By Douglas McLennan

Is there anyone not talking about a crisis in the news industry? The New York Times is dumping 100 jobs. The troubled Tribune Company is offloading 400-500 people. And across the country there are reports of slumping advertising and impending layoffs. Now this report in AdAge:

"U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services -- agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers -- broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth."

So things are pretty bad, and we're working in a dying industry. Nobody's reading newspapers anymore.

And yet they are. And in record numbers. Look at this report in Editor & Publisher. The online audience is soaring, and here's the growth rate and numbers of unique readers for newspaper websites in January 2008 (with 000's at the end):

NYTimes.com -- 20,461 -- 45.1%
USATODAY.com -- 12,314 -- 19.4%
washingtonpost.com -- 9,902 -- 14.6%
Wall Street Journal Online -- 6,962 -- 81.4%

Here's a hot topic that was brought to me today by an editor in Indiana, who asked why should his newspaper offer an RSS feed (or news feed), when it could then be used by other newspapers?

For those unfamiliar with RSS feeds, it is a syndication feed on some websites that allows the content of the site to be read in news readers or other websites. This site uses such a news feed in both ways: The content of the site can be read in a news reader and we have content from other sites fed into this site in the middle navigation bar to your right.

RSS feeds serve a very specific purpose and are used to a great extent by many people who use the web. In no way does it make it easier for people to steal content from your site. In most cases, someone who uses an RSS feed on their site can actually help the site who supplies the information with traffic and ad revenue.

If someone were to just take your content without giving credit or linking to your site, they can do it very easily by copying and pasting.

And I believe the RSS feeds can actually help newspapers in both readership and advertising revenue.

Wow, the response to this site has been phenomenal. Lots of questions (good questions) have been raised about newspapers, the web, marketing, and this little item: Viewing a newspaper website on PDAs.

Apple's iPhone, for the better in my opinion, made designing websites for cell phones that much better. The iPhone renders a web page the way it would on a web browser, via Apple's Safari web browser.

That said, not everyone viewing newspaper web sites are on an iPhone. That leaves the question of what do do for the personal mobile devices out there.

There are two solutions to the issue. One is to simply buy a .mobi web domain. When we design a site that will have such a suffix, we will add in a plug in to the content management system that will give a watered down version of your site on mobile devices.

The process is fairly painless, but is not without its drawbacks. For one, the site overall looks pretty plain. Graphics are null and the menus lose some of their functionality.