As the economic vise tightens around all of us, but around newspapers more tightly than most, readers may become more suspicious about the influences bearing down on what was once a free and vibrant press. Suspicions like being unduly influenced by commercial pressures. Anyone who has ever worked in...

And the envelope, please: How many people does it take to run an online-only metro news site? The answer appears to be 22, a number some occultists are said to believe holds psychic powers. Hearst, psychic, who'd a thunk it? That's the number I've heard from outsiders and that's the approximation we...

We knew that Hearst's moves in Seattle -- saying in early January that it would sell or close down the Post-Intelligencer -- was just a dry run for San Francisco. After all, the Hearst-owned Chronicle has bled more than a quarter of a billion dollars by most estimates since Hearst bought it in 2000....

1. Will the Post-Intelligencer Flip the Switch in Seattle? You know, go online-only. (Is online the onliest medium?) With Hearst's Ken Riddick and the PI's Michelle Nicolosi working through the what-ifs, we may have a new, great test to watch. We’d be able to compare the online PI to the Seattle s...

Look no farther than the week’s transport news to get an idea of what kind of muddle we’re in. My Forever stamp is getting to look more and more like the best thing in my portfolio as the Post Office moves toward 44-cent stamps, and oh, incidentally, says that it thinks it can no longer afford S...

Imagine you'd left the planet some time just before the election and just returned. You'd find that suddenly someone's sounded a Press Emergency! First, it was Sarkozy calling his people to rally 'round the failing press -- aux barricades, mes freres. Now, though, it's serious. Time Magazine certifi...

And now, putting shivers into executives and managers everywhere, the words, "let's do a reassessment." It's as predictable as Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca. Instead of rounding up the usual suspects , thought, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will be rounding up the usual assessments. You kn...

GlobalPost  will get a lot of digital ink Monday, and deservedly so. It takes moxie to launch a news enterprise into the deep, winter gloom of The Worst Economic Downturn Since the Great Depression. It's like Henry Luce founding Fortune in 1930. GlobalPost founders Phil Balboni and Charlie Sennott ...

What a difference a few years can make. Imagine if the New York Times had been one of the first papers to sell front-page space to advertisers in 2005? It was one thing for USA Today, a paper so totally comfortable with commerce, to put ads on Page One, which it did in 1999, but the Times, that was ...

When's the last time you checked out Real Clear Politics? Been, say, a little less than a month? Huff Post's announcement of new $25 million funding brings RCP to mind. Yes, RCP seems like more of a single-purpose poll aggregation site, though it stepped out from that in becoming a political (and ot...