Ann Moore, who traces her tenure at Time Inc. back to 1978, raised eyebrows for telling a British paper Wednesday she's thinking about charging for access to Time.com and People.com:

Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me.

(NB to Ann Moore: Those aren't shoes, they're BlackBerries and iPhones. And the kids only pulled them out to email their friends and ask why the lady from the dental-office magazine is quizzing them about internet rumors and trying to convince them to pay for celebrity gossip, for the Good Of American Journalism.)

Then there were the comments of Martin Nisenholtz, who has run the New York Times website since its inception 13 years ago.

Asked in an ongoing online Q&A this week if he saw "online newspaper and magazine content becoming pay-per-view," Nisenholtz replied, "the short answer to your question is 'yes.'”

Then he said the Times is trying to come up with new ways to charge online readers:

Today, we continue to carefully analyze the question of how paid content (subscriptions, micro-payments, membership tiers) can augment our core advertising business... NYTimes.com has a very large national display revenue stream. As we develop new pay-for-content ideas, we must carefully balance our ability to generate meaningful dollars from both sources.

It makes sense that amid the desperation of depression-esque advertising declines, newspapers and magazines are eyeballing internet paywalls for their most salable content. Time Inc. just completed 600 layoffs and may end up doing more in the near future. Its debt rated as junk, the Times is operating on a high-interest loan from a Mexican billionaire and a subprime mortgage on its headquarters building. They need money somewhere, and any knucklehead can multiply a subscription rate by some invented, projected subscriber base and come up with a big number.

What's sad is that most publishers' online profit strategies will never get more creative than that. (It's enough to make you want to "throw" your "shoe!")

Metro reporter Hector Castro got one of maybe 20 job offers at the transformed PI. How was it?

He said the offer increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.

We'd welcome you to the exciting future of journalism, Hector, if you hadn't turned down the gig as "too tech-oriented." That's an awfully polite way of putting it.

Twitter bought search site Summize last summer and has begun making it even easier for its own users to search within the microblogging service. Twitter search was the go-to source for breaking updates in on the Flight 1549 crash and the recent NYU (non-)"riot," along with many other recent news events.

All this prompts Ad Age's Michael Learmouth to wonder, like others before him, whether Twitter might start justifying its freshly-minted $230 million valuation by selling keyword ads next to search results.

The only hitch: People who are actively searching for news aren't very receptive to being pitched on products. They want information.

Maybe Twitter should try selling ads to newspapers and the other traditional media organizations who are still trying to show users that their content is more valuable than the unvarnished ramblings one finds on sites like... Twitter.

According to a Bloomberg report, the adjustments are meant to put Times Web staff on a more equal footing, pay-wise, with print staff. Why would a company with junk-rated debt, fresh off its first-ever major layoffs, pour more money into salaries? It's not like the job market is all that great. And the raises are retroactive to March. Wow.

The answer lies with the Newspaper Guild, which negotiated a three-year contract covering about 100 online staff.

"The Times wants to have a first-class Web site to go with

the first-class newspaper," O'Meara said. "It would be not good

to have a big disparity between the staff of the digital

operation with the staff of the newspaper."

The gray in the silver lining? Web people still have to work 40-hour weeks, compared with 35 hours for print staff.

Also, Web staff had to give up their bonuses. Ha, guess you won't be rolling in massive pageview bonuses any time soon, suckas!

(Disclosure: Um, neither will we.)

Sure, the title made $10 million last year, according to Keith Kelly at the Post. And it has new leadership (Kelly reports) in managing editor Jess Cagle, a People and former Time editor who spent 10 years at EW following its launch. (Fortune vet Rick Tetzeli, the former M.E., was kicked upstairs.)

But the magazine's profits are a fifth of the $50 million they recently were. If 2009 plays out as expected, EW could slide into the red on the cost of printing 1.6 million copies each week.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is betting an editorial turnaround will prevent that, as will lower costs, thanks to the loss of 30 of 120 editorial staff and plans to share staff with other publications. But Moore should be ready to pull the plug quickly if the magazine starts losing money. EW never quite made its mark, and Time Inc.'s last round of 600-or-so layoffs was actually not that deep given the magazine group's 10,000 employees.

If the company has to fire more people, it should not be to sentimentally extend a failed experiment.

Today the paper carries a front-page ad for CBS. Well, sure. It's hard to be shocked by that after the paper's first mass layoffs, a junk rating for its debt, a planned mortgage of its headquarters building and a deep company dividend slash.

Besides, the Times already had display ads on section fronts (since 2006) and the occasional classified on the front. The Wall Street Journal (since 2006), USA Today (since 1999), Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune all have front-page ads. The Washington Post is now the most prominent paper to have held out against them.

In 1851, when the Times started publication, it was not uncommon for advertising to crowd news out entirely from the front page. Even by the 1890s, the first two or three pages of the New York Herald contained no news at all. (It's not entirely clear from the Times' cautiously-phrased story today if it ever carried front-page ads during this era.)

