Here's a new way to feature your work

One of the Annenberg centers I'm associated with, the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, is launching a new blog feature that you might want to check out -- and even write for. It's an aggregation of news stories and blogs on new business models for news. Two areas the blog will especially focus on are government regulation and subsidies, and non-profit funders such as foundations and philanthropists.

The center earlier began featuring some original content by your instructors and others affiliated with the center, and we hope to continue and even accelerate that. We're also looking to make it more of a USC place to go by linking to content on these topics that's generated around Annenberg.

Your class blogs (or others you write for) might be good candidates from time to time for this aggregation. All of you have written about interesting developments on the news innovation front, and this aggregation might draw you a bigger crowd. If you'd like to nominate one of your new posts, send an e-mail to Rebecca Shapiro (rcshapir@usc.edu), who's helping me do the aggregation.

Digital revolution: No one single story

There's a dominant story unfolding in the media world these days -- the fast decline of newspapers and other mainstream media. But as Steve Yelvington notes in his reliably smart blog, our tendency to look for a single story (or averages) really masks the truer individual stories of successes and failures.

He noted, for example, that one Gannett newspaper is still making a profit margin of 45 percent!!

Another new blog post, from Editor and Publisher, strikes the same theme. Community and suburban newspapers are doing much, much better than metropolitan newspapers. Advertising was down 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter for these newspapers, their associations reported. Compare that to the 17-18 percent decline reported in a number of big newspaper companies.

Nancy Lane of the Suburban Newspapers of America had this to say about the group's performance:

"Community papers are affected by the current economic downturn but they are not in a crisis; they are not experiencing massive layoffs and they are investing in the future."