Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

"Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we'd be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps," said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. "I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it's inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies."

All the layoffs - about 4.4 percent of CNet's work force - will involve employees in the U.S., according to a document CNet filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

CNet's suite of popular websites commands a huge worldwide audience, but its investors have long complained the company's profits haven't kept pace with the growth of Internet advertising.

The company indicated in the filing that the layoffs would be effective immediately and cost at least $3.8-million in severance pay, outplacement and other expenses.

The company, which owns the LexisNexis information service and the medical journal, The Lancet, is understood to be preparing to cut the jobs over the next couple of years as it centralises functions such as procurement, human resources and IT across the group. Analysts expect the job cuts - the majority of which will take place outside Britain - to contribute to a restructuring that will shed as much as £100m from Reed's annual costs bill. It is unclear whether the cuts will be acknowledged formally in its annual results announcement on Wednesday.

Reed, which is listed in London and Amsterdam, employs nearly 37,000 people around the world. The proposed job reductions are thought to be focused on functions that have previously operated separately across the disparate parts of Reed's empire, which includes units specialising in science and medical, legal, and business publishing, the last of which includes a large exhibitions division.

Sir Crispin Davis, Reed's chief executive, told analysts last July that the cost cuts would be "fairly spread" across the group and that the efficiency programme, dubbed "One Company", would continue for the next two to three years. He said at the time: "We've taken the low and mid-hanging fruit. It's why we put in [train] this programme and I think it's been very effective in identifying new areas. Over the last six months we've taken that a step further... with the objective of continuing to deliver meaningful cost reductions across the business."

The cuts will be achieved by "by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs," said the executive editor, Bill Keller. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, "the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs."

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in The Times' newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely because of the growth of its Internet operations.

Shares in The New York Times Company rose almost 5 percent Thursday after the newsroom staff reductions were reported, closing at $18.84, up 86 cents.

The Times Company has made significant cuts in the newsrooms of some of its other properties, including The Boston Globe, as well as in non-news operations. Company executives say the overall head count is 3.8 percent lower than it was a year ago.

Tribune Chief Executive Sam Zell broke the news in one of his frequent "Talk to Sam" e-mails to all employees. The job cuts are focused on the corporate staff and the company's nine newspapers. Besides The Times, they include the Chicago Tribune, Newsday in New York, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford (Conn.) Courant.

The decision was reached in meetings of senior executives Monday and Tuesday at Tribune's Chicago headquarters, said Hiller, who was among them.

For now, Tribune's broadcast division, consisting of nearly two dozen stations around the country, including KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles, will be spared. Fox TV veteran Ed Wilson, hired last week to run the broadcast operation, will be given time to evaluate his business and make his own personnel decisions later, according to a Tribune executive familiar with the situation.

The job cuts will come swiftly. Hiller said all the people affected would be out of the company by the end of March. The Times has 3,544 employees, 887 of them in the newsroom.

There were 389 new magazines launched in 2007. There were also 636 magazines launched in 2007.

Exactly how many depends on who's doing the counting.

"We only count magazines that we have physical copies of," says University of Mississippi professor Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni, who tracks launches monthly on his Web site. "That is, no announcement or wishful thinking that we are launching."

Through November, there were 636 magazine launches by Husni's count, including 221 published four times or more and 363 special issues that may or may not come out with a second.

BusinessWeek laid off a dozen editorial and business employees amid new integration of its digital and print editorial operations. The new structure will be phased in this month.

"For the past three years, we've been moving progressively toward integrating our print and digital operations -- by increasing reporters' contributions to BusinessWeek.com, combining our overseas bureaus and copy-desk teams and seating together everyone within a given coverage area," said Editor in Chief Stephen J. Adler in an internal memo that was posted on Talking Biz News. "Today we complete this vital transformation by creating a single editorial organization for BusinessWeek. The new structure will enable us to collaborate more effectively, take greater advantage of everyone's abilities, learn new skills and serve our readers and web users better."