The only thing outrageous about the Times' decision is its tardiness. Ten years ago, the paper could have fetched a truly outlandish premium for the honor of front-page placement. Today the novelty has been eroded by competitors like the Journal, and the economy is in the tank. As with his mortgage, dividend cut and planned sale of other assets, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. slept far too many nights on this decision.

In an interview with former Gawker editor Choire Sicha, the Huffington Post publisher insists her operation isn't putting any newspapermen out of work. "No, no, no,"she said. She totally reads books and newspapers whenever she can, even on her friends' fancy yachts!

I was on vacation in the Caribbean and our host had software on his boat where he would print newspapers. And there we were overlooking the Caribbean, all of us totally wired—laptops, iPhones, BlackBerries— and we're passing around the New York Post and the Herald Tribune....I don't think it's either/or. I don't think books will disappear. I think they're appealing to different needs. And I see the future as a hybrid future, I don't see it as a future where only online exists.

Awww, sweet.

But isn't Huffington expanding HuffPo into local markets? And stealing entire articles from newspapers when she gets there, to obliterate competitors on Google?

Yes, and that's the thing about Ursula: She was notorious for promising to help desperate little mermaids, and then totally undermining them for her own nefarious purposes. Which is why she'd pop into the head of one of the HuffPo workers past and present: They know the Huffington's Ursula moves firsthand.

(Arianna Huffington Photo: Liz Baylen, LA Times)

Just look at the examples above: "Lincoln vs Darwin"! "The Religious Case For Gay Marriage"! "Global Warning Is a Hoax*/Not really lulz ROFL"!

This is the template for the future, editor Jon "The Economist, Please Marry Me" Meacham told the Journal:

"Covers like Lincoln v. Darwin is what the redesign is all about... We are trying to be more provocative."

...Recently, Newsweek has emphasized commentary on hot-button issues, such as gay marriage, by big-name journalists like editor Jon Meacham and international editor Fareed Zakaria, as well as contributions from political operatives and academics like Michael Beschloss and Sean Wilentz.

The idea is to just kind of sit back and pontificate on the world, like The Economist, without the need for all those pricey reporters everywhere. Then elite, smart people will read the magazine, which will become a "thought leader," as anonymous Newsweekers phrased it in Folio Tuesday, and advertisers will pay a premium. Meanwhile the magazine will save on postage since it won't have to mail anything to the poors!

But of course people who fancy themselves "thought leaders" hungry for global news opinion can just order The Economist, which has way more snob appeal than Newsweek. Meanwhile confused pediatricians and dentists will stop ordering the magazine for their waiting rooms, due to the increasingly inflammatory covers; bloggers will mock the magazine for going tabloidy; and Matt Drudge will finally hire Michael Isikoff away to write for Drudge Report directly, since if you're going to do investigative journalism on behalf of a spinmeister you might as well work for the big, growing one with lots of extra money.

Aside from the cost of maintaining such a high circulation, Newsweek would like to transition from newsmagazine to “thought leader,” something more akin to the Economist. “[Editor Jon] Meacham and [Time editorial director Richard] Stengel are both infatuated with the Economist,” the source said. “To get that ‘thought leader’ position, a million is the sweet spot.”

Newsweek isn't so much a business, you see, as a think tank. Being a large magazine is sort of gauche when you're trying to be a "thought leader," we imagine.

Then there's Esquire, whose ad pages have fallen further than competitors GQ and Details this year, but which Giorgio Armani totally gets, and hey don't forget the flashing electronic ink cover (look! something shiny!).

Sigh. Well, there's no getting through the holidays without a lot of denial, really. Same with a media depression, apparently.

(Photo via Kafka via b_d_solis on Flickr via the hands of our own Owen Thomas.)

Except instead of a house it's a giant newspaper company, and thousands of journalists at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Florida Sun-Sentinel and other papers stand to lose their jobs. Apparently Tribune's insane newspaper savior Lee Abrams is going to have to send even more rambling and pointess memos to get them and their advertisers out of the  "fear/acceptance zone."

Bloomberg predicted all this, as usual, by listening to fancypants Wall Street analysts, with their attention to things like fiscal solvency and balance sheets and other things of zero interest to new media visionaries like Zell and Abrams.

Tribune paid off some debt by selling Newsday to Cablevision for $632 million. But it still needs more cash to avoid going into default, and several of its big ideas look dubious amid the economic meltdown: selling the Chicago Cubs (S&P is skeptical and Tribune delayed the sale , originally to come by the end of the year, until spring), issuing securities on the moribund commercial paper market and selling the properties now housing the LA Times and Chicago Trib (commercial real estate is in the toilet).

