Newspapers

They were a distasteful breed, all in all, the loud-mouthed young hustlers who sold newspapers on this city's street corners, and when the 11- and 12-year-old newsboys got driven out in the early part of the last century, the old men and toothless reprobates who replaced them were scarcely any better. "In every condition of decrepitude, some with two crutches, some with one, some with but one arm, some partially blind and some totally blind," a county judge wrote in 1937.

The newspaper industry is constantly bewailing its need for a new economic model, as the Internet upends the old one. Maybe it could take a page from the Club Penguin Times. The Club Penguin Times, after all, is more widely read than New York's Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or the Dallas Morning News. And it's not even 3 years old. But this weekly "newspaper" isn't tossed onto driveways or sold at newsstands. Rather, it's an online publication distributed to the estimated 6.

Spacious and airy, the newsroom of the National seems a newfangled journalistic field of dreams, with its stylish furniture, flat-panel monitors and roomy, uncluttered desks. Though the new United Arab Emirates newspaper has a daily circulation of only 70,000 to 90,000, it has grand ambitions and leaders who are bullish on print journalism. "Don't panic!" editor Martin Newland advises his counterparts in the West. "Don't head to the hills yet.

Facing falling revenue in a stalling economy, the Los Angeles Times on Monday laid off 75 editorial employees, part of a 200-person reduction that began last week. "The Times is no less immune to the twists and turns of the current economic situation than virtually all other businesses and institutions," Publisher Eddy W. Hartenstein said in a prepared statement. "As such, we continue to evaluate and realign our organization and operations."

The century-old Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday that it would discontinue its daily print edition in April and move almost exclusively to online publication, becoming the first major national newspaper to abandon a daily paper-and-ink format. The move, which had been expected by industry professionals and the Monitor staff, will cut annual costs by millions of dollars for the money-losing newspaper, which is subsidized by the Christian Science Church.

Apparently looking for something old to go with something new (Barack Obama) and something blue (a more Democratic Congress), the American people bought newspapers in huge numbers Wednesday, a day after the historic election of the nation's first black president. From the nation's largest daily, USA Today, to its more modest broadsheets, newspapers expanded press runs to accommodate enormous sales. Some papers even sold special gift editions and framed front pages.

As the alleged scourge of American journalism, James Macpherson cuts a rather disappointing figure. In a crisp blue blazer, with slicked-back gray hair, the onetime garment manufacturer looks like a prep school headmaster. He speaks with the polite self-control of PBS' Jim Lehrer. Macpherson drew headlines and hate mail last year when it was revealed that his Pasadena Now website intended to report the news from Pasadena using writers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India.

This might go down as the week that they took paper out of the newspaper business. Detroit's two daily newspapers announced Tuesday that they plan to reduce home delivery to just three days a week. And the trade organization for newspaper editors scheduled an April vote on whether to drop "paper" from its name.

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk took over a Turkish newspaper for a day and devoted Sunday's front page to criticism of the oppression of artists in his native country. Pamuk, whose trial last year on a charge of "insulting Turkishness" received international condemnation before it was dropped on a technicality, earned a degree in journalism but had never practiced the profession before becoming the one-day editor in chief at Radikal.

Yahoo Inc., the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based operator of the second-most-popular Internet search service, is the latest target of Belgian newspapers in a copyright dispute over how search engines link to articles. "We sent a formal letter to Yahoo yesterday, requesting it to remove all links to our newspapers' content," said Margaret Boribon, secretary-general of Copiepresse, a group that includes 17 French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.