House & Garden had to contend with more than a dozen large national and regional magazines that cover much of the same terrain, like House Beautiful, Better Homes & Gardens, Traditional Home, Country Home and Home.

"The category as a whole is so crowded," said Kelly Foster, senior partner and print director at MindShare North America, a media planning and buying agency that is part of the WPP Group, adding that the magazines "get in each other's way."

That was particularly true for House & Garden, she said, as Conde Nast took the magazine into the luxury end of the market — but then ran into Conde Nast's own upscale publication, Architectural Digest. Conde Nast has two other entrants in the home design and furnishing field, Domino and Vogue Living, both started last year.

The offer was limited to the first 60 eligible employees that accepted it. Workers had to be at least 50 years old and have worked at the company a minimum of 10 years. The offering included cash payments based on service and enhanced retirement benefits.

There will be less than 60 positions cut as a result of the offering as some jobs will need to be refilled, Kevin Mowbray, publisher of the Post-Dispatch and a vice president of Lee, said in a statement.

Time Inc has decided to close rather than sell its monthly magazine Business 2.0, which has suffered a decline in advertising revenue, the New York Times reported in its online edition on Wednesday.

Employees have been told that on Wednesday human resources personnel and other executives from Time Inc will visit the magazine's San Francisco headquarters to formally shut down the operations, the report said. It will cease publication after its October issue, it said.

Time will reassign the editor of Business 2.0, Josh Quittner, and nine other editorial staff members to Fortune magazine, the report said.

The tabloid's publisher, American Media Inc., issued a brief statement that announced the Aug. 27 issue would be Weekly World News' last. It called the closure necessary "due to the challenges in the retail and wholesale magazine marketplace that have impacted the newsstand."

For all the headlines WWN has penned, it has also made headlines of its own. In 2001's deadly anthrax mailings, AMI's office in Boca Raton was targeted and a photo editor was killed. Since then, it has tended to lighter fare, including recent headlines "Mother Nature Endorses Gore for President" and "Why Moses Wandered in the Desert for 40 Years: He Lost the Map!"

AMI, which is based in Boca Raton and New York, did not immediately respond to questions seeking specifics on layoffs, circulation and business woes or plans for a final issue. The company only said WWN was the smallest of its publications, which include Star, National Enquirer and Men's Fitness.

Fairchild Publications, which has since been absorbed by Conde Nast, launched Jane with Pratt at the helm in 1997 with a 400,000 rate base. Pratt stepped down in July 2005, and Holley gave the women's title a more positive, girly attitude with a redesign that came out the following year. Holley was supposed to leave on a mission today to Uganda with actress Natalie Portman for the magazine's next cover,

Reached by cell phone today, Pratt said she was saddened by the news. "Some people think I would be gloating. When you put so much into building something, when you put that much into something, you really want it to be around."

The magazine struggled to find its place amid the established, mass women's fashion/beauty monthlies. Ad pages stood at 282 this year through July, per the Mediaweek Monitor, an increase of 20.8 percent, but were less than half of what they were two years ago. Total paid and verified circ stood at 713,581 in the second half of 2006, up 1.9 percent, per the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

I have been a freelance contributor to Tips & Tricks Magazine for the last 1.5 years, and I just found out today that August will be the last issue. From now on, there will only be monthly codebooks, which sounds incredibly intriguing (who wants to read people's opinions anyway?). The bigwigs at LFP were planning on firing the entire staff this week while they were away from the office at E3 promoting the magazine. But if they knew anything at all about the industry, they would have realized that E3 is still two weeks away.

The plan was to fire all employees in the middle of the week, but when I received a letter with my latest paycheck this past weekend (I was told that I shouldn’t have received it until later this week) that said "Tips & Tricks magazine is ceasing its publication of monthly issues...Thank you for your contribution to Tips & Tricks Magazine." I knew that something was up.

Approximately six weeks after it acquired complete ownership of Bookspan, Bertelsmann has initiated a major overhaul of the book club business, a process that will eliminate 280 positions, or about 15% of its workforce of 1,900. As part of integrating Bookspan into BMG Columbia House, an unspecified number of smaller clubs will be closed as will Madison Park Press, the publishing program launched about 18 months ago.