Driving this whole firesale mentality are continued declines in newspaper advertising, which Zell apparently didn't count on, and which radio-industry clown Abrams couldn't correct. Operating profits declined 83 percent companywide in the most recent quarter, according to the Journal.

Tribune's best hope at this point is that its lenders will decide the company is in better shape than most other distressed debtors and give it some breathing room, rather than lose all their money in bankruptcy. The lenders have supposedly been "amicable" with Tribune thus far, according to the WSJ, but demoralized empoyees won't be so forgiving the next time Zell comes around to cuss them out.

UPDATE: Leverage with creditors might be precisely the point, actually. Writes the Times this morning: " Analysts and bankruptcy experts say that the hiring of advisers, including Lazard and Sidley Austin, one of the company’s longtime law firms, could be a just-in-case move, or a bargaining tactic" (emphasis added). On the other hand: "As the economy weakens, other lenders have become more aggressive about forcing debtors into bankruptcy when they believe such a move is inevitable, to preserve a company’s valuable cash reserves."

What really pisses me off is that they couldn’t bother to mention my book - the only good reason to talk with a reporter - even after the reporter visited the recording of the audiobook. Now that’s bullshit.

Just how long have you been in this racket, Jarvis? A real internet futurist publishes his book online, for free. As a random blogger once reblogged, "The market and the internet don't care if you make money." But then you already knew that.

From left: Geoff Reiss, Gina Duclayan, Kristen Rayner, Daniel Carter, Christiaan Kuypers, Nicki Gostin, Marion Rosenfeld, Paul Donald, Damon Torres.

Newspapers are still among the best media businesses... no competitor in local markets has held onto audience as well as newspapers have...

We certainly have competition from Google and others. But in each of the communities where we compete, almost every newspaper has the largest news staff, largest sales force, biggest audience and greatest share of advertising in its market. Whether it's on the Internet or off the presses, we are capturing that business.

...Simply put, more people want our products today than wanted them yesterday; this is hardly the profile of a dying industry.

After Pruitt published that op-ed and completed his company's acquisition of Knight-Ridder newspaper group, his company's shares fell to less than $2 from $48.

Of course Murdoch has faith in newspapers. That's self-evident. Like Pruitt when he published his op-ed, Murdoch's just made a huge investment in the future of newspapers. Hopefully he's right! And hopefully he can really cement the public perception of newspapers as "news [readers] can trust" by not sweeping his company's stock-moving errors under the rug so often, and getting the name Canada straight. They're little things, and to a certain extent unavoidable, but they add up.

(via)

In contrast to Ivanka's father, the pair operate discreetly. I witnessed them not uttering a word of protest when turned away from George Clooney's Armani party at Manhattan's Bungalow 8 nightclub in May.

Way to deploy an underhanded compliment, Guardian!

Nightlife embarrassments aside, we're left wondering where the 40 percent revenue increase came from and where the hell it's gone. Is it from the expanded real estate coverage? And if so, what has that revenue stream been looking like over the past, say, six months?

Is the revenue being spent — as it must, since the losses are still there — perhaps online? The Observer is planning a nationwide expansion for its Politicker political blogging franchise (not a bad idea), but it's not clear if capital has been deployed on that yet.

In any case, perhaps the city's club owners could be persuaded to treat young Kushner with a bit more care. After all, we'd hate to see him decide he's not having any fun and go all Ron Burkle one of the last remaining subsidized print operations.

"Pissed off" is among crude language regularly removed from Times coverage as part of what McCoy acknowledges is "a conservative standard" when it comes to publishing coarse or vulgar remarks...

Clark Stevens oversees the style and usage guidelines at The Times... "It's a phrase we've all heard, and most of us have used. But is it essential to the story (or the quotation) here, and is it consistent with the overall tone and image we want to project to our readers? I think that's where conservative judgment prevails in favor of not using it..."

The policy for the first time takes into account the online world vs. the print world. As McCoy wrote in her cover note to staff when she distributed the updated guidelines on obscenity and taste, "A less formal voice may be appropriate in online stories and on blogs (as is often the case in feature stories too), but a conversational style is not an invitation to abandon The Times’ high standards by introducing gratuitous obscenities."

So whether it's on latimes.com or in print, curse words and crude language are supposed to be used only when they are essential to conveying an important point of the story.

Thanks for keeping everyone excruciatingly up to date on your slow-motion embrace of Web culture, LA Times, rather than boring us with stories about, say, philandering politicians and their mistresses!

[LA Times via Romenesko]

Her name, Laurel Cummings, doesn't seem to appear on the BlackBook website, but under "contact information" on her Facebook, she does list that same site. Odd.

A couple more pictures, via Horowitz and Cummings' Facebook profiles:

As once-hot novelist Jay McInerney once said, sometimes BlackBook "enjoys frolicking in the shallows." As does its owner!

(Photos via Laurel Cummings and Ari Horowitz on Facebook)