Just read a piece written by one of the ex-Seattle P-I reporters. It’s not going well. The great experiment didn’t yield salaries.
People keep butting up against this problem, in an age when we can get the news directly from the people who are making it, there just isn’t that much money availble for intermediaries. That’s the harsh reality. People hanging on in the news business apparently still cling to the idea that if they can discredit people like me, the problem will somehow go away. That’s what I make of the comments that have been showing up here re the last RBTN podcast. It’s nonsense. Even if I had never been born the news business would be facing the same problems. To think that discrediting anyone will change anything, well that’s just bad reporting, imho.
Change is necessary. I think there’s still value in the brands, and the rolodexes of the reporters, and the selection process to determine who has something important to say on any topic of news. Then the news process should get out of the way and let the sources speak directly to the readers. That simple formula will make professional news relevant to the news process in the future.
Rebooting The News 
Newspapers should look at how difficult their products are to use. What is the point of sending me thick stacks of expensive paper containing car and home ads, when I have no interest in looking at them? But I get to take a huge stack out to recycle once a week. Well, I used to, but not any more.
The thing that newspapers do well is local news. For them to survive, they must find a way to publish local news on the web and make money.
Instead of complaining about what Google News takes from their site, they should just create an RSS feed with the content they want published. Then block the rest of their site.
Finally, they should create their own news aggregator sites, to make their content easy to find. Is their a more cluttered web site than the NY Times home page?