Not surprisingly, there’s been a ton of news of late surrounding the daily newspaper industry, but the summary of it all is that as bad as things are for the dailies, these businesses are incredibly gifted at finding new, imaginative ways to make things even worse.

• Newspaper revenues are down 29%, and papers around the country continue to crater. Freedom Communications, owner of 33 dailies (including the Orange County Register) and 70 weekly newspapers, filed for bankruptcy this week while the San Francisco Chronicle is cutting more employees. Ann Arbor lost its daily entirely, the L.A. Times is restructuring its sales force (as if that’ll help in the least), and Rupert has shuttered his free London Paper. With no attractive offers, the Austin American Statesman was taken off the block, while local investors purchased dailies in Philadelphia and bidders are emerging for the Boston Globe.

• Want to see local movie listings in the paper? Sorry.

• The debate over paid news continues to rage with more stories here and here.

• Rather than charging for online news, maybe the answer is better distribution through e-readers or ‘hyperdistribution.’

• Due to a string of bankruptcies that have placed media companies into the hands of creditors (like some cruel game of hot potato), the largest publisher in the country at the moment is….J.P. Morgan. The Banking giant now controls Readers Digest, Source Interlink Media and American Media Inc. which have combined revenue of just over $5 billion.

• Local news is a big deal these days and is being looked to as the savior for local dailies (as if it hadn’t always been). As everyone except daily newspaper publishers has known for years and years, the strategy of gutting local coverage in favor of generic AP stories and reruns from other newspapers has proved fatal for almost every local daily in the country. Now, after virtually every newspaper in the country is either on its last legs or already in bankruptcy, local news is back in favor.

• Local news is even big enough to be fueling some M&A activity. Local blog site Examiner.com has acquied NowPublic for an undisclosed sum. NowPublic raised $10.6 million last summer from lead investor Rho Ventures and seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund.

• Even the most dysfunctional paper in the country is seeing the local light. The Tribune Company has started a local blog network to boost its online coverage of all things local. Too little, too late, I’m sure, and they’ll undoubtedly find a way to screw it up, but at least they got the right answer eventually.

• Speaking of the most dysfunctional paper in the country, Tribune has finally sold the Cubs. Unfortuantely, only now is the greatest fraud in the industry’s final chapter receiving the scrutiny it should have from the very start.

• And finally, in the most baffling, head-scratch-inducing development over recent weeks, the same businesses that were slow to appreciate and effectively leverage the digital tsunami that swept across the industry are now letting go of the very people who have any chance of saving them.

It continues to dumbfound me how much this industry enjoys digging its own grave.

The tectonic shifts transforming the media and advertising landscape have always been fascintaing to me a stand as one of the central areas of focus of this blog. And while the earthquakes and volcanos along the fault lines are worthy of the headlines they grab, I am equally intrigued by the smaller events and more subtle (and not always so subtle) tensions that are constantly taking place as the traditional media plate gets subducted underneath the new media plate. This subduction zone seems to be generating peak activity these days (I’ll save the record-length list of story items for another post) and has now even been put to music. Mad Avenue Blues is a little long, but for anyone in the media, advertising, search, web, or tech/software business, it’s worth watching in its entirety.

(Thanks Lief for the link)

I’ve been saying for months that we have entered the final chapter of the daily newspaper story, and if there was any doubt as to the validity of that proclamation, those doubts were erased today when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced today that it will be abandoning its printed publication and moving entirely online. It is the first major metro daily newspaper to make such a move, and the floodgates are now officially open. Moving entirely to the web is the only viable option for most dailies, and there will be at least a dozen major U.S. metro markets with no printed daily newspaper by the end of the year.

It has to be the case that the New York Times is reading this blog. The story they ran yesterday on the front page was my #1 prediction for 2008. Either that or they’ve been reading Alan Mutter’s blog, or tweets from themediaisdying or any of the other countless blogs, articles, industry analysts, pundits, experts, or doomsayers that have been predicting the inevitability that a major metro market in the U.S. will lose its printed daily newspaper entirely in the very near future. So even though my analysis may not have been that original, it was a fun article to see on the front page of the New York Times 14 months after I wrote the same thing.

There has been a whole pile of additional news over the past week or two about the daily newspaper industry, along with a bunch of other interesting things I’ve seen and read, so it’s time once again to dump out my list of saved articles and links.

• Q4 ‘08 results for magazines and newspapers were even more horrifying than even the most pessimistics observers would have predicted.

• MinnPost’s David Brauer has a fix for the annoying way the Star Tribune paginates it’s online articles.

• The stars from the best video podcast, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of Diggnation, made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Podcasts have now officially become a mainstream media channel.

• Moody’s new ‘Bottom Run’ classification of the worst credit risk businesses is filled with radio and newspaper companies. What a shock!

• Philadelphia’s newspaper mogul, Brian Tierney, whose company just declared bankruptcy, erupts at the bloggers who are dancing on the graves of daily newspapers all over the country and declares, “We’re not dead yet!” Death might actually be more appealing than the rotting-corpse, zombie-like state that most dailies are in these days. And yet, maybe he’s right.

• 4 dailies in Tennessee are trying desperately to stave off oblivion by sharing resources and cutting costs. At the rate dailies are going, we might end up with one giant (or small) newspaper monopolist that tries to cover the entire country.

• The NYT article from yesterday made the oft-repeated claim that Craigslist stands as the primary culprit behind the demise of daily newspapers. What a joke. And shabby, lazy, simplistic reporting, too. Craigslist certainly took some market share and eroded some revenue, but the site is largely filled with classifieds that would never, ever run in the daily paper, despite what they claim.

