Our colleague Tom Murphy, over at RedwoodAge.com, picked up an AP story the other day: "Soft economy speeds newspaper decline, job cuts." McClatchy, owner of the Bees in California, is among the chains leading the cutbacks, with the Sacramento Bee offering buyouts to a majority of its full-time employees. While it's true that, as the AP points out, "Newspaper executives are cutting operating costs even further because advertising revenue has fallen faster than anyone anticipated," there's another element in the mix: Most of these major cutbacks are coming from large newspaper chains, which have borrowed billions from private and public equity markets to finance recent newspaper conglomerations that they claimed would help put the industry back on firm financial footing.

Update on the political ad fact-checking project, a Public Press collaboration with Newsdesk.org:

As of Aug. 24 we have raised 89 percent of the $2,500 goal, courtesy of David Cohn's experimental "crowdfunding" tool, Spot.us.

We're already working with two reporters who have started researching ballot initiatives and candidacies on the Nov. 4 election in San Francisco. The goal is to scrutinize claims from all sides of these political contests, research where the money is coming from and hold the partisans to account.

We need 12 more people to donate $25 each to make the project happen. An article in the New York Times Week in Review section this morning that highlighted the project will no doubt help. If you haven't given to the project, please do!

The collaboration with Spot.us is only a piece of the funding puzzle for a startup news organization. Please also consider giving directly to the Public Press (select us from the project dropdown list under "Please direct my contribution to"). Your donation is 100 percent tax-deductible.

San Francisco free-speech poster child Josh Wolf, who was alternately defended and attacked as an "anarchist and activist" for refusing to disgorge to the authorities his video of a protest -- and paid the price by serving 226 days in federal prison in 2006 -- is now a "real" journalist, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Two interesting postings from journalists, expressing outrage at the destructive effects of corporate consolidation in the newspaper industry:

The Public Press is gearing up to compete in the Knight News Challenge this year. The $5 million award from the Knight Foundation goes to a handful of projects deemed by the judges to be innovative uses of technology for the fulfillment of the unmet information needs of society.

This year the foundation opened up what it's calling the "garage," a Web space where applicants, thinkers, critics and dreamers can post preliminary ideas and debate them in public. Check out our page and leave some comments for the Public Press project and others.

We were saddened to learn late last week that the San Francisco Chronicle again is pursuing another round of staff reductions, seeking to eliminate 125 jobs through buyouts.

Carl Hall, the eternal curmudgeon (we love you, Carl!) at the Northern California Media Workers Guild, told SF Weekly that "It looks like the end for print journalism." We're not so sure about that. It is true that the advertising market has tanked with the advent of Craigslist and Monster. It's also true that for national and international news, there are a surfeit of online alternatives to the newspaper. But we continue to believe that there's a hunger out there for quality, timely and accurate news about the local community. We also believe that many people are willing to pay for a printed product because it is more portable, affordable and easy on the eye than any existing digital medium.

The Public Press is actively seeking volunteers to help us shape the editorial agenda for a new news service in San Francisco focused on public policy, social trends and consumer education. If you're an experienced journalist who wants to be part of a conversation about creating something new, instead of dismantling something old, we'd love to have your help.

Apparently, under the terms of the buyouts at the Chronicle, staffers get at least four weeks' pay -- and two weeks' pay for every year of service. We'd love those journalists to consider working with us on a volunteer basis during the transition time. Right now we can't afford to pay. But we hope to have a budget for staff within the next 12 months. In the meantime, get involved in our brainstorming and skill sharing! E-mail us: volunteer (AT) public-press (DOT) org.

Newsdesk.org, The Public Press and the Knight Foundation-supported SPOT.US "crowdfunding" project are teaming up to raise $2,500 to support investigative coverage and fact-checking of San Francisco-focused election advertisements. Your micro-donation will make a difference!

[Newsdesk.org editor Josh Wilson interviewed by David Cohn of Spot.Us]

    Pledge Your Support for SF Election Ad Fact-Checking:
    http://wiki.spot.us/election

If you are a San Francisco voter, your pledge of $25 will help us meet our funding goal, and hire a professional reporter to provide weekly investigative coverage and fact-checking of election ads, running from Labor Day through Election Day. These reports will run for free on Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org, and will be made available for free to any media partners who wish to use them.

The need

It's election season, and your brain is the target of one of the highest-stakes, most expensive influence campaigns in the world.

What's the quality of the information you're getting? Where can you turn for a breakdown of the facts, issues and money behind those election advertisements? Not just for the grand-scale national races, but at the local level?

Sadly, there is a historical gap in Bay Area news media's coverage of campaign advertising. During the 2004 elections, for example, GradeTheNews.org found that Bay Area TV news averaged 1minute 24 seconds nightly covering ballot initiatives, but ran 2 minutes 41 seconds of paid advertising for those initiatives.

Help Newsdesk.org and the Public Press fill that gap by supporting a weekly investigative report on Bay Area campaign advertisements, to run from Labor Day through Election Day.

Our goal is to help Bay Area residents cut through the barrage of influence advertising, and make truly informed decisions at the voting booth -- from the candidates to the ballot initiatives and propositions.

About Newsdesk.org

Since 2000, Newsdesk.org has led commercial mass media with groundbreaking, nonpoliticized coverage of veterans' health care and PTSD; the 2004 presidential election and the 2003 San Francisco mayoral runoff; the energy industry in the developing world; genetically engineered agriculture, and much more.

Newsdesk also is the producer of News You Might Have Missed, a unique source for important but overlooked news from around the world, published every Wednesday since February 2002.

Your donation is an investment in high quality, truly independent coverage of an important issue that has been neglected.

Thank you for your support!

Check out the capsule interview San Francisco Magazine did with me in the current issue of the magazine, in "The Next Big Charity: News." The subhead is: "With newspapers on life support, a new/old solution may provide a cure."

The Public Press is featured in a breakout box alongside David Talbot's San Francisco Free Press and Louis Freedberg's CalExpress. It's on Page 52 of the August 2008 edition.

In the box lableled "San Francisco Public Press," it starts by quoting me:

"We're trying to essentially reinvent the newspaper industry," says Micahel Stoll, a San Jose State journalism professor who's looking for grants to start, surprisingly, an actual print newspaper, only one that eschews ads and is funded by a public broadcasting-style subscription base. "I have yet to find anyone who can tell me why the KQED and PBS models won't work in print," Stoll says. And without the layout constraints of those pesky ads, he adds, the Public Press can be sleeker, thinner, and more eco-friendly.

Hand it to San Francisco Magazine -- they boiled down a lot of nuance into an accurate and understandable bite. My only quibble is that thankfully I'm not alone in this endeavor.

In the midst of a year that has seen a truly existential crisis for print journalism, it's instructive to ask ourselves just what kind of paper product newspapers are selling these days. The photo above is what landed on my front stoop last Sunday. Inside the advertising bag was a free sample of what's reputed to be some of the most absorbent pulp money can buy ... plus the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bit by bit, the Public Press project is getting noticed.

I just got off the air from an hourlong interview with Jonathan Rowe, host of the talk show "America Offline" on KWMR, the community radio station in West Marin County.