If I'm making such a hash of it, he could say, why is it the only big newspaper in America that's growing?

Is practicing the more rarefied forms of journalism a right or a privilege? I'd say a privilege, but the way some people talk about the evolution of The Wall Street Journal (NWS) since Rupert Murdoch bought it shows they take the other view.

Check out Scott Sherman's 5,000-worder in The Nation to see what I'm talking about. Although Sherman interviewed plenty of people who think the Journal is as good as it was before Dec. 2007, or even better, he still can't shake the nagging sense that a terrible injustice has been committed. "Murdoch has not corrupted the Journal," he concedes, grudgingly. But, just as damnably, "he has smothered it and made it ordinary."

Semi-relax, New York Times employees! Having lasted this long, your job isn't going away. Probably.

"I believe right now a good part of our severance is behind us," said Times Co. (NYT) CFO Jim Follo on yesterday morning's first-quarter earnings call when asked about what sort of severance costs he expects to encounter in the remainder of 2009.

Last week, you enraged employees and readers of the Los Angeles Times with an ad for Southland that was clumsily made to resemble a front-page news story. This week, you inserted possibly the most gag-inducing bit of product placement primetime has yet witnessed into an episode of Chuck:

Starting next week, The New York Times (NYT) is going to look a lot different.

A variety of expected cost-cutting measures will kick in beginning next Tuesday, according to a memo executive editor Bill Keller sent out earlier Thursday morning. (Gawker and the Observer have both posted the full memo.) The first thing to go will be the two-page new index in the A section, which was only introduced a year ago.

A New York Times reader asked the paper's opinion czar about a "rumor" that the government might offer newspapers a bailout on the condition that they do away with their editorial pages. Rosenthal's response:

ZenithOptimedia released a revised version of its closely-watched global ad-spending forecast yesterday, and the new view projects a year-over-year decrease of 6.9 percent, the biggest drop since Zenith started keeping track in 1980. The declines will be sharper still in the U.S. (down 8.7 percent), in newspapers (down 12 percent) and in magazines (down 11 percent).

Like sports fans who fixate on the officiating only after their team starts losing, newspaper boosters have a new shibboleth: fairness.

It's a word we've been hearing a lot in the seven days since the Associated Press declared its intention to stamp out online "misappropriation" of news content by aggregators and bloggers. Even those who question the wisdom of AP's plan seem to agree that something ought to be done to address the injustice of the situation. As David Carr puts it Monday, "The taking of one company's content and selling ads against it for the benefit of another company is simply not fair, no matter what the lawyers stipulate."

With a weekday circulation of about 350,000, the Globe is reported to be on track to lose $85 million in 2009. "For a newspaper of their size, that's just an extraordinary amount of money," says analyst Edward Atorino of the Benchmark Co. Obviously The New York Times Co. agrees, or it wouldn't be threatening to shut the Globe down unless it can bring those losses down by $20 million in a hurry.

So when the Associated Press announced plans yesterday to combat misuse of news stories by certain nameless web operators, many naturally assumed Google was the main target. But Eric Schmidt says that's not the case.

Alan Mutter reports that a number of CEOs currently in San Diego for the Newspaper Association of America convention are holding a clandestine meeting to discuss, among other topics, whether and how to start charging readers to view articles and other content online. The presence of a lawyer is meant to ensure the conversation doesn't stray into antitrust territory, whatever David Carr might wish. Still, one might think these executives -- whose companies are, after all, competitors -- might wish to keep any brilliant ideas about monetizing journalism to themselves. Chances are this confab will be less a workshop than a support group.

A thought: If you can't produce the CEO of General Motors's name from memory (and with the correct spelling of his surname), maybe you have no business writing editorials about the American auto industry?

As I mentioned yesterday, the network that invented 24-hour cable news has hit a new low, falling to No. 3 in the prime-time ratings race, behind both Fox News (NWS) and MSNBC (GE). It's gotten so bad that Fox's Bill O'Reilly has actually taken to saying kind things about CNN, possibly out of pity. (He called Anderson Cooper "an honest guy" and said Wolf Blitzer "does a nice job.")

Life went through several incarnations as a print magazine, most recently, and least iconically, as a weekend newspaper supplement that lasted three years.

That's what Tribune Co. is doing in Hartford, Conn., where the newsroom of the Courant is now going to double as the set for the local newscasts of WTIC-TV and WTXX-TV, the conglomerate's two local stations, as the three entities merge into one. Richard Graziano, general manager of the stations, has been named publisher of the paper as well, with Steve Carver, who currently holds that job, set to go.

For years, Drudge has curated headlines for conservative readers in a way that makes it reflects their rabid, all-consuming hatred of LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS. But he never gave his readers what they'd clearly appreciate more than anything: a forum where they could vent their anger/paranoia/conspiracy theories and argue with each other. That omission leaves Drudge-ophiles with no option but to carry on their discussions in the woefully overtaxed comment sections of other websites.

If Ken Auletta's December 2005 New Yorker profile of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was what persuaded the New York Times publisher not to cooperate with any more reporters for awhile, then there's scant chance Mark Bowden's 11,000-word Vanity Fair portrait will change his mind.

Sulzberger declined to talk to Bowden, and told Times employees to do the same. Nevertheless, Bowden writes, "I interviewed dozens of current and former Times reporters, editors, and business managers, as well as industry analysts, academics, and editors and publishers at rival newspapers. Nearly every one of them hopes that Arthur will succeed. Few expect that he can."

Ever since Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones from the Bancroft family, staffers at The Wall Street Journal (NWS) have lived in fear of seeing their unique culture dismantled -- not unreasonably, given Murdoch's public critiques of the paper's long stories and its baroque editing process.

But perhaps nothing since the ouster of managing editor Marcus Brauchli almost a year ago has done so much to crystallize that fear as a memo sent last Thursday by Brauchli's successor, Robert Thomson. On the face of it, the memo was no different from any number of edicts issued by his predecessors: Thomson urged Journal reporters to contribute more breaking news to Dow Jones Newswires and previewed a new system that will facilitate their doing so.

This is a disturbing pair of charts for anyone still holding out hope that ad dollars are going to come gushing back into print once this pesky little recession is all sorted out. Is there anyone like that left? Well, Time Warner chairman Jeff Bewkes said not too long ago that more than half of the ad decline in publishing is cyclical, not secular, and Associated Press CEO Tom Curley said Monday that the journalism profession is "going to undergo some enormous growth after we get through this valley." So, yes.

But just look at how neatly ad spending fluctuations in each medium correspond to audience gains or losses. (The charts are via the Project for Excellence in Journalism.)