To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.

"This is one of the biggest one-time hits we've heard about anywhere in the country," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in Washington.

Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others, as well as 20 employees in management positions are expected to be laid off by end of the summer. Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega said Friday that voluntary buyouts are likely to be offered.

Vega declined to say whether the paper is continuing to lose $1 million a week, as Hearst attorney Daniel Wall stated in court in November during a hearing on an antitrust suit filed by San Francisco businessman Clint Reilly.

"We're not getting into any specifics at this point," Vega said. "It's fairly common knowledge that we have had a tough financial row here for several years. As we continue to evaluate our situation, unfortunately continued belt-tightening is necessary."

Wizards, as the licensor of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, made the decision not to renew our license at the end of the current term. They generously gave us a ten-month notice that the magazines would be ending, even though they were only obligated to give us notice in a much shorter time frame. Once they let us know their decision, we both cooperated on a transition plan to take care of our customers. Wizards agreed to extend our original license so that we could complete the Savage Tide Adventure Path. They allowed us to time the announcement so that we could discuss it with distributors and retailers at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas in April. They have also graciously agreed to allow us to continue to sell our Dragon and Dungeon products until they are gone, rather than forcing us to blow them out or destroy them at the end of the license. In short, they have really bent over backwards to allow Paizo to give our customers the best service possible in this time of transition, and for that, I am very thankful.

Many people have asked why Paizo doesn't just create new print magazines that would be just like Dragon and Dungeon, but without the official D&D content. Well, if there were a viable way for us to transition to a new magazine format, we might have. However, you can't just create a new magazine and have it automatically appear in all of the places that carried Dragon and Dungeon. Hobby store managers and gamers might understand the value of a new magazine, but what about bookstore managers, military suppliers, major magazine distributors, or advertisers? You've basically got to start over from scratch with them, and in many cases that means you have to buy your way in. When we started Paizo five years ago, Dragon and Dungeon magazines had a combined 40 years of inertia behind them, but in today's marketplace, starting a new magazine on that scale would take more than a million dollars. I'm sure that some enterprising company will come out with a magazine to try to fill that niche, but I sincerely doubt that they will be able to afford to put in the same high-quality content that Dragon and Dungeon had each month and sell it for the low price that we were able to offer thanks to the size and dedication of the Dragon and Dungeon audience.

Instead, we decided to take the type of content that you have been telling us that you have been enjoying so much in the magazines, and we migrated it to Pathfinder. Pathfinder isn't a magazine; it's a monthly 96-page, full-color book. It will feature the same artists and authors that you love so much from Dragon and Dungeon magazines, but there is no advertising (except for a few house ads in the back). The $19.99 MSRP might initially seem high compared to the two magazines, but you're really getting a similar amount of content. Dragon and Dungeon average around 55 pages of content per issue for $7.99. That's 110 pages of content for $15.98 each month. Pathfinder will give you 96 pages for $19.99, but you're buying a book that's printed on higher-quality paper and that will survive extensive use at the gaming table much better than a magazine. In short, we think that we will continue to be giving you one of the best values in gaming.

Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed. It was first reported in MediaSurvey premium newsletter here. InfoWorld has been a pioneer online and has been the earliest to embrace new techniques and forms of journalism and advertising, including blogging, podcasts, RSS (and ads in it), screencasting and others, so this move probably makes sense.

The worst thing: the staff internally didn't know about this until this story came out, and got picked up by SF Chronicle and Valleywag among others. From what my sources told me, there won't be too many layoffs as most of the team had been working on multiplatform already: print, online and events. And don't discount the events side, as that was a major source of revenue for the brand.

The company, which also publishes Car and Driver, Elle and other magazines, said in a statement late Monday that the April edition of Premiere, which is on newsstands until April 16, will be the last for the U.S. edition. The international editions will continue.

Hachette said that Premiere's Web site would continue and will be revamped later in the year. The company had also shut the print edition of Elle Girl but kept its Web site going, a move that Time Warner Inc.'s Time Inc. unit did with Teen People last year.

