Over the past few weeks, there have been fifty some-odd changes to my most active Cision MediaSource press list. Which means that a staggering 20% of the reporters I’m in touch with on a regular basis have recently switched beats, switched organizations, or simply switched professions.

We all know that most newsrooms are shrinking. In mid July alone, about 400 newsroom people lost their jobs at papers across the country, according to MediaLife. Among the organizations making cuts were the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Here's something new and interesting on the decline of newspapers.

A longtime Los Angeles Times reporter, William Lobdell, has left the paper and provides his list of the 42 Things I Know about the newspaper, its challenges and its future in the Web 2.0 world.

Here's a sample, from Lobdell's blog:

There is plenty of uncertainty about the newspapers, but this much I know:

1. I made the right decision leaving the newspaper business.
2. That’s not to say I’m happy about breaking up with my one true career love.
3. But the business model for newspapers is broken.
4. No one has figured out how to fix it.
5. That’s probably because it can’t be fixed.

There's a lot more in the post worth reading ... from someone who's actually been in the trenches.

Some things just leave me scratching my head.

In an interview with Robert Thomson, the new managing editor of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, we find out that the Journal is gunning for The New York Times by way of its ability to be objective. Business Week reports:

Still, how can the Journal compete with the Times' much bigger newsroom? No worries, shrugs Thomson. "Journalists at The Wall Street Journal have the objective of being objective. At The New York Times, you have news with a skew. Or a skew with news."

This is a ludicrous assertion, albeit one that echoes his boss, Rupert Murdoch. Told that such talk sends some into seizures, Thomson concedes "there are great journalists at the Times," but the paper's "calcification of culture" gives the Journal an opportunity.

When journalists get arrested, usually it's to protect an anonymous source or support the First Amendment. Video blogger Lindsay Campbell of MobLogic.tv chose jail in order to better understand the story she was covering.

At the end of the clip below, Campbell questions why reporters are supposed to avoid becoming part of the story. She asks why it's wrong to relate her feelings about a story along with the facts?

As a reporter, I was taught not to do these things. But watching Campbell's piece, I wonder if there aren't new ways to approach news coverage we should all think about? New technology, a new generation...

Many of the "military analysts" who explain wars and weapons programs to the public on CNN, NBC and other TV and radio networks are actually part of an Pentagon-orchestrated PR campaign, The New York Times tells us this weekend:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

PRWeb is getting faster.

As part of a new set of features to be released starting today and rolled out over the next two weeks, the online press release distributor is now offering priority distribution -- which lets customers upload and distribute their press releases in just 1 hour.

While pricing wasn't finalized when PRWeb briefed me last week, they said it would be about $100 a release and could be used with any distribution. This is an important development, as the next-day and 2-day distributions available previously were simply insufficient when working with clients making last-minute changes.

Other new features include the ability to:

• Specify the time of day a release will be distributed
• Include a release in media digests emailed to reporters every morning (based both on speciality and region)

About 20% of Newsweek's staff took a recent job buyout offer, according to a Wall Street Journal story today. That's a pretty big number, but nothing all that new in the news business.

The real news IMHO is the fact that magazines publishing on a weekly basis still exist at all.

Think about it. TIME. Newsweek. BusinessWeek. Just about the only thing that differentiates them is their weekly schedule.

Now, once upon a time this was indeed a differentiator. But today, with both up-to-the-minute news and context/opinion available from myriad sources, what's the point of a "weekly?" The Journal story picked up on this point somewhat:

Reposted from the Farrell Kramer Digital Images blog.

I happened to find myself outside NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's office this morning in Manhattan just before his resignation.

Fortunately, I had my Nikon D300 and Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens. I took some pictures of the media as they gathered, eagerly awaiting any sighting of the governor. I had to move on to a business meeting, but thought the scene was worth recording.

We've often discussed the value of podcasting, blogging and other web 2.0 media as a core ingredient of effective communications programs. For some, however, the implementation of these things on the IT side can be difficult.

So I thought I'd take the occasion of today's new release of Drupal (Drupal 6) to talk a bit about this.

Drupal is a content management system, or CMS, that powers websites. Our farrell kramer communications site, in fact, is powered by Drupal.

If you record it, they will come...

At least, if you're recording podcasts. A new study by eMarketer has found that the U.S. podcast audience rose to 18.5 million in 2007. It is expected to hit 28 million by the end of this year and 65 million by 2012.

Where the eyeballs -- or ears, in this case -- go, the dollars will follow. eMarketer sees podcast-related advertising in the U.S. more than doubling to $435 million by 2012.

A number of factors are driving the growth of the podcast-user base:

* Greater ease of consumption for podcast content
* Growing awareness of podcasting
* Terrestrial radio’s use and promotion of podcasting
* Increased penetration of portable players
* The evolution of smart phones and proliferation of affordable mobile data plans