• Unions, which have been a substantial factor in the bloated cost-structure of most dailies, are now stepping up as perhaps the last-ditch saviours??!?!?!?!?!

• The New York Times is trying to generate cash from every nook and cranny in the business. I hope they succeed. I could not stand losing the Times.

• Since 1990, only 5 of the 25 largest papers in the country have grown circulation.

• MediaNews Group is the first major newspaper company to finally realize that the answer might be a customized newspaper. It’s most likely too late, but it’s about time that someone from inside the industry finally come to appreciate one of the solutions that has been widely recognized and bantered about outside the industry for at least a decade.

• Denver lost a daily. Seattle and San Francisco will soon lose their dailies. And there’s a growing list of others that will have no daily by year-end.

• Even Rupert Murdoch is having a tough time these days.

• Jason Calacanis, who made news this week for his brazen yet brilliant offer to buy a spot on Twitter’s top 10 recommended list of twitterers to follow for $250,000 (which, by the way, Twitter should accept immediately so they can actually start generating revenue), has written the best piece yet on start-ups surviving in the current economic meltdown.

• The free v. paid content debate rages on.

• Is Patch one of the new models that will fill the void when the presses eventually stop running?

Lots of stuff, and sorry for the massive, somewhat lazy dump of links, but the overflow of stories and links is getting overwhelming, and I’m afraid that it’s actually just getting started. It’s going to be a crazy year.

In the great horse race to see which large U.S. city will first lose its daily newspaper altogether, Denver has now taken a quantum leap forward into the frontrunner pack with the announcement today that EW Scripps is shuttering the Rocky Mountain News. While the city still has the Denver Post, that paper is in no great position itself, espcially as the weight of what had been a shared expenses structure with the Rocky Mountain News comes bearing down in full force on the daily.

In December of 2007, I made some predictions for 2008, one of which centered around a major metro market in the U.S. losing its daily newspaper altogether. While the timing may have been a little early, there is little doubt that it will come true in 2009. The only question that remains is which city will win the race. For the last few months, the frontrunners included Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Seattle will certainly lose one of its dailies, and appears to be working hard to work itself into contention by losing both. Handicappers should not overlook other dark horses in back of the pack such as Buffalo and St. Louis either. And after last weekend, Philadelphia roared up to the front of the pack, and now San Francisco is making a late charge. It’s already a crowded field with more entrants every week in a race that’s anyone’s to win.

While everyone knew that it was only a matter of time, it is still remarkable to witness the incredible, rapidly accelerating decimation taking place in the daily newspaper industry. Like watching the demolition of a Las Vegas casino from the 50’s, the countdown on setting off the explosives laced throughout the daily newspaper industry has been going on for years.

Well, we’ve hit zero and the explosions are rocking the country. First there was Chicago with the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company, followed by Minneapolis as the Star Tribune fell last month. And just this past weekend, the Journal Register declared bankruptcy, taking with it its 20 daily newspapers and 159 non-daily newspapers. And Philadelphia Newspapers, a unit of Brian Tierney’s Philadelphia Media Holdings and owner of the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, is expected to declare bankruptcy today.

We’re just getting started on what will undoubtedly be an incredible year of destruction. And even though we all knew it was coming, the ferocity of the devastation will be riveting throughout.

It was only a matter of time. The Star Tribune declared bankruptcy last night, ‘filing a voluntary petition under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy code.’ Following the Chicago Tribune’s similar announcement last month, it was the 2nd major metro daily to file bankruptcy in the past 6 weeks, and more will undoubtedly follow. Seattle will be next, followed by Detroit, and then the dominoes will just start falling all over the place. In a letter to readers on page A9 this morning, publisher and chairman Chris Harte promised that the reorganization will not impact at all the product and service that the daily delivers to the community. It has to be said, of course, but that certainly doesn’t make it any more likely that it’ll be true.

I don’t know how many steps are left to go, but the Minneapolis Star Tribune definitely took a step closer to bankruptcy this week as negotiations broke down between its labor unions and management. The company has essentially been there for some time since it has defaulted on its debt, but my guess is that a formal bankruptcy filing is just around the corner.

In looking at the pile of headlines to catch up on regarding the daily newspaper industry, it’s obvious that December was another horrendous month for the daily newspaper business. Unfortunately, it’s going to be even worse in 2009 for them. But here’s one last pile of stories for 2008…

• The Seattle Times is freezing non-union pensions

• The most recent Pew Survey indicates that the web has, for the first time ever, overtaken newspapers as the more preferred source for news. This could be seen as a positive for daily newspaper web sites, but unfortunately, people are spending less and less time on those sites.

• The New York Times is selling its minority stake in the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park to raise cash. This is just the latest trend of the dailies selling anything and everything they can to generate some liquidity. The problem is, they’re selling at absolutely the worst time, and no one is buying anything. The NYT has even  registered to sell stock at a massive discount which will result is ridiculous dilution.

• Things are so bad, in fact, that some papers are even losing money on their classifieds. The Cincinnati Enquirer has reduced the number of days per week that it runs its classifieds section because the paper cannot generate enough classified advertisers to cover the incremental costs associated with that section.

• All in all, it was just a brutal year for the industry.

• And already, just 2 days into the new year, 2009 is proving that things can get even worse. AsianWeek newspaper announced that they are shutting down their newspaper. Just more proof of the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same…