Premiere was a monthly magazine but faced competition from weekly rivals such as Time Inc.'s Entertainment Weekly and others. Last year Premiere's paid ad pages declined 25 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Cracked the company, I should point out, is still alive and well. We're currently all working exclusively on book projects and our website at Cracked.com right now, which pays for submissions so there will still be freelance opportunities for you in the future. But unfortunately, distribution issues and the publishing industry as a whole made publishing a bi-monthly comedy magazine unviable. Will we revisit it in the future? Ya never know. But for now, no more Cracked magazine.

As part of the change, the paper will trim its circulation territory to 73 counties, centered on metro Atlanta. The pullback will take effect April 1 and means the print version of the AJC will no longer be available in Alabama, South Carolina, Florida and many parts of Georgia.

The paper also will overhaul its Thursday community editions, cutting them from 13 to four. The zones that remain will be larger than previous publications, focusing on the most populous areas of metro Atlanta -- Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. The AJC's Home & Garden will be shuttered and replaced with a new section, HomeStyle, which will be carried in the community editions.

The changes come as the AJC, like other newspapers, grapples with big shifts in news consumption and advertising spending.

The changes were announced Thursday after months of planning. "We have to transform the organization," Publisher John Mellott said in an interview.

The future of MTV's signature music video show, Total Request Live, looks precarious, illustrating the Viacom network's struggles to stay relevant in an increasingly Web-based media landscape.

Speculation inside MTV and at the major music labels has been mounting that TRL, a daily afternoon show that has been experiencing declining ratings, will soon be canceled or scaled back to two days a week. The newest fuel for the rumor mill: the fact that much of the staff at TRL's studio at New York City's Times Square was laid off late Tuesday, including members of the wardrobe, makeup and technical staff.

At last, we'll finally get to see whether Dennis Publishing president Steve Colvin's long-running campaign to slap the Maxim brand on everything from hair dye and steakhouses to the Vegas desert itself will translate into big bucks.

The New York Post reported in late September that Dennis had quietly retained media investment firm Allen & Co. to broker a sale, and that possible buyers included Girls Gone Wild meatstick Joe Francis and former Wenner exec Kent Brownridge, among others. At the time, sources told Radar Dennis had been involved in hush-hush negotiations with one eager buyer—the rumored asking price was $250 million—but that the deal fell through. Today, Dennis is making its search for a buyer public.

"Dennis Publishing, Inc. today announced that it has retained media investment firm Allen & Company as its exclusive financial advisor to explore various strategic alternatives available to the Company including a possible sale of the Company," reads a draft of the press release obtained by Radar and scheduled to go wide imminently.

Viacom is preparing to cut 250 jobs at its MTV Networks division, the latest action in what MTVN chairman and CEO Judy McGrath characterized as a "fine-tuning" of operations.

This morning, in a memo to MTVN staff, McGrath said that in order to compete in an accelerating digital universe, the company must "refine [its] business and organizational models as well."

The memo, which was leaked to the press almost immediately after it hit MTVN staffers' in-boxes at 6:17 a.m., confirmed that cuts will come across the five business units: Music and Logo; Kids and Family; Entertainment; International; and Sales and Strategic Services.

The cuts are expected to have a considerable impact among the cable networks, including the flagship channel, as well as Spike TV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. The dollars Viacom saves as a result of the staff reduction will be funneled into furthering MTVN's digital expansion, a category that has been a source of particular tumult.

"This is a sad turn of events for book reviews. AP reviews, even small, ran far and wide, and always helped sales," said a book-company publicist who alerted Editor & Publisher to AP's decision. The publicist requested anonymity.

When E&P asked AP about the decision, Linda M. Wagner, the wire service's director of media relations and public affairs, said in a statement today: "AP is revamping its Lifestyles coverage to focus more resources on topics like food and parenting, and as a result we are discontinuing the book-review package that had moved through that department."

She added that AP "remains as committed as ever" to covering books--via reviews, features about authors, etc.--through its Arts and Entertainment Department.

Lagardère is shedding 700-1,000 jobs from its media division as part of an attempt to adapt its magazine, radio and television operations to the challenges and opportunities of the internet age.

The French group's media arm is dominated by its 259 magazines, which include Elle, Marie Claire, Paris Match and Car and Driver. It also includes the Europe 1 radio station and TV production companies.

On Thursday, it said that 7-10 per cent of the media division's 9,900 jobs would be cut and more than 20 underperforming magazines cease publication. It will allow some magazines to be produced under licence in countries where sales are too low to justify a direct presence. Advertising sales departments will be merged too.

5. Book Binder Book binding is an industry that’s been around since the first century A.D. Today, a book binder maintains the machines that cut, fold and sew books together. According to OOH, employment in this field is expected to decline through 2014 as a result of a slower demand for printed material and increasing reliance on digital publications.

Where we're headed -- A combination of inexpensive overseas labor and new computer-operated equipment makes it easier to assemble books.

Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner, is planning to cut more than 150 people, about half of them in editorial jobs across the company’s best-known titles, like People, Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune. The cuts follow about 600 last year, many of them from the company’s business side, and a decision to trim its roster by selling 18 of its roughly 150 titles.

Time Inc.'s top executive, Ann S. Moore, has not yet publicly outlined or discussed the cuts, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. But other executives said that, while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the Internet.

To prepare for the future, they said, the company is cutting costs now and continuing to shift resources to its branded Web sites.

Silicon Valley based Insider Pages, one of the many user review sites that have sprung up in the last couple of years, has reportedly laid off 2/3 of their total staff recently. The news is coming from companies that are interviewing former Insider Pages employees.

The company, which is funded by Sequoia, Softbank and idealab, seems to be unable to keep up with the growth of competitor Yelp (and others) in this crowded space. Both Alexa and Google Trends suggest Yelp is the only company with any traction right now. Other companies doing something similar include Judy's Book, Zipingo and Riffs

Several reporters at the Inquirer, Pennsylvania's largest newspaper, said they were told Tuesday morning that their jobs were being eliminated. The employees said that they were told to meet with personnel officials Wednesday to discuss details of their severance pay and health benefits.

All the affected workers will be notified by Wednesday, and their layoff dates and benefits will vary, said company spokesman Jay Devine.

The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, both long part of Knight Ridder Inc., were sold in March to McClatchy Co. In turn, McClatchy sold the papers three months later to Philadelphia Media Holdings, an investment group led by Brian Tierney, now the papers' chief executive and publisher.

Newsstand operators in Grand Central Terminal are breathing a little easier following British-based Emap 's announcement Wednesday that it would stop publishing the American edition of FHM, the laddie magazine with the sometimes too provocative covers.

In the last year, as FHM attempted to pump up its newsstand sales, it was frequently forced to put blinders on its covers in Grand Central in the wake of complaints that photos of its models were too revealing. And the attention-grabbing covers didn't help.

"With conditions in the U.S. worsening, we have decided to suspend publication to focus resources elsewhere on faster growth platforms," said Paul Keenan, chief executive of Emap Consumer Media, in a statement. The March issue of FHM will be its last.

The King County Journal will put out its last issue Jan. 21 and 40 full-time employees will lose their jobs, the newspaper's new owners told employees Thursday at a meeting in the Kent newsroom.

Circulation of the Journal, which has been losing money since 1994, has fallen to 39,100. It is the region's fifth-largest daily paper. The newspaper's parent company, Black Press Ltd., plans to focus money and attention on the daily's sister publications, six of which will begin publishing biweekly beginning Jan. 24.

Black Press, a Canadian publisher, bought the Journal and its nine sister publications in November from Kent-based Horvitz Newspapers Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

"We looked at several business models over the last month to see if there was anything we could do to save the daily, because closing it was our last option," Don Kendall, general manager of Black's newly created King County Publications Ltd. division, said in an interview. "This is the most difficult day of my career, and I've been in the newspaper business more than 30 years."