F+W Media, a media company serving markets like antiques, crafts, writing and horticulture, has purchased World Tea Media for an undisclosed sum, Folio reports.

World Tea Media’s biggest asset is the World Tea Expo, but also runs the North American Tea Championship and a news site called WorldTeaNews.com, which has three editors listed on its masthead and 19 (freelance) contributors. Existing staff will remain intact, Folio says.

Mashable brings up an interesting (and somewhat horrifying) thought: perhaps Facebook Timeline is the new resume.

Yeah. Not that LinkedIn is going anywhere, but employers have been checking Facebook profiles to get the skinny on candidates for years. Timeline does two things: it makes it easier for those old posts of yours to surface, and since it makes it easier to make a really nice-looking profile page, those who don’t may be penalized.

Here’s what Mashable contributor Gerrit Hall says: “Until now, the Facebook profile has provided a current slice of a user’s life. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty details or look a week, month, or year into the past, it takes some searching and clicking. With Timeline, employers can learn more about users by searching specific time frames and seeing how the details mesh together.

“Ultimately, Facebook is going to become the go-to site for more curious employers and clients. Personalized and manicured Timelines are simply going to be more attractive.”

Smart tips: double-check your privacy settings, make sure that embarrassing stuff from way back in 2005 is truly hidden, not just hard to find, and highlight your best stuff.

Courtesy of AG Beat, here are some cool Facebook timelines that put a jobseeker’s best professional face forward.

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Reuters is moving its online newsroom from Toronto to Bangalore, taking with it 18 of 23 jobs.

The Toronto Star reports that the cuts represent a third of Reuters’ editorial operations in Toronto.

Reuters says it has increased the number of Reuters.com staff over the last eight months, but “as part of restructuring of our production staff, we’re moving some roles in our global online newsroom from Toronto to Asia. The online visuals desk remains in Toronto,” the company said in a statement.

Looks like the move has already begun, if this post is any indication.

The Atlantic has launched a new channel, The Atlantic Health, which promises a “broad approach” that will “bring[...] you vital news and analysis that matters to your health and wellbeing.”

The channel will be edited by Nicholas Jackson, formerly a writer in the tech channel.

The channel promises to be lively, and Jackson and the site’s writers will have their work cut out for them. In Jackson’s introductory post, the commenters are already coming out to play. There are the people who think the reporting is already not rigorous enough (“I hope this column is intended to add to the debate rather than parrot the usual undigested tripe”) and then those who believe mainstream medicine is out to get them (“I myself, for example, have made the decision after have several major problems with the quality of health care, to begin the process of being my own doctor”).

Good luck, Atlantic! You stepped into probably the most controversial topic after politics!

Longform journalism site Byliner has sold over 100,000 “Byliner Originals” singles since it launched in April, reports paidContent.

That means sold, so the 70,000 people who freely downloaded Jon Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit” when Byliner Originals first launched aren’t included.

Sounds pretty good. The site’s currently selling 15 originals, for between (a quick glance at the site shows) $0.99 and $5.99, with Krakauer’s piece, at $2.99, the best-seller.

If we assume that the average single sells for $3, and we know (roughly) how the money is split, we can do a little math and run the numbers on the Byliner business.

100,000 sales at $3 equals $300,000. Amazon takes 30% of sales, which leaves $210,000. According to PaidContent, Byliner pays its authors an upfront fee and then splits the proceeds 50/50.

That gives Byliner $105,000, with another $105,000 to be split between the (so far) 15 Byliner Originals authors, or an average of $7,000 each. (We can assume that Krakauer, whose single is still in the #1 bestseller spot on Byliner.com, has received significantly more than that, while the writer at the bottom of the list has received less. Also, this is not an ENTIRELY accurate method of calculation, as an author whose $.99 single sells twice as many copies as a $3.99 single is still worse off.)

But there’s also the upfront payment: A similar long-form journalism program run by Gothamist pays its writers $3,500 up front for a 10,000-word feature; Byliner’s features are a bit longer, so we can guess/conjecture/assume that the upfront fee is in the mid-four figures.

That fits with what David Wolman said about publishing his piece on Atavist, which publishes stories of similar length and at similar price points as Byliner: “I’ve been happy with sales, which continue steadily, but make no mistake: There is no zippy sports car in my future.”

But considering that Byliner’s mission is to publish pieces that are too long for magazines and too short for books, maybe steady sales are the best that can be hoped for. We’re hoping that the revenue Byliner itself is pulling in is enough to make its staff and investors happy, so these pieces can continue to find homes.

Updated to correct math.

It seems like only last week we were cataloguing the ill-advised Tweets and Facebook posts that cost some idiot his job. Okay, okay, to be fair, some of those 12 social media mistakes were honest ones. Here comes a whopper of a 13th, though: three Hill staffers for Democratic congressman Rick Larsen have been fired after months of insulting and damaging Tweets became public knowledge.

“Apparently the current workload isn’t substantial enough to keep junior staffers attentions focused on professional matters,” reported the Northwest Daily Marker, a politics blog for Oregon and Washington. Why? Because over four months, legislative assistants Seth Burroughs (@therocketship1) and Elizabeth Robblee and legislative correspondent Ben Byers (@byers_remorse) posted Tweets that portrayed “on-the-job drinking, frivolous misuse of office time and resources, and contain public insults aimed at the boss himself.”

The staffers’ Twitter accounts have since been deleted, but appear to have taken reasonable precautions: they don’t name the boss by name, the accounts don’t have last names associated with them, and so forth. It’s not clear how the Northwest Daily Marker identified the accounts. However, Byers, Robblee, and Burroughs could have prevented their firings if they’d taken perhaps the most important social media precaution of all: locking down their accounts to prevent their Tweets from going out into the public domain.

This is another reminder that this sort of conversation is much better saved for texts between your friends, if you have to say it at all.

Voice of San Diego lowered its budget by $200,000, resulting in the loss of four jobs, including three journalists.

Those three are education reporter Emily Alpert, photo editor Sam Hodgson and neighborhood reporter Adrian Florido, VOSD said.

“There’s no one cause for the change. No major donor has dropped out. Our sponsorships are consistent and our membership is growing rapidly. But in the past, we’ve relied on grants from national foundations to make up a large part of our funding and we can’t be sure they’ll be there for us again,” VOSD CEO Scott Lewis and editor Andrew Donohue said in the announcement.

Most of the 26 comments on the announcement are from readers who say they’ll miss those three reporters sorely. With that kind of support, these three should have no trouble finding new jobs, but it’s a blow for VOSD for sure.

In the past week, AOL has merged three pairs of Patch sites, and if these mergers work out, more may come in the first quarter of 2012, reports AdAge.

Patch spokeswoman Janine Iamunno acknowledged to AdAge that these one-off mergers had happened in the past, but “It’s not some shift away from what we’re doing, but if it makes sense to do it again, we will.”

In the case of the recent mergers, which affected Franklin Lakes and Wyckoff, and Glen Rock and Ridgewood in New Jersey, and Clayton and Concord in California, Iamunno said that the idea to do so came from the site editors themselves, who saw too much overlap in their sites’ coverage.

Patch now consists of 860 sites nationwide, but Iamunno told AdAge that Patch still intended to launch more sites before year’s end.

Metromix, which provides local event and entertainment listings, is losing seven of its Gannett-run sites as well as the staffers who ran them.

They will become “Express Metromix,” aggregating data from elsewhere and negating the need for staff, reports MinnPost’s David Brauer.

The seven sites were ones “locally mixed” in collaboration with seven of Gannett’s broadcast TV stations:

• St. Louis Metromix, managed by KDSK-Channel 5
• D.C. Metromix, managed by WUSA-Channel 9
• Twin Cities, managed by Kare11
• Tampa Bay, managed by WTSP-10
• Atlanta, managed by 11Alive
• Cleveland and WKYK
• And Denver and 9News.

“The decision was made because the business model did not prove to be effective in broadcast,” communications director Laura Dalton told Brauer.

Eight employees who ran these seven sites have been offered jobs elsewhere in the company, while nine have been let go, she told Brauer. He points out that the Twin Cities site, at least, also uses freelancers, who are now presumably out of a gig.

The paywall that went up at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s website is, so far, bringing in more money than the site has lost due to reduced ad revenue.

The paper told MinnPost media critic David Brauer that page views in November, the first month the paywall was up, were down 15 percent. Ad revenues will fall per year in the five figures, which is a pretty vague number but there you are.

But in that month, the Strib has signed up thousands of new digital subscribers. Just under 5,000 of them were completely new subscribers who opted for a digital-only plan, and 1,150 also decided to add a Sunday print edition subscription to their tabs. And another 2,000 current Sunday subscribers added digital access to their current print subscriptions. Strib publisher Michael Klingensmith told Brauer that a digital subscriber is typically “worth” $100, so that’s $800,000 in revenue in the first month of the paywall.

“Although the subscriber pace should subside, the count should grind over $1 million as some current newsaholic refusniks get tired of banging their heads on the pay wall (and tweeting about it!) and simply fork over the cost of a double mocha latte or two a month,” Brauer writes.

$1 million is not much, considering the paper’s expected to make $40 million a year from circulation, but it’s still a net gain.