1. Reflections of a Newsosaur: The best of the best in my opinion. Not only does Alan Mutter write original content about the business side of journalism, he also uses cold hard data to back it up. A numbers man and a news man.
2. The Media Business: I only found Robert Picard’s blog recently, and I wonder why this guy isn’t mentioned just as often as Alan Mutter. Certainly he has the resume to impress and the blog posts to back it up. Really great information and analysis.
3. Poynter’s NewsPay: One of Poynter’s newer blogs, created to keep track of all the new crazy ideas for reinventing the news business. The Transformation Tracker is also a must-read: It’s a supplemental list of links that’s updated constantly and by category.
4. Poynter’s Biz Blog: How this differs from NewsPay exactly, I’m not sure, but it is different enough to be a separate blog. It seems to be more news and analysis of the already-established industry. Still essential reading.
5. Editors’ Weblog: Gives an international perspective on everything from print journalism, Web 2.0, multimedia and other analysis. From the World Editors Forum.
6. MediaCafe: It’s more hit-and-miss than the previous blogs, but when it hits it really hits. Like this post that offers a downloadable spreadsheet of different scenarios for paid online content for 50K circulation newspapers. (What do you expect? They’re media consultants.)
7. MMCDigiMe: The blog has numerous interviews with key players in the reinventing-journalism business. The MMC is for the Media Management Center at Northwestern, which also offers plenty of research available to download. The blog is coupled with MediaNoted, a great aggregate of links.
8. Newspaper Death Watch: Of course it’s depressing. But someone’s gotta do it. And the folks behind Newspaper Death Watch do a great job of rounding up news on the industry that’s more than just some paper’s obituary somewhere.
9. Monday Note: Every Monday like clockwork, these two Frenchmen write in-depth thoughtful analysis on various media and their complex business models, complete with numbers and data. This used to be an e-mail only newsletter. So glad they turned it into a blog.
10. Rebuilding Media: This one brings together four thought leaders in the field and lets them opine on rebuilding the industry. Good focus on business models in particular.
11. PaidContent: Content comes in many forms. PaidContent snatches up news and headlines about how those content creators can, do and should get paid.
12. MediaBistro: In addition to the excellent TVNewser and WebNewser blogs, you can go to a local media blog for LA, SF, NY and DC, or turn on the firehose with all news about print, ads, design, TV, web and everything else here.
13. RevenueTwoPointZero: It’s slightly outdated and quotes Clay Shirky too much for my liking, but it has really interesting ideas for boosting revenues. From the Society of News Design people.
14. State of the Media: OK, so it’s not quite a blog, but it is such absolutely essential reading that I couldn’t NOT mention it. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism hands over the keys to understanding where the business is and where it may be headed.

I also have to mention Nieman Lab and Romenesko. Though they aren’t strictly business, they still blog about what’s happening on the biz side of things. They’re just too good to leave off this post.

What are some of your favorites?

Also, a very short apology for lack of updates here, though it’s not for lack of writing. I’ve been writing here and there for the Public Press, San Jose Metblogs, TNTJ and these writeups that summarized our big CollegeJourn chat a few months ago. Plus, Twitter and Facebook are killing blogging, don’tcha know.

I shot an email to Paul Kauppila, a reference librarian that works specifically with the school of journalism here at SJSU. The resources he pointed me to were invaluable (a list of which I will post PDQ), and I ended up crawling on my hands and knees bookhunting through the section of the library that dealt with newspaper issues.

I found something.

It was out of date, but it was the first hard numbers I came across. According to Philip Meyer in an essay that appears in “-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper” (page 75), a typical newspaper of 100,000 circulation in 2001 would have annual operating costs that look like this:

And income looked like this in 2000:

The advertising income was split up like this:

The obvious problem is, these are extremely outdated figures now. The newspaper industry has seen a drastic shift even since these 2001 figures were compiled, and especially with the rise of sites such as Craigslist and CareerBuilder that took away significant classified dollars from a newspaper’s gross income.

I mean, take a look here. Not too long ago, classifieds earned 40% of an entire newspaper’s income. Just to break even on that $55.48 million of operating expenses, classifieds would have to earn $22.2 million a year. Just classifieds. That was easy back in the day when newspapers had a monopoly on classified listings. That income has been since practically decimated.

I know there are updated numbers floating out there somewhere. Complicated Google searches didn’t turn them up in time to write my accounting paper on this subject, but the reference librarian forwarded me these links that I am going to delve into in order to continue this series: The Newspaper Guild, the National Newspaper Association, the Newspaper Association of America and the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The next post will list some of the books and scholarly research we were able to dig up.

UPDATE: Bingo. Updated figures are here. I will expound later when I have a chance to digest.

ANOTHER ETA: I just found this fantastic interview with Craig Newmark. He is personally keen in saving quality journalism, even though his Craigslist is scapegoated for killing the news industry. Read his comments here.

So in the accounting class required for my minor, I’ve been asked to write a paper on anything my pretty little heart desired, as long as it had something to do with accounting. Naturally, I pick the future of the journalism industry, and in particular newspapers.

I just “finished” the paper and turned it in, but it is in no way finished. I have more stuff to find out and more resources than I know what to do with (with the help of my new BFF, the journalism department’s dedicated librarian). So I want to start a series of blog posts, adding to the cacophany of already-established journalism bloggers who write about the future of journalism.

But here I want to emphasize hard numbers above lofty ideals, because frankly hard numbers scare me but that’s what we all need to look at. Journalists and math tend to go together like oil and water, but it’s the math that’s needed and sorely missing from the online resources I found. I suck at math, too, but I’m willing to push the data and discussions in a cohesive place and open it for discussion.

So I hope this works, and I hope this discovery process helps others too. Let me know if you know of any resources.