Adaora Udoji is departing the WNYC and WPRI morning news show The Takeaway to spend more time with her husband and newly adopted baby girl.

“I am extraordinarily proud of what The Takeaway has accomplished and am honored to have worked with such a talented group of people,” Udoji said in a statement announcing the news. “I have made the right decision for my family at this time. However, journalism will always be my passion and I look forward to returning to my career at some point in the future.”

Full release after the jump.

Read more

In the So What Do You Do? running today, we asked New York Times City Room bureau chief Sewell Chan about what it’s like to work with the boss’s kid. His answer:

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger joined the Times staff as a reporter, and he’s been working continuous news. He’s already been working with metro, and he’ll continue to work with metro. He has been absolutely impressive, gracious, smart as a whip, hardworking, full of energy, full of ideas and has a great sense of language. His writing sparkles, and he’s a charm and a pleasure to work with.

Spoken like a true Timesman.

After two years as publisher of Curbed, Kyle Crafton joins Sports Enthusiast Media as digital GM.

In January 2007, SEM purchased StatFox and Head2Head Sports to add to its portfolio that includes Daily Racing Form and Sports Eye Publications. In October of that same year, Arlington Capital Partners bought SEM.

Before joining Curbed, Crafton served as publisher and CFO of FishbowlNY’s parent company, mediabistro.com.

Portfolio‘s dead and gone, but that doesn’t mean magazines will stop folding. (It means Conde Nast‘s collective head got a little closer to getting out of its you-know-where. Discuss.)

Onwards, to today’s depressing media news…

Trans World Publishing Inc. shuttered Atlanta Woman due to “lack of sufficient marketing revenue from the Atlanta business community.” It’s all your fault, Hot-lanta.

Elsewhere, after 14 years as a print pub, @issue — the journal of business and design — becomes atissuejournal.com — the online journal of business and design. Editor Delphine Hirasuna emailed FishbowlNY.com the news earlier today.

The good news: We would venture to guess that both of these pubs lost considerably less than $100 million.

Webnewser has a story about former New Jersey Star-Ledger employees who launched NewJerseyNewsroom.com, the latest in a series of local news sites founded by refugees from print papers.

Roughly 40 of the 200 employees who took buyouts are assisting in the effort. They aren’t making any money — although they are receiving equity in the fledgling venture — but most are subsiding on the one-year salary they were given when they departed the S-L.

While Matt Romanoski, the former deputy sports editor who’s spearheading the effort, says he and his colleagues are searching for revenue streams, it remains to be seen if there’s any interested parties. With investments decreasing, we think these guys have a much better shot at securing funding.

Reuters took a page out of our playbook and looks at the state of media stocks in today’s economy. What did it find? Good news, actually, at least in the short-term.

The article notes that Time Warner Inc. and News Corp. are up almost 20 percent in the past month while CBS found its stride and jumped 40.

This isn’t likely to last, however, as “experts warn advertising budgets are not yet showing indications of a comeback, after corporations heavily cut spending on everything from print campaigns to Web banners as the recession worsened late last year.”

We should know a lot more later this week when companies ranging from Walt Disney Co. to Viacom report their first quarter earnings. Expect stocks to take a hit as earnings are projected to be quite poor.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released its report on the state of the newspaper industry for the six-month period ending March 31, 2009 and findings include a seven percent decrease in daily circulation to 34,439,713. Sunday circulation dropped more than five percent to 42,082,707.

The Boston Globe, which might be shuttered by The New York Times Co., saw circulation fall more than 13 percent (daily) and 11 percent (Sunday).

Of the New York-region papers, Rupert Murdoch‘s The Wall Street Journal fared the best, as circulation actually increased by 06. percent. The New York Times (3.5 percent), Newsday (7 percent), the Daily News (14 percent), and the New York Post (20 percent) all posted drops.

Gannett Co.‘s in serious, serious trouble. The company’s stock dropped to barely more than $3.00 per share before recovering with a late Friday rally back to $3.45. Still, that’s a decline of $0.31 on the week, and it continues to trend towards zero. Elsewhere, only Viacom and DirecTV Group gained ground on the week. To the jump.

Read more

Brian Tierney, the chief executive officer of Philadelphia Newspapers, received $81,000 in 2008 for transportation expenses from the company that filed for bankruptcy in February 2009.

Tierney, who along with other investors purchased the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News in 2006 for more than $500 million, also received $650,000 in salary, a $350,000 bonus for 2008, and a $175,000 bonus for 2007. In total, his compensation came to $1.175 million, a number he called “very low.”

In late 2008, Philadelphia Newspapers union members agreed to give up their raises in an attempt to keep the company from bankruptcy.

The Boston Globe inches ever closer to becoming the latest newspaper to shut down.

Yesterday, Janet Robinson, the chief executive of the New York Times Co., <a href=reiterated that the paper’s union has one week to agree to $20 million in concessions or follow Hearst Corporation‘s Seattle Post-Intelligencer into the great newspaper bin in the sky.

“We’ve talked to them about the May 1 deadline and I think they know it’s the date we need for them to get back to us,” Robinson told Globe reporters.

The Beantown paper is on track to lose $85 million this year. Considering its parent company is cutting costs everywhere it can, it makes sense that the Globe is in dire straights indeed.