Unable to raise enough cash to stay afloat, conservative rag The New York Sun is shuttering. Not even seven years after launch, founder Seth Lipsky finds himself closing down the daily rag, which is burning through some $1 million a month. And without new investors and a balance sheet $70 million in the red, there appears little other choice. (Maybe Bloomberg will buy it?) An announcement is expected in tomorrow's paper, but Internet wizards that they are, they've posted it online already.

So this classifies as bad news, right?

• Media conglomerate Cox Enterprises is selling the whole kit and kaboodle (except for three holdings)

• The McClatchy Company announced a year-long wage freeze. Then they started selling off their assets.

• Gannett Company Inc, (the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S.) plans on cutting 1,000 jobs to avoid going under.

"Federal wire fraud charges were filed Tuesday against a former La Crosse newspaper delivery man accused of bilking the New York Times for nearly $325,000 by submitting about 8,500 fake subscriptions. Martin T. Holtet, 50, of 235 S. 19th St., is accused of defrauding the company of $227,000 in delivery fees and $98,000 in printing expenses. Holtet was arrested Tuesday and made an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Madison in the afternoon. According to the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Holtet delivered papers for the New York Times from 2002 to April 2008. Holtet was paid for each paper delivered in Wisconsin and Minnesota. From 2007 to early 2008, the number of subscribers in the La Crosse area jumped from 65 daily and 103 Sunday to 2,781 daily and 2,818 for Sunday papers." [La Crosse Tribune via IIN]

"Sunday papers continue to be the most popular source of coupons: 53 percent of households clip coupons from the Sunday newspaper, as opposed to 35 percent from advertisements that arrive in the mail, the next most popular source. Only 11 percent of households regularly look to the Internet for coupons, up from 6 percent in 2005, the study found, though the Internet is proportionally the fastest-growing source of coupons." [NYT]

Though editorial cartoonists are, like culture critics, quickly becoming an endangered species, somehow the Post's bigoted Sean Delonas still has a job. [LAT]

If immune-from-backlash Craigslist can reduce the hassle or finding an apartment (or increase it, depending on how you look at it), brings two strangers together who exchanged a smile on the sidewalk only to walk away without exchanging numbers, and find somebody willing to take a few of your Topps baseball cards off your hands, why can't Craigslist do the impossible — and save the very newspaper industry it's supposedly killing?

CONTINUED »

Roger Ailes, the Fox News head earning $11 million a year whose job description is loosely phrased as "perform Rupert Murdoch's bidding," did something most would expect from his boss: He bought a newspaper. It's the 3,000 circ Putnam County News and Recorder, the 142-year-old paper of Ailes' hometown. And like a good Murdoch minion, Ailes is taking care of the whole nepotism thing: He's hired his wife, Elizabeth, to be its publisher. Also like Murdoch, there are promises that nothing about the paper will change. Heh. [NYT]

There are some things in life that simply do not need to be "studied," because when the research is finished and the analysis is performed, you will end up with a lengthy report explaining, in excruciating detail, a generally accepted norm that you already knew existed. Phenomenon like this include: 1) Increased motorcycle sales will increase the number of motorcycle deaths; Combining Valium, Cialias, Vicodin, and Klonopin could put your health in serious danger; and 3) That the sports departments at newspapers are mostly made up of white guys.

CONTINUED »

The newspaper industry succeeded at beating last year's revenues. Errr, revenue declines, that is. In 2007 the industry saw ad revenues slide 8 percent; this year they're on par for a 12 percent drop. Congratulations publishers!

If it makes you feel any better, across the media spectrum at the TV networks — who've seen their ratings plummet by double digits as viewers move to cable channels, video games, and Facebook — managed to beat last year's upfront sales with more than $9 billion in sales.

That the two industries are working with opposite logic signals one thing, which isn't particularly top secret: Advertisers continue to believe in television as an influential way to reach consumers, and they've all but abandoned hope in newspapers to do that.

Sam Zell, who continues to ruin all that remains good and honest with the beleaguered newspaper industry – a list that includes just the comics page, and those Best Buy circulars, at this point – is taking out one more strand of fishing wire and tying it around the neck of the Los Angeles Times, one of the Tribune Co.'s flagship newspapers that Zell has taken a liking for abusing. Rather than letting the editorial team there, led by editor Russ Stanton, operate the paper's Sunday magazine as it always has, Zell sneakily hired an entire new staff for the weekly LAT Magazine without telling anyone. And that staff, it turns out, is part of the business side of the newspaper, not the editorial unit.

CONTINUED »

Slate's Michael Kinsley explains the ridiculous nature of publishers measuring journalists' productivity – by counting the number of column inches, or words, they produce – by using far too many words in his explanation. That Kinsley is writing for a web magazine, however, means he has to use even more words than normal to express his point, to increase the length of the browser scroll bar on his article, which is the only way to truly measure the physical length of his column, and thus, his column-inches. Also: asdfkjh asjdf ;l asdfl akda 399 f0 a0a0 a0sfd. [Slate]

It's not like Sam Zell ever promised to keep anyone around at the Los Angeles Times. He's got billions in debt he needs to keep stable, which means he's got a couple plans up his sleeve. Obvious first choice: job cuts. Except Zell calls this down-sizing "right-sizing," because, based on his calculations that the average LAT journo produces the equivalent of 51 pages a year, while competitors in Hartford and Baltimore spit out 300 pages, the current staff overload is just waste. And so all of this will bring into focus his other big task, which is evening out the editorial:advertising ratio to 1:1, which will also allow him to shrink the actual size of the paper and the number of pages printed per year. And finally, Zell has taken to addressing his thousands of employees as "partners," if only because the future of the Times, and its debt load, depend on their stock-option plan.

"Pity the poor New York Times. They are indeed doing right by their readers, if not by their stockholders. On May 6, 2008, there were 2,524 square inches of column space devoted to news. A year earlier, before the slimmer page width and heftier contents listings, the number was 2,535 square inches. Although there was about 11 percent less ad space (3,359 square inches versus 3,839 square inches), the amount of news remained the same. If we go back to the supposedly halcyon days of 1998, when the average Times reader was about as likely to get his news from the Internet as Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens is today, the difference is even more pronounced. The advertising climate was, in industry parlance, kick-ass; the front section of the Times contained 5,549 square inches of ads. But despite this revenue bonanza, there was a meager 2,188 square inches of news. The (somewhat) surprising verdict: The Times of today has more news, and way less advertising." [VF]

Hint: There's a class system. [Gawker]

There will be no New York Post-Newsday News Corp. tag team to take on the Times, with Rupert Murdoch having dropped out of the bidding for Tribune Co.'s Long Island paper. Instead, Cablevision will buy 97 percent, for $650 million, of the paper, adding the rag to its massive cable biz front on Long Island.

Along with Newsday, Cablevision also picks up "related assets," including freebie paper am New York, a detail the Times surprisingly left out of its coverage. (The WSJ did not.)

So while the deal doesn't actually include Newsday's real estate, as original reports said, the two papers Cablevision picks up guarantees you're about to be inundated with ticket sales ads for Madison Square Garden, which it conveniently also owns. As well as Radio City Music Hall, the New York Knicks, and the New York Rangers..