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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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The start of 2009 has not been kind to the newspaper business. Go to any industry Web site, such as Poynter’s Romenesko, and find the page filled with stories about layoffs, revenue drops and the elimination of print editions.

Why this happened and where we are heading are key questions on most insiders’ minds. Two articles cited here try to give some answers:

• Michael Hirschorn, writing for The Atlantic, imagines a world in the not so very distance when the venerable New York Times goes out of business.
• Jack Schafer, on Slate, reports on “how the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web and failed.”

Both these articles serve up large doses of harsh realities.

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. 

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.   

 I’m not the first person to point out the incongruity between the loads of money spent on the glitzy Newseum, opening today in Washington, and the money that continues to drain from the newspaper industry.

The Newseum, whose slogan is “The Interactive Museum of News,” is funded mainly by the Freedom Foundation, a non-partisan group devoted to furthering the freedom of press, so it isn’t totally fair to compare the investment in the museum to what’s happening in the real world. But it is an interesting observation.

I haven’t seen the museum personally, but the write-ups paint an impressive picture - a brand new building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a news helicopter hanging from the ceiling, dozens of interactive computer exhibits, 15 theaters, and the list goes on.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the article I read about the museum in today’s The New York Times and an article published earlier in the week about the financial difficulties faced by Sam Zell, who recently took over ownership of the Tribune Corp., my former employer.

Here are some numbers from both articles.

According to the museum story, the Newseum cost $450 million to build. That’s about half of Tribune’s $1 billion debt service bill for this year and close to the amount of money needed to buy Newsday, which Tribune is considering selling to offset its huge debt, according to figures in the Zell story.

Again, taking numbers from these two articles — the museum’s operating budget for this year is $50 million, not an insignificant sum when compared to Tribune’s reported net income last year of $87 million.

The figure that struck me most was in a Washington Post article, which reported that rooms can be rented for events at the Newseum for $500 to $30,000. That $30,000 figure is within range of some starting annual salaries for reporters breaking into the business.

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.