Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

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While many professional journalists fondly remember the work they did in college–covering townie news for the university paper or radio station–some are trying to erase their past work from the Internet because it shows up prominently on search engines like Google (GOOG).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice feature about the subject in its May 15 issue, called “Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites.”

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Is the newspaper business sustainable? Not any more. Is the community network business sustainable? Yes. And at the hyperlocal level.

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Researchers from City University London have published a report showing one European newspaper’s steep drop in revenue as well as unsteady Web traffic after it became an online-only publication.

The report, “Taking the Paper Out of News,” by Neil Thurman, a senior lecturer at the university, and Merja Myllylahti, focuses on Taloussanomat, a financial daily paper in Finland that stopped printing on Dec. 28, 2007 in a cost-cutting move.

According to the report, Taloussanomat, which had a daily circulation of 72,000, lost at least 75 percent of its revenue as it sacrificed print advertising and subscription fees in the shift. But the more surprising finding concerns its Web traffic.

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Another weekend goes by and another old school newspaper guy writes a long screed condemning Google (GOOG) as a menace hellbent on destroying all that is good and right in the news business. This one, by Henry Porter in The Guardian, is particularly amusing due to the logical inconsistencies within.

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Last month an email message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper, which has a circulation of 2,500. The cost was $370.

“We were amazed–it came from out of nowhere,” the newspaper’s editor, John Woods, said in a telephone interview. “We are very skeptical of ads like that.”

Even more surprising was who was paying for it: Google (GOOG).

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Hearst Corp. this afternoon said it may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if a new round of cost-saving measures cannot be accomplished in the coming weeks. Hearst said it will undertake “critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and non-union employees.”

Hearst said the Chron lost more than $50 million last year and that “this year’s losses to date are worse.” The company said the paper has had “major losses” each year since 2001.

The statement is basically a warning to the Chronicle’s unions that they can either play ball or watch the paper go up in flames.

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Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs.

Susan Wojcicki, the millionaire sister-in-law of Brin who also holds a management role in the company, announced the job cuts in a blog post, as she laid out plans for Google (GOOG) to exit the business of brokering radio ads, a business it entered in 2006 when it bought dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million.

Up to 40 Googlers will lose their jobs, a small percentage of the 20,000 remaining employees at the search giant. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.

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I’m not sure why the micropayments-as-the-savior-of-journalism meme seems to have taken off of late, but I’m glad there are lots of people trying to squash it: I’d particularly recommend Gabe Sherman and Clay Shirky. But in the case of Steve Brill’s “secret memo” on the subject, it’s worth responding to some of his specifics; a few points are worth making beyond those of David Cay Johnston.

First, Brill frames the question in an utterly bizarre manner, through the parent of a journalism student:

As one parent put it to me last fall, “Why are you luring my daughter into something that will never pay her loans when she could go to work for McKinsey?” I have been trying to construct an answer for her.

The answer is simple: “Madam, if your daughter wants to go work for McKinsey, she’s more than welcome to.” You want to make lots of money? Don’t become a journalist. In fact, if you’re the kind of person who would make a great management consultant, don’t become a journalist: The skillsets are just too different.

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The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!
The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” was published, in London, and, in an unrelated development, Parliament decided to levy on the colonies a new tax, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper–everything from indenture agreements to bills of credit to playing cards. The tax hit printers hard, at a time when printers were also the editors of newspapers, and sometimes their chief writers, too.

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If you’re a tree, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. We’ve long known that the traditional newspaper–a hard-copy compendium of the previous day’s events, printed on an obscene amount of wood byproduct–was terminally ill. But two of 2008’s big media developments–the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to kill its daily print edition outright, and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press’s decision to radically scale back their print operations and refocus online–suggests that the traditional newspaper’s death will come sooner than anyone imagined.

But the term “newspaper” has another meaning, too: it’s an organization staffed with men and women who report and analyze the news for the public. Newspapers in this sense aren’t about to go extinct. They are being reinvented, however.

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A couple years ago, right around the time Dell’s exploding laptop batteries were getting a fair amount of media attention, I had breakfast in San Francisco with a senior Dell executive. He was seriously annoyed by all the focus on Dell (DELL), even though his company wasn’t the only one with the spontaneous combustion problem caused by Sony’s (SNE) batteries.

I used, with little success, an explanation I like to give subjects trying to understand their media coverage. It revolves around a key scene in the fabulous Ron Howard movie “The Paper” in which a tortured city hall official pleads with a columnist to know why the latter is targeting the former in his columns. “You don’t get it, do you,” replies the news man. “It’s your turn.”

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Page by page, section by section, the influence of The New York Times is fading away. Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might.

Today’s Sunday magazine has a cover story on Jennifer Aniston. Of course!

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” is the heart of the problem. It was never that, of course. It was “All the News That Fits.”

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1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.

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We still occasionally encounter people who argue that physical newspapers and TV news shows have a vital role to play in the dissemination of news. These folks usually work for physical newspapers and TV networks, of course.

In any event, Zogby’s annual importance-of-news-source poll shows just how fast traditional news media are going extinct.

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