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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 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is out with a new study that found more people get their national and international news from the Internet than newspapers.

According to the study, the Internet has passed all other sources except television as the leading source for national and international news. The center said 40 percent of respondents said they got most of this type of news from the Internet as compared to 35 percent who said they relied on newspapers.

That percentage goes up when looking at just respondents under 30. According to the study, nearly 60 percent of younger Americans rely on the Internet for national and international news. A similar survey taken in 2007 placed that number at 34 percent, indicating that Web sites are consolidating their roles as definitive news sources.

The study doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but backs up these trends with some numbers. The survey was conducted Dec. 3-7 among 1,489 .

An interactive map about the New York Marathon on nytimes.com pulled together a lot of different elements under one umbrella. There were photos and audio clips at different points along the race route, and just boxes of text with snippets of information about the marathon. It might have been nice to see video clips, too. Maybe I looked at it too early in the day and they will be added later.

As news organizations fall over themselves to post the best and most intricate interactive elections maps, I thought it would be useful to pull some of them together in one place to make comparison easier.Election results and Web sites seem like a match made in heaven — lots of data combined with a visual background that allows you to link information to geographical location.
 You can even allow users to customize their results based on the races they are most interested in following.The ultimate in this genre has been CNN’s on-air, big board election map that calls up the most detailed data with just a tap of the finger by its political reporter John King. The danger with these types of reporting tools is often reporters and designers try to squish too much information into one format.
 The end result can lead to information overload and confusion.I offer you a few examples that cross the spectrum from simple to sophisticated:  

• Scientific American has a very simple map that highlights just the battleground states. 
•  The Daily Kos map may lead to information overload. I feel you need a lot of time to figure out this map and then get something out of it.
• Here is CNN’s online election tracker.
• The LATimes.com’s interactive electoral calculator allows readers to predict which state will go red or blue and then will give you an updated count of electoral votes.
• The BBC’s election poll tracker is more like an interactive timeline that follows developments across the life of the campaign.
• On the Fox News interactive map, users will be able to customize the election data they follow by entering their zip code or state. 

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 current issue of American Journalism Review has an article titled “Charticle Fever,” which examines a type of storytelling gaining prominence in newspapers. A charticle mixes text, photos and graphics to tell a story. It is visual and allows a reader to drop in and take only the information that he or she may be interested in. According to the article, some editors and reporters aren’t crazy about this type of storytelling because they see it as undermining traditional, narrative-style reporting.
 Without commenting on the pros or cons of charticles, it strikes me that the fact that these types of stories are becoming more prominent in print could be a reflection of how stories are told online. Web versions of stories also meld text with photos and other media such as video, audio, flash files and interactive features. Maybe what’s happening online is influencing what’s happening in print.  
I’ll include here a couple of examples of Web journalism that are taking this melding of different media to new places.  The first is Flyp Media, an online-only magazine, and the washingtonpost.com’s Video Haiku, which brings together text, photos and video in a linear format.   

An interesting posting by the Poynter Institute’s Ellyn Agnoletti gives us a peak into the future. Agnoletti attended the recent Online News Association conference and came back with a list of emerging technologies that could have an impact on how the news is delivered.

Take a look here and let me know if you find anything of interest. 

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. 

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