Spot.us founder David Cohn sat down with us for a little Q & A.

FBLA: How has the reception been to this idea so far? Has there been a lot of money raised?

DC: The reception has been good. People are genuinely excited about it. If I had a $5 donation for every person that said it was a smart idea, we would have funded all our pitches by now ;)

But seriously: So far people are really positive about it. We haven't raised "a lot" of money by some standards, so far we've raised about $1,000 - but that's not bad in just one week. The problem is that we must raise a lot more if we are going to fund some serious journalism.

continued...

In the wake of massive layoffs and shrinking newsholes...it's been looking bleak for reporters. 'Exposure' is not a paycheck. 'Great opportunity' does not pay the rent. 'Credit' doesn't pay off interest.

Anyway, we found this site while trolling on Twitter.

They explain themselves:

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project to pioneer "community funded reporting." Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.

Could this be the future of print journalism? The public television/radio model? If newspapers aren't making a profit should they just all go nonprofit?

Watch CBS Videos Online

We're going to admit that after we watched 60 Minutes exclusive with President Elect Barack Obama, we turned on the second to the last episode of this season's of True Blood.

But we were sent this clip of Andy Rooney giving props to newspapers...and well - someone on TV needed to.

So we caught up with our friend, journalist Erica Smith, whom we have dubbed the Newsroom Angel of Death, because she has watched over the industry as it wheezes and hacks documenting it with a nifty little Google map.

Someone has to do it.

FBLA: How's the site going and do you see the bottom anytime soon? Is it going to get worse?

continued...

Word last week that Cissy Baker was named to the new position of vice president of the Washington News Bureau of the Tribune Co. got us wondering, who the hell is Cissy Baker?

We know that Cissy is the top Tribune TV person in Washington, and that she's the daughter of Sen. Howard Baker. We also know that she has worked for CNN and Fox.

What we didn't know -- until someone clarified this for us -- was that Cissy was assigned because Zell "hates former Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus" and wanted him fired and "they do not want L.A. Times people in charge" in the Washington bureau.

So that's who Cissy Baker is.

The News & Observer found an interesting way to cut election night costs:

"Please be polite," wrote Susan Spring, the News & Observer's director of newsroom operations. "If you are working elections, you may have up to TWO slices" of pizza. A few hours later, executive editor John Drescher vetoed the limit, but added that "if Susan Spring chases you with a knife in her hand, you are on your own."

--Via Romensko

Rob Tornoe has a sobering post on his site today. It's a graph from a 1982 Newsweek article:

"The Modem, a.k.a. modulator/demodulator, is a handy little device that lets computers talk over telephone lines. ... 'I go home, have a glass of wine, turn on my computer and see what's on Dow Jones,' says Apple vice president Wilfred Houde. 'I don't know if it's good or bad, but I don't read the paper anymore.'"

-- Newsweek cover story, February 22, 1982, page 54.

Tornoe titles his post "The REAL Beginning of the End," but we don't agree. The REAL real beginning of the end would have been a graph from newspaper editors around the country on February 23, 1982, saying that either they hadn't read the story or, worse - and more likely - that they'd read it and thought nothing ... absolutely nothing ... about it.

Man, it's been a horrible couple of weeks for the state of print in this town. LA Observed notes that jobs were slashed at the LA Weekly and reports of a rumored four job cuts at the LA Daily News.

The Capistrano Insider, written by former Reg editor/reporter Jonathan Volzke, has posted an internal memo indicating the Register cuts will be deeper than initially thought: 110 layoffs, including 30 in the newsroom.

The memo from publisher Terry Horne delivers the bad news:

Orange County Register Communications is reducing our workforce by approximately 110 associates, across the organization. Many associates are being notified today, and this process of notification is expected to be complete by Friday, October 31.

This decision is not a reflection on the work or the contributions of the associates leaving us this week. It is based on a simple, but unfortunate marketplace reality -- we must reduce costs. Asking talented people to leave our organization is by far the most difficult part of this process. I hate having to do it, but it's absolutely necessary.

Amazingly, Horne tries to wrap this life-shattering news in empty platitudes:

Thank you for your resiliency during this challenging time. Leaders thrive in times of uncertainty, and I have the utmost respect for the dedication our leaders display on a daily basis. I appreciate your contributions to our strategy and serving our community.

In other words, you're out of a job, but you've earned Horne's respect. Congratulations.

From MediaPost Publications:

Signaling a fundamental shift in the publishing industry, The Christian Science Monitor today announced plans to shift from daily to a weekly print publishing format. In turn, the national newspaper plans to invest heavily in its Web presence.

"We're the first national paper to switch to a web first strategy," said John Yemma, editor of the newspaper, which is more than 100 years old and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes. "We need to make it first rather than secondary, so we can make it more of a go-to destination."

The newspaper industry is facing intense pressure to downsize and reorganize due to decreasing ad revenue, rising production costs, and a whole host of new and Web-facilitated competition.