On the heels of Pew’s findings that newspapers gain only $1 in digital revenue for every $7 lost in print revenue, we now present to you even more depressing news. The Next Web has found perhaps the saddest traditional media related infographic ever.

A few lowlights:

• Between 2007 and 2010, 13,500 journalists have lost their jobs
• Amazon sells about 115 e-books for every 100 print books
• Just 31 percent of people who read a paper each day read it in print only
• Ful-time newspaper staff is at its lowest point since the 1970s

To view the full infographic, click here. If you’re in the traditional media business, you might not want to. If you do look at it, maybe have a loved one hold your hand while you do. It’s that bad.

This map, which documents the growth of newspapers across the nation, shows that in 1725, The New-York Gazette became Gotham’s first newspaper. As you can imagine, it wasn’t that great.

The Gazette was a “small two-page paper, poorly printed, and containing chiefly foreign news from three to six months old, state papers, lists of ships entered and cleared, and a few advertisements,” said Frank Luther Mott in his book, American Journalism, A History: 1690-1960.

While we’re sure the ads were probably hilarious (the finest ‘coon skin caps this side of the woods!) we have to appreciate the pioneering efforts of the media companies of old.

In order to do that, we suggest you click through to Stanford’s website, and play with the interactive map yourself. You can slide the date and watch as dots document papers springing up.

While 1725 didn’t have much going on, check out our region in 1925:

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City Pages reports that Tim Pawlenty‘s very own hometown newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, ran the announcement of his presidential campaign on the Obituary page this morning. Are they calling their own man Dead on Arrival?

Amused though we are by this, we’re warned not to read too much into it. “Any other day, it would have made the front page. But that’s what he gets for making his big publicity push the day after a deadly tornado rips through his home state.”

This could have been amazing: Google has had a five-year-old News Archive project that was basically its newspaper version of Google Books. As part of the project, Google promised to scan, index, and host digital files from numerous newspapers, and it eventually had 60 million pages, covering 250 years.

But alas, no more. Google sent an email to publishers, including The Boston Phoenix, saying it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers. This is what the Phoenix‘s blog had to say on the subject:

News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers — especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn’t afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives… but newspapers are infamously more difficult to index than books, thanks to layout complexities such as columns and jumps, which require humans or intense algorithmic juju to decode. Here’s two wild guesses: the process may have turned out to be harder than Google anticipated. Or it may have turned out that the resulting pages drew far fewer eyeballs than anyone expected.

RIP, Google News Archive. We hardly knew you.

Today in offputting, we hear from Poynter that Houston Press, a Village Voice affiliate, wrote a post called “10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List.”

Funny stuff. Note that women on the list have assaulted boys and girls ranging from two to 16 years old.

The writer of the piece, editor Richard Connelly, was, obviously, taken to task in the comments under the post, such as this one: “There is nothing about child molestation that should be glorified. I cannot believe this got published and everyone involved should be fired.”

Now he has issued an apology, and explained the genesis of this post:

Last week I spoke to two veteran child-porn prosecutors… It triggered an idea about how people have a pre-conceived notion of what dangerous predators “always” look like — slovenly fat guys in t-shirts asking kids if they wanted a ride — and how best to shake that notion up.

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As FishbowlNY noted yesterday, Yahoo! News is the most popular news website, according to recent data by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. But when you take out news aggregators, as comScore did, the result is some grim news for print: Cable News websites are pulling in higher numbers than print sites.

For the first three months of 2011, CNN was the most popular site, averaging nearly 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors each day. MSNBC came in second place with 7.4 million. New York Times, the best performing newspaper, ranked third on the ComScore list with an average 5.6 million.

Fox News, though the giant of cable, averaged 2.3 million. Nonetheless, it bested sites for the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and USA Today.

David Folkenflik provides some explanation at NPR:

People associate breaking news with cable channels, said Rick Edmonds, who writes about the finances and business trends in the news industry for the Poynter Institute… “If you’re on CNN or MSNBC, you figure you’ll find out what’s going on within five minutes… With the others, there’s a feeling I’ll get a nice serving of stories that were produced this morning.”

Poynter amalgamates the 2011 first quarter earnings reports from Gannett, New York Times Co. and Media General, and the outlook for newspapers isn’t so rosy: lower revenues are driving lower earnings compared to the period a year ago.

So what’s going wrong? Well, where do we begin! Newsprint prices are high, circulation revenue is down, digital efforts are still in their early fumbling stages, heavy debts must be repaid, and even “severe weather” and an “unsettled world economy” are being blamed.

But all is not lost. Rick Edmonds sees beyond the earnings report figures:

The very thin profit margins on net earnings (1 percent for the quarter at New York Times Co.) do not delight Wall Street, but I see a positive beneath the surface. As all the companies do their own version of digital transformation, they are investing in new media rather than harvesting operating profits and dropping them to the bottom line.

Exactly the right attitude! We’ve had enough of this depression, and it’s time for a turnaround. Newspapers, 2011 is your year.

The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) has released data indicating that American newspapers showed a very slim increase in newsroom employees last year (from an estimated 41,500 in 2009 to 41,600 in 2010), “finally halting a three-year exodus of journalists.”

It’s not a huge increase, but we’ll take whatever good news we can get!

But for minority newsroom employees, things aren’t quite so rosy. The percentage of minorities in newsrooms, according to ASNE, currently totals 12.79 percent (minorities make up 36 percent of the total U.S. population). This is a decline of .47 percentage points from a year ago, and marks the third consecutive year that the percentage of African-American, Asian, Latino, and Native American journalists has declined in U.S. newsrooms.

It seems smaller papers have a greater problem in this regard. ASNE reports that 60 percent of minorities work at newspapers with circulations exceeding 100,000.

This is a sign of things to come as newspapers go digital.

Jason McIntyre reports that according to a source, in a conference call last night USA Today outlined its plan to pay annual bonuses to writers based on page views.

“But once writers start scrutinizing their page view tallies, and realize slideshows, rumors, and celebrities drive traffic, what will be the impact?” asks The Big Lead editor-in-chief.

We’ll see which other major newspapers will be next to follow suit.