Stories that caught my eye today:

Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads

Excerpt: "[Journalists] are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history - as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily - just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we - journalists - we can't stop doing what we do.

As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here."

With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?

Excerpt: "...[I]t is only a matter of time before someone puts the pieces back together again. The search for a hopeful future begins with the insight that although journalists and publications are suffering, readership is up by wide margins. More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.

The problem is not the scarcity or the quality of arts journalism (the latter has always been mixed), but that no one is paying for it—at least not yet. "

...

“'Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,' media analyst Clay Shirky observed in his blog recently. 'No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper,' he added, 'but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.'”

Time Warner CEO hints at online fees for magazines

Excerpt: "Like other publications, Time Warner's magazines — a group that includes Time, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated — have been hurt by a steep decline in print advertising. Time Warner's publishing division suffered a 30 percent drop in ad revenue in the first quarter.

With little hope that online ad sales will ever compensate for the erosion on the print side, more publishers are drawing up plans to charge for access to Web sites that have been mostly free for the past decade. Newspaper industry executives met Thursday in Chicago to discuss the prospects."