Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

In a roundup of every current media-wonk topic — the Olympics, YouTube, TiVo, and the Philadelphia Inquirer's boneheaded move to keep its hottest stories offline — David Carr of the New York Times has deftly buried a hint to his employer's Web strategy: "The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off." Carr's not just speculating. He's alluding to a move already being made at the Times:

Us Weekly does not own UsWeekly.com. The celebritard sheet's website is at UsMagazine.com instead; an anti-Obama political site ("not affiliated with Us Weekly Magazine") occupies the domain. [The Frisky]

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stopped by Advertising Age's Madison and Vine conference last week, and proceeded to weep incredibly expensive tears over the fate of investigative journalism after Google helped eviscerate newspapers' business. "It's a tragedy for America," Schmidt declares before noting how few resources are going into reporting on the war in Iraq. "We'd spend a little more money to cover it, but our economic system doesn't justify that." Meanwhile, across the pond, Google hired away veteran BBC newsman Peter Barron of Newsnight for the company's public relations machine. Maybe Google will open a new PR bureau in Baghdad and send flacks to the front lines to cover the war. Would certainly be one way to improve Google News.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which has been losing over $1 million a week for Hearst for years, is set to offer 125 employees across the company buyouts. Rather than a strategic round of buyouts focused on one division, any employee can offer up his or her name, marking a desperation to reduce overhead at all cost. It remains to be seen how many of the cuts will come out of the newsroom, and if more than 125 buyout applications are received, the newspaper may accept even more. If not enough employees apply for the buyout, layoffs are threatened. Who's responsible?Publisher and CEO Frank Vega, originally brought on by parent company Hearst for his union-busting expertise and lovingly nicknamed "Darth Vega." Under his watch, operating losses at the company have actually mounted even as he's reduced the workforce. And while the 15-year, $155 million deal for a new press operations center in Fremont will serve to potentially gut the activist press workers' union, it also makes the paper especially unattractive as an acquisition. Meanwhile, executives are rumored to be spending anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million a month on management consultants. Cut them out, and the Chronicle's deficit will instantly shrink.

On Portfolio.com, Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, daughter of founder Hugh Hefner, spends a few hundred words patting herself on the back for breaking the story behind a Hollywood script and "Playboy's ability to grow its combined print and online audience and advertising." That, she seems to think, qualifies her to condescend to newspaper executives across America. Except "Playboy’s digital revenues have been flat or shrinking over the last few quarters, and the growth even before has been slower than industry average," according to PaidContent's Rafat Ali. (Photo by Getty/Jamie McCarthy)

While the amount of time American teenagers spent online and watching television both increased year-over-year, average time online increased from 10.7 hours last year to 12.5 hours this year, surpassing the amount of time spent in front of the television, 11.9 hours. If television viewing isn't losing eyeball share, what is? Reading. The number of teens and tweens who read a magazine for fun were both down from last year. [MediaWeek] (Photo by Derek Baird)

With Firefox browser plugin TimesPeople, the venerable gray lady will now allow registered users to connect, adding "friends" and recommending articles to each other. You can follow recommendations through a drop-down menu that presents a feed of recommended articles from other users, or subscribe via RSS. It's not a social network, strictly, but a social layer. And while I poke fun at the times in the headline, there's certainly one way this could be used to drive revenue — by targetting ads based on a reader, and a reader's contacts, interests as determined both by the user's demographic information from their registration and the topics they browse. And unlike Facebook, advertisers don't have to worry about advertising against content they might deem unacceptable. Unless the Times starts doing photo essays of keg stands and college-age women experimenting with homosexuality.

Surprise, surprise. As we've been predicting for months, the chief exec of Hachette is stepping down. Charming former modelizer Jack Kliger bamboozled the press with talk of a multimedia revolution after taking over the French-owned magazine group in 1999; but the web strategy never moved beyond the stage of rhetoric. After nine years, he leaves behind him a motley group of hobbyist titles and Elle magazine-with neither critical mass in print nor much of a future online.

Bauer Publishing has launched 4tnz, a website which appears to be cut-and-pasted from its teenage print titles and scanned onto the Web. "4tnz is Bauer Publishing’s first major foray into online publishing," the press release reads, and it shows. There are quizzes, but instead of having the answers printed upside-down at the bottom of the page, you can see the answers right-side up, in your browser window. One could make an observation about how it looks like Bauer's young-teen audience has built the site for the publisher. But that's too easy. The real problem is that 4tnz's would-be readers already have built their own equivalents, on MySpace and Tumblr and thousands of other websites. They have no need of the likes of Bauer.

