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  OnlineNewsWatch is a blog that follows developments in the ever-changing landscape of online journalism. It is edited by Vera Haller, an assistant professor of journalism at Baruch College.

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A color display ad on the front page of The New York Times today had the blogosphere buzzing. A Google blog search conducted mid-morning found many comments already posted.

A Gawker posting asked why the Times took so long to sell front-page advertising given the decline in newspaper ad revenues. A posting by Peter Kafta on the Web site, All Things Digital, concluded that it was no surprise since the Times was trying to mortgage its midtown headquarters and shed its assets in the Boston Red Sox.

The ad, which promotes the CBS television network, runs as a strip across the bottom of the page. Now, only The Washington Post, of all the major U.S. newspapers, does not run ads on the front page, an area once considered sacrosanct for news only.

In a story in the Times’ business section today, newspaper executives declined to say how much CBS paid for the front-page ad. The article did note that the New York Times Co. said its November revenues fell 13.9 percent from November 2007.

The Christian Science Monitor announced today that it would drop its daily print edition next April and place more focus on delivering the news on its Web site.The move makes the Monitor the first national newspaper to stop publishing a daily edition on paper and focus on its online presence. It will also publish a weekly print version and daily news updates via e-mails. The move, top newspaper executives say, will allow the Monitor to continue operating its overseas bureaus and Washington newsroom.

“We plan to take advantage of the Internet in order to deliver the Monitor’s journalism more quickly, to improve the Monitor’s timeliness and relevance, and to increase revenue and reduce costs. We can do this by changing the way the Monitor reaches its readers,” Judy Wolff, chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society, was quoted as saying in the Monitor’s story about the changes.  

You can check out a presentation of changes planned for the more robust Web site here.Although the Monitor’s financial situation is a little different from most newspapers because of the support it gets from the Christian Science Church, it may be a foreboding of what is to come in the next few years for other newspapers with national reach.

The business news this week has been staggering. The complexity and range of the stories make them difficult to understand, thereby making the need for explanatory reporting great. So I wondered, does the Web, with its complexity and range in story telling possibilities, lend itself to helping readers understand what is happening on Wall Street?
 My guess is that sometime soon, we will see a terrific interactive graphic that lays out the events, crunches numbers and gives us some perspective. So far, I haven’t found it. What I’m seeing in terms of multimedia coverage is not very compelling video of editors and experts giving interesting summaries and analysis. Take a look at this one from wsj.com. Maybe these type of features are better as audio podcasts because what they are saying is much more interesting that what we are seeing. 
I like that the nytimes.com is trying to maximize the Web’s ability to link people together quickly with its Q&A with experts. Readers send in questions and the experts give the answers. I also liked wsj.com’s photo gallery, which recorded reactions to the financial crisis around the world. A viewer was left with an impression that the gloom and worry was being  felt everywhere, not just on Wall Street.
Please send me links of interesting multimedia coverage of this story. 

On the day that Wall Street faces unprecedented challenges, a new business news Web site is born. The Big Money is a new venture by the owners of the online magazine Slate. Though you couldn’t ask for a better news day to launch a business news Web site, it makes you wonder how yet another site like this will find a audience in an already crowded field.If you read the editor’s note explaining the mission, the staff has set goals worth striving for: coverage that the cuts through jargon, interesting video and new multimedia features.  Time will tell whether the market can sustain another such site. 

This story came to my by way of Al Tompkins, the Poynter Institute’s resident expert on online and broadcast news. He points out that a six-year-old news story about United Airlines showed up online today and it caused the company’s stock to tank. Here is the story from the Chicago Tribune.It goes to show that people believe what they read online — so be careful what you post. 

A new report about the state of the newspaper industry doesn’t hold a lot of news. The survey of editors by  Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism includes an oft-repeated take on the situation — smaller staffs, more focus on local news, less national and foreign news and a younger, more Web-savvy newsroom.  The report, called “The Changing Newsroom,” is very direct about the uncertainty editors feel about the future, especially how shrinking ad revenue will affect their ability to do their jobs. Here’s a quote:”The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.”I guess the only sure thing about “The Changing Newsroom” is that there will be change.   

With The New York Times leading its business section today with a big story about gloom, doom and the newspaper industry, it seems more pressing than ever to figure out how to make news Web sites more profitable.

The bottom line is clear. The key to improving profits is the ability to charge higher advertising rates which, in the case of Web sites, are linked to the amount of traffic.

This is where it gets murky. Tracking Web traffic seems to me to be a very imperfect science. I don’t pretend to be an expert here so I was happy to find an interview in Editor & Publisher with the head of Nielsen’s online unit that attempts to explain how tracking is done.

The economic turmoil of late created an opportunity to see how some business news sites handled the onslaught of developments. A brief survey found they were all agressively updating, even outlets such as Forbes and BusinessWeek that used to enjoy the luxury of weekly deadlines. No more.

Both sites offered a mix of breaking news stories and analysis for investors. BusinessWeek today posted an interesting story about what financial blogs are reporting while Forbes offered an expert’s view on why a stock market crash may be necessary. Clearly, the editors were seeking to put information out there — and quickly — that would set their sites apart from the competitors.

One observation: Business news sites are relying heavily on video reports — perhaps even more heavily than general news sites. Take for instance Forbes.com which has its own video network with market updates and business stories. The video viewer launches automatically when a reader goes to the homepage.

Thestreet.com has a video network that produces numerous clips every day, and CNBC and Fox Business also have video links directly off their home pages. While the videos may not be all that visually interesting, they must be garnering clicks because they are prevelant on all the business news Web sites.