned down a cover at the mag that instead went to Shallon Lester at the Daily News, so maybe Richard Johnson was so mad about it that he fired her? But definitely, she was fired. According to Chaunce. Actually Garvey left to take a job at In Touch—which she announced more than two weeks ago. By all accounts she left on her own terms, and wasn't fired. When this was pointed out to Chaunce, he sent out a "statement":

There are supposed to be 15,000 journalists covering the Democratic Convention in Denver, a good proportion at newspapers. But the time-pressed and laptop-lugging reporters have largely abandoned their own medium, print: the New York Observer's John Koblin snapped this neglected pile of newspapers yesterday afternoon at the stand of Sam Zell's beleaguered Tribune Company.

Steve Cuozzo in the Post hates Wikipedia, that "engine of ignorance 'compiled by volunteers' and masquerading as a legitimate reference work." He's right! It gets things about New York City all wrong, as he points out—not just wrong, but "notoriously wrong-headed."Among its many crowdsourced errors:

The National Enquirer's John Edwards love child scoop turned out to have actually sold some extra issues! Funny how that works. The scandalous rag's August 11 issue claiming Edwards was paying $15k per month in hush money sold 738,000 issues—about 10% better than average. Unfortunately, the "tenfold increase in usual monthly traffic" to the Enquirer's website probably means that all their extra cash is going towards bandwidth payments—web advertising is pre-sold, and traffic spikes don't translate to immediate money. UNFORTUNATELY. [WWD]

Childlike man Jay Mariotti has resigned as a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times after 17 years. This was probably a wise move, because he is hated by Chicagoans, Cubs fans, White Sox fans, sports fans, athletes, his own colleagues, and readers in general. But no, he's not going into the hair care industry; he's had a revelation that sports journalism has become "entirely a Web site business." Oh. Lord:

Washington Post media regurgitator Howie Kurtz says that curator of all things journalistic Jim Romenesko was wrong when he said that Kurtz violated the WP's own policy by letting a Fox News flack attack Jon Stewart anonymously in response to Stewart's own (on-the-record) attack of Fox. Kurtz argues that since this was a spokesperson giving the network's official response, their name didn't matter. In the bowels of the Fox News headquarters, the PR department marked Kurtz's name off their enemies list, while finishing a Photoshop mockup of Romenesko morphing into a hyena. [WP, Previously]

Advertising revenues at New York Times newspapers were 18% down in the year to July, but that wasn't the most depressing statistic. Even online advertising—which is supposed to represent the Gray Lady's salvation—fell in real terms.

It has been months now since Fox News' PR machine issued one of its trademark slams of a critic, and we, for one, are happy that they have come off their summer vacations and gone back to work. The target this time: Jon Stewart, darling funnyman of the liberal elite. Surprise! The best part about this new spat: the person who comes off looking worst of all is not Stewart, nor Fox's flack, but rather the Washington Post's vacuous conventional media wisdom purveyor Howie Kurtz. A fight to admire, and a symptom of increased media fragmentation and public alienation! A full recap: The Democratic convention is such a news-bereft wasteland that Stewart was apparently giving a press conference, consisting of him riffing to a roomful of eager reporters. During the course of this, he said that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan is "the biggest 'fuck you' to people with brains that I've ever seen in my life" and that Chris Wallace is the network's only legit anchor, and that Fox is biased against Obama. Stop the fucking presses, right? But Howie Kurtz, trooper that he is, put in a call to Fox, and came back with this paragraph for his story:

Have you ever noticed that there are certain names in the newspaper day after day, industry "experts" whom reporters seem to constantly hit up for quotes? That journalists go back to the same well again and again is no surprise. Journalists are lazy. Why bother trying to squeeze a soundbite out of someone new when you have ten minutes to finish an article and there's already an eager pro who's given you his cell phone number and told you to call him day or night? Below, some of the most prolific quote-givers—who they are, the topics they're inevitably called to comment on, and how many times they got their "expert opinions" into newspapers for the first half of 2008.

"While 72 percent of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60 percent of them said they rarely or never read blogs." [Times]

Dexter Filkins spent four years covering the Iraq War for the New York Times. Today, the paper's magazine has an excerpt of his upcoming book, The Forever War. Filkins is a beautiful writer, which only serves to enhance the enormous sadness of his story. The piece pulses not with political outrage, but with weariness over a steady diet of death. After the jump, one small excerpt: Filkins tells how his desire for a photo of a dead insurgent ended with a Marine shot and killed: