I'm seeing a troubling trend right now. I know these are desperate times, and I remember seeing this happen after the dot.com crash. Online journalists were the first to go, and two years later, managers wondered where all the good online journalists had gone. It's happening all over again.

A good quick primer on how to use Drupal, an open-source community platform that is getting a lot of attention right now in journalism circles.

McClatchy Co., the nation's third-largest newspaper publisher, said Monday its total revenue fell 19.4 percent in November as print advertising declines continued to hurt results.

The New York Times would need about 1.3bn page views a month to support its current cost structure. With that much traffic, they could generate about $300m per quarter in ad revenues, according to a study by ContentNext. To put ath in perspective, Yahoo and AOL currently get around 1bn page views a month.

Large news organisations could survive as web-only plays but they would have to increase their traffic greatly to do so. The New York Times would have to increase its monthly page views from its current 173m to 1.3bn, according to a new study out by ContentNext.

James Surowiecki looks at the troubles of the newspaper industry, and he draws on the common comparison that newspapers followed the example of the US train industry in misunderstanding their business. He says: "…many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net."

"Here’s the problem: People generally do NOT want to follow an RSS feed on Twitter, especially from a news organization. Twitter is a conversational tool. It is a personal tool. If you want to read an RSS feed, you can use Google Reader. If you want people to follow your newsroom’s account, put a person on it. A real person."

You'll have to pay to get the full report, but even the bullet points are interesting. "Newspapers are doing their best to offer features online that consumers find compelling, but they’re still lagging many of the independent news and political sites." And I found this interesting as well. "The local-news niche is frightfully crowded, and there are fewer ad dollars to support those ventures."