These headlines are just from this morning…

• The Nation: Future of the newspaper is just as bright as it is for the telegraph

• Tribune cuts 53 jobs from newsroom and asks bankruptcy judge for approval of $13 million in bonuses

• Ad revenue for McClatchy in Q1 is down nearly 30%

• The New York Times’ foundation announced that it was suspending all grant-making

Down 93% from it’s 52-week high, McClatchy stock hit an all-time low yesterday, dropping 13% to $.89 per share. The company now enjoys a robust market cap of $73 million. The stock is down 99% from December, 2004, making for one of the all-time great stock charts to snowboard down. Now, if we could just get some of the incredible snow that been dumping on Vail and Beaver Creek in the last week or so.

Fitch Ratings slashed its rating today on McClatchy’s $2.1 billion in debt, citing the company’s deteriorating business and the grim outlook for daily newspapers in general. McClatchy’s revenue has declined 13.6% over the past 12 months, and year to date reveneue has dropped 15.3%. Perhaps most startling, the publisher’s employment classified business has plummeted, declining by nearly 40% over that time period. Whatever date one places on the eventual death of the daily, I’d say that these kind of alarming numbers, being far worse than the already dismal numbers that everyone has become accustomed to seeing from the industry over the past few years, should compel people to re-examine their assumptions and probably shorten their timeframe.

The best commentator on the decline of the dailies, Alan Mutter – aka the Newsosaur, recently uncovered a very interesting McClatchy filing with the SEC and has written an excellent post about what it might mean. Essentially, McClatchy’s CEO has resigned from the family trusts that own a 41% stake in McClatchy, a step that would be required were the family to take the newspaper publishng company private. The company has denied that that was the intent of the resignation, but there is little doubt that as the market cap of McClatchy continues to plummet, the possibility of such a transaction becomes increasingly likely. The company’s stock has dropped 88% since it acquired Knight Ridder, and today is worth a measly $301 million. As Mutter says, if you are bullish on the long-term prospects for newspapers and believe in their future, the value play on MNI gets more attractive every day.

The pace of news about the decimation of the daily newspaper industry is accelerating, and the picture is getting uglier and uglier every week. Among the recent stories, McClatchy is freezing wages, Gannett is reducing headcount by 1,000, and JCPenney and Kohl’s both announced plans to drastically cut back their newspaper circular advertising. Cox Enterprises announced that it plans to sell the Austin American-Statesman and all of its stand-alone community newspapers in North Carolina, Colorado and Texas as well as its direct mail business ad business Valpak. This news comes on top of announcements that dailies in San Diego and Newark are up for sale. (No news yet either, by the way, on Landmark Communication’s efforts to unload all of its dailies and weeklies). For newspapers, the capital market mantra appears to be: buy high, sell low – but sell now because it’s going lower in a hurry.

Many have been pointing to rapid growth in newspaper web site ad revenue and readership as the only bright spot in the newspaper business, but that, too, has shown recent signs of weakness. Not only is the rate of ad revenue growth slowing to a crawl, but newspaper web traffic stats are being mocked around the industry. Newspapers who looked desperately to a lopsidedly unfavorable deal with Yahoo for traffic growth are just now beginning to realize that their hopes and aspirations were, at best, misplaced.

The poster child for daily newspaper industry carnage, Tribune Company, marched a step closer to bankruptcy and Sam Zell openly called his acquaition of the media behemoth “the deal from hell.” There is no conceivable way he can possibly turn that abomination around, even if the Cubs do win the series, but I’d still keep my money on Minneapolis to lose its daily first.

Steven Smith, Editor of Spokane’s Spokesman Review, has written perhaps, at least to this point in time, the definitive eulogy (or is it an elegy?) on the death of the newspaperman. Without a doubt, we’ll be seeing more of these in the months ahead.

My list of blog topics to write about has become exceedingly long, so I’m going to be lazy today and simply list a pile of links to the numerous stories in the past few weeks about the continuing death spiral of the daily newspaper industry.

1. A Durham lawyer is suing the News & Observer, to which he subscribes, for cutting staff and content from the paper.

2. In an effort to ‘right-size’ the paper, creating an equal balance of ad pages and content pages, the Chicago Tribune has cut more staff from the newsroom. They’ll eventually get their balance when both ad pages and content pages are zero.

3. The Guardian, which recently purchased Paidcontent for $30 million, has a great piece about the demise of the newspaper industry. This is a paper that appears to be bucking the trend and thriving these days, so their critique of other dailies is particulalrly poignant. Anyway, the best line of the article relates to management at most daily papers – “The core problem is that too many newspapers tend to be run by blockheads from the top down. This did not matter back in the days when the margins were fat and the competition weak. It is a problem now.”

4. The lanaguage in the coverage of the industry gets stronger and stronger every month. An article in MediaPost uses the word ‘collapse’ for the first time that I can remember.

5. Another article in MediaPost compares the fates of both daily newspapers and radio.

6. This is an old article from May, but the trials and tribulations of the Minneapolis Star Tribune have been noticed overseas, catching the attention of the Guardian.

7. MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton’s advice to newspaper execs – stop being so arrogant!

8. Gannett is writing down its assets by $2.8 billion.

9. McClatchy is also making draconian cuts.

10. As papers continue to approach a brutal death, their willingness to maintain high editorial standards and integrity in their business models will be put under increasing strain. While some might argue that a lack of integrity and editorial standards are not new to the industry, and others that cases of failure already abound, the likelihood is that daily newspapers will become even more aggressive in chasing revenue wherever they can get it. As Nick Corcodilos points out, advertorials are one such egregious example.

Back in May, McClatchy issued an SEC filing in which it had written down its 49% ownership stake in the Seattle Times from $102 million in 2006 to just $12 million, a drop of nearly 90%. McClatchy acquired the minority stake in its purchase of Knight Ridder and the Blethen family owns the remaining 51% stake. Seattle’s other major daily, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is owned by Hearst, and the two papers operate under a joint operating agreement (JOA), albeit with a lot of bad blood and squabbling. McClatchy has also announced that it is very interested in selling its stake in the Seattle Times, even at the current, ridiculously depressed price.

The situation in Seattle is not only indicative of what is happening to daily newspapers around the country, but it’s also particularly relevant to the Twin Cities, which by all accounts is too small a media market to support two daily newspapers, especially in the current environment. The bickering, lawsuits, and troubles surrounding the Hearst/McClatchy relationship in Seattle raises substantial questions about the likelihood of Avista and MediaNews ever reaching an agreement about establishing a JOA or even combining the two dailies in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I cannot imagine that discussions between the two companies are not taking place, but the longer they wait, the more likely it is that the already depressed valuations of both papers are going to be further annihilated. At a valuation of $25 million like the Seattle Times, it hardly becomes worth the effort to try to salvage anything from the business.