U.S. Media Revenue Set for Historic 2009 Decline - LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Not only was last year's Media 100 revenue growth the lowest since 1991, this year it's on track to show the first decline since Ad Age began ranking top media firms in 1981. [Advertising Age Latest News]

How Google Wave could transform journalism - LATimes.com
Mark Milian shares "a few wild ideas" for using Wave, including live editing, smarter story updates, and smarter story updates.  [Poynter Romenesko]

Lyons: "Instead of giving newspapers bailouts, we should be hastening their demise" - Newsweek.com
"The weak papers need to die," writes Daniel Lyons. "The strong newspapers need to go into bankruptcy and restructure their businesses with smaller staffs and lower cost structures. Yes, it will be painful. But journalists will find jobs -- and they'll be working in a better, faster medium."
[Poynter Romenesko]

Shirky: The transition to a new news model won't be seamless - Shorenstein Center
"We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place," Clay Shirky said Tuesday at Harvard. || More on the media futurist's talk from Dan Kennedy and Ethan Zuckerman.
 [Poynter Romenesko]

An update from Nieman Journalism Lab on how government defines a "journalist:"

Shield law: Definition of “journalist” gets professionalized -

On Thursday, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered an amendment to the Senate version that hews toward the professional definition in the House. Under the amendment, which was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a journalist is defined as someone who:

(iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—
(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means; and
(II) that—
(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;
(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;
(cc) operates a programming service; or
(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

As I observed last week, the shield law obviously needs a definition that limits its scope, but the professional definition, which now seems inevitable, would exclude student journalists as well as bloggers with a day job.

Congressional hearing on newspapers set for Thursday - Editor & Publisher
The hearing will "examine contraction in the newspaper industry, the economic impact of the changing media landscape, as well as the future of the industry at large," says an announcement. Pew Research Center's Tom Rosenstiel will be one of the witnesses.  [Poynter Romenesko]

From the E&P article: 

"The witnesses will review alternative funding options for newspapers in our new and ever-changing electronic age. Since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the federal government has acknowledged that the press is an institution which is afforded special protections by name. In this spirit, I think that the government can help foster solutions for this industry in ways which protect the independence of newspapers and enables their objective reporting to thrive in a new economic and media climate."

All of which prompts the question: how involved can government truly be in its watchdog's welfare without harming the watchdog's objective watchfulness?

Has newspaper advertising reached rock bottom? Probably not. -

During the last few months, as newspaper stock prices rebounded somewhat from  their lowest points, and as newspaper execs suggested, in conjunction with second quarter results, that having made all the cuts they did, they would be in good shape “once advertising rebounds,” I found myself nevertheless thinking the same thoughts as the crystal ball-gazers consulted by the New York Times who said that the bottom, for newspaper advertising revenue, had not yet been reached. [Nieman Journalism Lab]

The potential problem, of course, with "bills that would help newspapers" is that it creates the appearance, if not the reality, of government-owned media.

Obama's "happy to look at" bills that would help newspapers - Toledo Blade
The president told Dave Murray that "I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding." He added: "What I hope is that people start understanding if you're getting your newspaper over the Internet, that's not free and there's got to be a way to find a business model that supports that." [Poynter Romenesko]

Paula Graham says the much-discussed "pay for content" online news model may be fundamentally flawed in that newspapers and magazines never really charged for their content, even in print. Subscriptions and newsstand prices have been traditionally used to pay for the medium, and the means of distribution, and not for the content of the articles.

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

One could argue, however, that via iTunes, Apple has successfully transitioned music from consumers paying for medium to consumers paying for content. Could the same happen for online news and online books? Graham says that iTunes is actually more of a "tollbooth."

Discovered via New Business Models for News and @freddieoconnell.

Journos Losing Jobs at Three Times Rate of Average Workers - News media, including newspapers, broadcast and digital, have shed 35,885 jobs since Sept. 15, 2008, according to a study by Unity: Journalists of Color. The great majority of jobs lost -- 24,511 -- were in newspaper and other print journalism, Unity said.