Today's cuts included 26 editorial employees who were not members of the union there and 40 business-side staffers. The guild members who were offered voluntary buyouts have until Feb. 13 to decide whether to accept. The company declined to identify those employees sent packing today but said they do not include top-level executives like those who were let go in the round of layoffs in December. Some people will be replaced, but some will not; much depends on the response to the buyout offers.

The vision, according to people familiar with the plan, involves increasing annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to about $825 million over the next 18 months. That represents an improvement of about 20% from 2004, when the company reported Ebitda of $685.9 million.

To reach that level, the company sees a buyer relying on "streamlined" operations as well as a plan to reduce the physical sizes of some of Knight Ridder's 32 daily newspapers.

Reducing costs is key to a company whose revenue has barely been keeping pace with the overall rate of inflation. And it will be essential to private-equity buyers, who will need to extract more cash to help reduce new debt used to purchase the company.

But the buyers have viewed Knight Ridder's projections as overly optimistic, according to two people familiar with the matter. And they are treading cautiously as they do their own analysis -- which is pushing back the resolution of the auction to late February or early March, these people said yesterday.

The digital music subscription company announced specifics of the staff cut after the Hollywood Reporter quoted unnamed sources saying it had axed 10 percent of its workers.

Napster said the cuts were made to consolidate its online music subscription service and music sales effort and denied it is trying to sell its business.

Hollinger said it expects the Sun-Times News Group's 2005 segment operating income before items to be down 15 percent from $92 million in 2004 due to industrywide factors as well as the lingering effects of the company's circulation overstatement.

Hollinger expects the staff cuts to be largely voluntary and plans to eliminate or restructure unprofitable advertising and circulation arrangements. The group includes the Chicago Sun-Times, Pioneer Press, Daily Southtown and Star, Naperville Sun, Post Tribune of Northwest Indiana, and other suburban newspapers.

Editors at Newsweek, Time and BusinessWeek emphasize their commitment to international coverage. Yet within the last month, staff reductions at Time and Newsweek and the outright closure of BusinessWeek's international print edition will almost certainly reduce the amount of news and analysis of global affairs.

The wave of "cutbacks at these major U.S. news weeklies overseas is a significant event," said Doug Arthur, a publishing industry analyst in New York with Morgan Stanley. "You cannot help but see this as a major retreat."

A soft advertising market and the efficiency of distribution via the Internet are the causes. Although the magazines are all profitable, U.S.-based advertising revenue for 2005 through November at Time was down 16 percent, at Newsweek off 13 percent and at Business Week down 11 percent, Arthur said, after three years that were already weak.

But to staffers at The Cincinnati Post, last week's five-person proposed buyout is sparking concern. Not just because it will reduce the 65-person newsroom by another handful, but also because it marks the second such buyout move in less than six months at the struggling daily.

"The part that sticks in our craw is that they are still making so much money," says Bob Driehaus, president of the Cincinnati Newspaper Guild and a Post reporter. "They stand to make $28 million over the next two years and to cut jobs and quality when you are making that money is infuriating."

In September, the E.W Scripps-owned paper gave buyouts to 15 staffers, decreasing the newsroom from 80 to the current 65. If another five are lost through buyouts -- or possibly more -- that would mean a 25% reduction in staff since early last fall. Staffers have until Jan. 25 to decide if they want to take a buyout.

The layoffs affect 70 people at the company?s San Antonio headquarters and are effective immediately, spokesman Mark Slitt said.

The layoffs come after the loss of state contracts in Connecticut, Virginia and Oklahoma and will mainly impact employees working on those contracts, he said.

"Ours is a maturing industry in a region that has not enjoyed economic growth," publisher Jim Dible said Monday. "This is as much about reshaping our company for the future as it is about 2006."

Wednesday will be the last day the paper publishes sections covering eastern, southern and western Erie County. A Friday section covering Crawford County will continue.

Nine employees will be laid off. The moves are part of a larger effort to cut payroll by about 8.5 five percent this year, Dible said.

The newspaper plans to lay off another 11 workers next month and leave four positions unfilled, giving the paper about 250 employees.

The paper will cut its current average of about 500 pages a week by about 20 pages by condensing several sections in the Sunday and Monday papers. The Observer's newsroom employs about 260 reporters, editors, photographers and others.

"It's the people who produce those pages that make The Charlotte Observer, not the number of pages," editor Rick Thames said Monday. "There's no shortage of important work for these people to do."

The Observer decided to trim space in the newspaper's Sunday edition because it is the week's largest and on Monday because is the most hurried day for most readers. The changes begin next week, Thames said.

Tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan, which measures point-of-sale purchases across the United States, said Wednesday that total album sales -- including current and catalog titles -- fell 7.2 percent from 2004 to 618.9 million units, the lowest since 1996, when they were 616.6 million.

After enjoying an "up" year in 2004, prompting predictions that the worst was over, sales flagged during 2005, hurt by competition from illegal downloads, rival forms of entertainment such as video games, and a lack of breakout musical acts.

Indeed the top album was from veteran pop singer Mariah Carey, who sold almost 5 million units of her comeback release, "The Emancipation of Mimi." By contrast, the top album of 2004, R&B singer Usher's "Confessions," sold almost 8 million copies that year.

Nielsen SoundScan said overall music sales, which include albums, singles, music videos and digital tracks, jumped 22.7 percent to just over a billion units in 2005. The rise was fueled by a 194 percent increase in digital downloads.

The change bumps up Telephony's circulation to more than 71,000 from 62,000, said Mark Hickey, publisher of Telephony. The Wireless Review staff was let go more than two years ago and the magazine has since been written and edited by the Telephony staff.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday that it will cease publication of Final Markets, a 12-page afternoon edition containing stock tables and some articles sold wrapped around the morning paper.

"In the electronic age, the availability of stock tables is no longer the compelling draw it once was," Sun-Times Editor John Barron told the newspaper.

Tom Frisbie, a news editor in charge of Final Markets, said the edition would stop running Friday, Dec. 30. A mid-afternoon edition called Late Markets has already ceased publication, he said.

It was a new-fashioned newspaper skirmish, in one of the few U.S. cities where two daily papers still compete head-to-head. In the end, the Chicago Tribune's RedEye outlasted the Chicago Sun-Times' Red Streak in the quest for young adult readers.

However, despite Red Streak's Dec. 22 demise, the fledgling batch of U.S. newspapers aimed mostly at readers in their 20s and 30s is alive and growing. Similar publications targeting young urban professionals and commuters with short, edgy stories are starting to proliferate, and industry experts and media executives see some encouraging early results - mostly when the papers are free.

"Even if they fail to do what newspapers had originally intended, which is to develop newspaper reading habits, it looks as though some of these are starting to prosper in their own right," said John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Md. "So I don't think you'll see people start shutting them down unless they come under financial strain."

"The Tribune was going after our demographics, and we weren't going to let them do that without a fight," Barron said. "The plot line for Red Streak from the start was to confuse the marketplace and not allow the Tribune to set up a successful paid-circulation tabloid."

When the Tribune dropped its 25-cent charge for RedEye on Oct. 3 and began offering it free, the Sun-Times viewed it as validation of the strategy, Barron said.

"I hate to say mission accomplished ... but mission accomplished," Barron said. It took a few months to unwind the publication and close out its advertising commitments, he said.

In recent times, it has become more and more difficult for Christian newspapers to remain financially viable. And Christian Herald has been no exception. The factors involved include increasing costs, the changing nature of the news trade, the explosion of information available through digital media, and the decline in reading across the UK Christian community.

The pace of change both in the world, and in the Church has accelerated in recent decades, and we sense that a new kind of publication is needed to communicate widely among God?s people ? and to tell the stories of hope that will fire a new generation to help change the world. And now's the time to make that transition, bringing with it the end of an era for Christian Herald.

While purveyors of lyrics online, such as lyricfreaks.com and lyricsfree.com, might altruistically think they are performing a much-needed service, in reality without any formal agreement with the entity that owns the rights to the lyrics, they are as guilty of copyright infringement as a site offering pirated music.

Many site owners were unaware that they were in violation of copyright laws until they received cease-and-desist letters from the publishing division of Warner Music last week.

According to Keiser, owners of fan sites featuring lyrics need not worry about finding themselves on the business end of a cease-and-desist letter. The MPA is taking action on the large lyric disseminators. The whole business model of those sites, Kieser said, "is based on exploiting copyrighted material that they do not have the rights to."

Music publishers claim that until the Internet, Xerox machines were the greatest threat to a songwriter's income. However, the existence of thousands of sites providing lyrics, sheet music, and tabs without paying royalties on them have greatly impinged on the songwriter's earnings.

This is a year in which we've seen more than one print magazine run into trouble, with the enthusiast oriented GigaHz magazine suspending its operations in July. The words of Computer Trade Shopper's editor suggest that advertisers are spending less on getting ads into print publications these days, perhaps looking towards the Internet as their new killer marketing tool?

Is the day of the print magazine numbered, or are we simply experiencing the result of a saturated market?