LOS ANGELES, CA — Consumers aren't the only ones not buying the Amazon Kindle pitch. At a presentation by Amazon.com representatives at Book Expo America on Saturday, publishers proved an equally tough sell. The reps held a special session to introduce publishers to Amazon's tools for uploading, publishing, and managing inventory for the Kindle. While the Digital Tools for Publishers system is slick and easy to use, the company wasn't particularly transparent about questions regarding the size and makeup of the market for Kindle e-books.

Steve Outing, a former editor at the Poynter Institute and self-described "new-media visionary" Christopher Ryan have started a blog to brainstorm ideas for new classified advertising business models. While quotes from the likes of new media pundit JD Lasica assert "Craig Newmark of Craigslist is not the devil incarnate," the level of obsession is evidenced in the site's popular categories. One cure for the classified ad revenue decline fever suggested? More Seesmic! [ReinventingClassifieds]

Last week, Publishing 2.0 noted that the New York Times was finally using hypertext links in articles in a meaningful way. Welcome to the 20th century, Grey Lady! The Times invested in WordPress, which is used for the site's blogs, but the rest of the product? That required an expensive upgrade to CCI NewsGate, which comes with a $40 million price tag and is "very time consuming to integrate, especially across multiple properties," according to an editor at another major market daily.

BookLocker, one of many print-on-demand (POD) publishers who are threatened by Amazon's move to vertically integrate POD with online sales by priveleging authors who publish with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge, has brought a lawsuit against the Web retailing giant in the United States District Court of Maine. According to the allegations, Amazon and BookSurge have done everything in their power to keep this under the radar — by notifying publishers and authors over the phone instead of in writing, and demanding confidentiality agreements in the proposed contracts. But the case really hinges on the power of the "Buy now with 1-Click™" button. Why should you care?

Star magazine's new Web show lets the whole Internet read gossip together! It's like commenting on a regular online video, but you have to find the host, Star editor-at-large Julia Allison, on the streets of Manhattan to have your say on last week's stale celeb snapshots. Imagine what will happen when Allison takes her talent for crashing to the next logical level and turns up in the middle of Lindsay Campbell's New York based woman-on-the-street interview show, MobLogic.tv.

A tipster tells us that Mass Appeal, the Brooklyn-based hipsterish hip hop/ graffiti culture magazine, has folded. Editors and designers were laid off last week, and no more issues will be forthcoming, the tipster says. It's not known whether the mag will seek a buyer, or how its sister title MissBehave will be affected. If you have any information, email us. Sucks, if true—Mass Appeal was a quality rag. And to think that Cat Fancy soldiers on unscathed. What kind of world do we live in?

In the wake of eBay's suit against Craiglist, we get a touch more fear and loathing from a newspaper about the online classifieds site and local bulletin board from the Times:

TV Guide, one of America's biggest magazines, was sold a few days ago. Now it's for sale again! Well, not the parts of the brand that have some actual value (the website and the cable program guides and on-demand technology). Rather, new owner Macrovision is looking for a sharp business entity that would like to take the print magazine off of its hands. Cheaply, no doubt! And to the skeptics who might say that buying the money-losing print version of TV Guide without the accompanying web brand would be like buying a cow without milk, consider this: the new editor is looking to achieve "topicality and newsiness, urgency." By doing things like reviewing YouTube videos!

International Data Group, the tech publisher, was losing money every time it printed signature title InfoWorld. After kicking the paper habit, the title is now making $1.6 million per month in revenue, and approximately $592,000 net profit, the Times reports:

In the newsrooms of Silicon Valley, they call it "going native." In New York, media is a semirespectable profession, and the skyscraper snobs of the world's leading infotainment conglomerates assume that those who drop out for lesser arts like PR just couldn't cut it. Not so here. Erika Brown, who covered venture capital for Forbes, is leaving the magazine to join Matrix Partners as the VC firm's director of marketing and business development. (Biz dev? I can't picture Brown, a snappy dresser, in blue shirts and pleated khakis.) Did Brown parlay her contacts from reporting into a new job? It's hard to imagine she didn't. And one can hardly blame her. The death of magazines may or may not be imminent. But serving time in a distant bureau of a magazine which is mostly diffident about the Valley is a career killer. Brown's note to friends: