Here is the last day (finally) of cleaning out my backlog of stories relating to the dailies, traditional media, new media, advertising, etc. Some of these headlines are slightly outdated, but so be it.

• Village Voice Media is stepping in to capitalize on the opportunity completely missed by the dailies in creating a local advertising network. This may turn out to have been the biggest whiff of all the missteps of the dailies over the last decade. And while that may be arguable given how badly the dailies have handled their fortunes of late, there is no arguing that in these late innings, the creation of a local ad network (both online and offline) represents perhaps the last great hope for local newspaper franchises.

• Unfortunately, the local ad play has also taken a beating in the current downturn, so maybe it’s not the immediate fix everyone believes it to be. (Though long-term, the hype over local ad networks, local search, local media, and local advertising is more than justified). Even local TV, which has also whiffed on many of the opportunities they’ve been presented, is showing signs of innovation and change in the new media landscape.

• Online classifieds are soaring these days (as if anyone needed more evidence of how badly the dailies blew their monopoly in that arena).

• Tucson has lost its daily. And again, while some say enough with the obvious and tell me something I don’t know, the pace of death and destruction in the industry is staggering and is still worth endless commentary and observation. Anytime an industry can lose $18 billion in 3 years, it’s worth commenting on.

• …another article to add to the mix on whether or not micropayments will or won’t save the dailies. And despite the arguments against charging for content, MediaNews is forging ahead anyway.

• Some believe the Kindle won’t save the dailies either (though I’d argue that it might).

• Maybe public subsidies are the answer (even Congress is jumping on the bandwagon)…or maybe the dailies can follow the example set by the Huffington Post and start auctioning off internships and even higher level jobs on ebay.

• Also in the obvious category, the trend with the dailies over the next few years will be local billionaires and/or real estate developers buying their local daily from debt-holders. It’s already happened in San Diego, and next on the list will be Boston, L.A., and possibly even New York. (Something has to happen with the Times as it’s too valuable to be run down to zero and the Sulzberger family is eventually going to riot as their fortune continues to be decimated…). But eventually, most large metro dailies will be owned by local individuals or groups of individuals and we’ll be back to where we were 100 years ago.

As I indicated yesterday, I have a huge backlog of daily newspaper, media, and advertising news items that have accumulated over the past few weeks and am trying to get through them in as few blog posts as possible, so here’s day two of cleaning out the closet…

• McClatchy is scrambling on multiple fronts to stay ahead of the avalanche crashing down around it. The company has restructured its debt, accepting a 3x increase in the interest rate it’s paying (5% to 15%) in exchange for an extension on the debt of a few years. In the head-scratching department, the company is also experimenting with an additional charge for subscribers who want the TV Guide with their newspaper. Really?!?!?!?

• There is little doubt that the Wall Street Journal will be out front leading the charge in charging readers for its content online. This is a good thing (if done the right way), and in one form or another it will work and it will be an important component allowing certain publishers navigate towards a long-term, sustainable business model online. Circling the wagons and working out an industry-wide program might be the answer, but the dailies just need to make sure they stay out of trouble with anti-trust regulators in the process. The trick will be balancing the need to generate a decent value proposition that warrants a paid fee and the urge to maniacally police the web for ‘pirated’ content.

• Another component of that sustainable business model will be individualized news. There has been countless attempts of this, and many, many failures, but eventually publishers will figure it out and it will become a standard component of news delivery, both in print and online. The latest attempt in this effort comes from MediaNews.

• Newspapers are now less liked than airlines. According to a recent report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, newspapers ranked below airlines and cell phone companies in customer satisfaction. That’s pretty low.

• With all the chaos swirling around newspapers, it remains an active area for deal activity. This is likely to increase as papers work through bakruptcies, consolidate, shut down, develop new models, and begin arriving at new models that provide some prospects for growth and value creation. Despite the collapse of the industry, print remains an incredibly appealing media channel for consumers and advertisers alike, and that will likely remain so for decades to come. But at some point, all the newspaper debt holders that are quickly becoming equity owners are going to realize that they have less chance of successfully managing a daily paper than industry veterans (who deserve about a D- for their effort even with an exceedingly generous curve applied to the grade) and are going to have to sell at whatever price they can muster. Debt holders who hold out hoping that good days are going to return are delusional. Selling now at $.10 on the dollar is far better than nothing down the road, no matter how painful the write-down might be today.

• The New York Times continues to experiment with new advertising formats on its site. While some may be annoying and hopefully short-lived, readers should be patient and forgiving and let the Times keep experimenting until it eventually arrives at workable solutions. If brilliant campaigns like the Mac/PC ads are any indication, the future is solid for online advertising. I also credit the Times for raising its prices. I haven’t a clue if this will work long-term, but at least they’re aggressively trying to figure out what to do with their business to stay solvent.

• What is sure not to work, however, are weak attempts to launch new publications that are aborted before issue #1 even hits the street.

• As if more evidence is needed, Pew just released a new study showing how badly newspapers dropped the ball with online classifieds. This news comes just as online employment classifieds are beginning to rise once again.

Taking a few weeks off from posting the latest headlines concerning the plight of the dailies has created a massive backlog of items to list. I am not sure if the pace of noteworthy events is accelerating or if it just seems that way due to my short hiatus, but I have about 3 blog posts worth of items to try to get through this week, so here’s the first batch:

• The saga of the Boston Globe continues, with growing acrimony between management and the unions.

• Global readership of newspapers continues to rise, and readership of and traffic stats surrounding newspaper websites continues to lend hope that there is an answer for some dailies who are smart enough with their web offerings.

• News that Craigslist’s revenue will soon top $100M provides further proof that while the site has certainly played a role in stealing classifieds away from the dailies, the credit the site receives in the mainstreams press’ coverage of the death of the dailies is massively overblown.

• Given the recent public statement from Google that they will not be the savior for newspapers, perhaps Apple will step in to carry the day. Or maybe it’s the gaming industry. Or maybe it’s the oft-mentioned ‘user-generated content’ that is helping Hearst’s TV station sites.

• Newspapers are finally catching on to the power and appeal of online video. It seems to be working for Philly.com.

• What a shock! Sam Zell might lose control of his not-so-beloved Tribune. I hope the holders of the $8.6 billion in Tribune debt have fun with their new prize.

• For a preview of what’s coming for almost every single major metro market in the U.S., check out the battle in San Diego between a non-profit online news company (Voice of San Diego), a local for-profit online news site (San Diego News Network), and a cratering daily (San Diego Union Tribune) that was purchased by a private equity group with no experience in publishing primarily because of the daily’s real estate holdings. (Sounds pretty similar to the situation in Minneapolis, although we’ve swapped the local online-only, for-profit website for another daily over in St. Paul).

• True/Slant, the latest entrant into the for-profit, online news & journalism fray offers another possible glimpse into the future of online journalism.

• Right on the ball just like they were in accurately assessing credit risk in the housing, mortgage, and banking sectors over the past decade, Moody’s has released a report on the daily newspaper industry. In the report, John Pucalla writes:

“Ultimately, we expect the industry will need to reverse the vertical integration strategy through cross-industry collaboration and outsourcing print production and distribution processes,” said Puchalla. “Although newspapers may lose some of their in-house control over press time, they would also release resources to beef up investment in content and technology.”

In English, that means newspapers are over-leveraged, crippled by unions, and suffering tremendously due to chronic under-investment in value-added journalism and online technology. What timely and prescient insight.

• In a non-daily related story, the Computer History Museum has posted two fascinating documents that provide some visibility into the earliest days of Apple. These should be heartening for every entrepreneur and early-stage company that’s had to make use of their magic crystal ball to gaze into the future with perfect clarity.

The headline is not a critique of Warren Buffett in any way, I simply could not think of a word for newspapers that started with an ‘O’. In any event, Warren Buffett weighed in on the state of daily newspapers this past weekend at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and articulated about as grim an assessment as one could imagine. (Berkshire Hathaway owns the Buffalo News and has a significant position in the Washington Post).

“For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” Buffett said. “They have the possibility of nearly unending losses. … I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end.”

Of course, as any good short seller will tell you, the losses will most definitely end when a company stops operating.

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.

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.

The pace of stories about appearing everywhere about the death of the dailies is reaching a fevered pitch, and everyone, it seems, has an opinion about what will and will not work to save the newspapers from an inevitable demise. The following are just a sample of the deluge of stories over the past few weeks about what will certainly be a major theme in 2009 (even more so than in 2008…).

• Time thinks that micropayments are the answer

• Portfolio’s Felix Salmon says they aren’t

• Slate thinks that newspapers should declare themselves religions and reap the tax benefits

• Maybe the future of printed journalism lies in customized, printed blog posts

• Can Google save the dailies by “merging without merging?’

• No matter what the answer is, at least the New York Times is furiously and intelligently attacking the problem

• And maybe the end of printed dailies is not as devastating an outcome as most (including me) think. Seth Godin, for one, doesn’t seem to be too nervous about it.

Google has a vested interest in making sure that quality journalism not only survives, but thrives in the decades ahead. CEO Eric Schmidt has identified the demise (and maybe even death) of the daily newspaper industry and the decline of journalism in general as a concern for Google. As such, the giant has to be exploring ways in which it can achieve its business objectives by strategically support efforts to maintain a sufficient quantity of high-quality journallistic content on the web. One of the means by which it was trying to do so was helping the newspapers sell advertising in its newspapers. But the effort has not been successul and Google announced this week that it was scrapping the initiative. This stands as yet another blow to an industry that is quickly running out of supporters and alternatives to its dismal business model.

The Business Journal is reporting this afternoon that senior creditors are stepping in to take over ownership of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in a debt for equity swap that eliminates 100% of Avista’s ownership in the daily newspaper. Avista invested $100 million in the deal and financed the rest with $400 million of debt, the majority of which was provided by Credit Suisse. Avista has already written off 75% of their original investment, and given their abysmal track record, it was only a matter of time before lenders demanded that something happen along the lines of what is being reported. I am reminded, however, of the old adage that anything that ends up in the garage or basement after a spring cleaning is making nothing more than a temporary stay before it ends up in the dump.

In its latest attempt to stave off the inevitable, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is demanding that its unions trim off $20 million in annual salary and cost reductions or the daily newspaper will be forced to declare bankruptcy. The company also acknowledged that Avista Capital Partners will be writing off the remaining $25 million on its books for the original $100 million equity investment ($75 million has already been written off). Regardless of what the unions decide to do, Minneapolis has stretched its lead as the most likely first major metro market in the U.S. to lose its daily paper. Time is running out, but I still have 28 days left for one of my 2008 predictions to come true.