I was trolling through the Internets today and came across an interesting post. It's from Erik Wemple, the editor of the Washington City Paper, one of the alternative newsweeklies in the restructuring-through-bankruptcy Creative Loafing chain, talking about a recent conference call with the bosses about cost-cutting.

Relax. Wemple reports that this week the cost-cutting involves trimming executive salaries by 5 to 15 percent throughout the chain, which includes Creative Loafing editions in Sarasota and Tampa. Live-blogging from the conference call, Wemple sounds relieved; at least he doesn't have to tell someone they are losing their job this week (CL Tampa editor David Warner blogged about it here).

The post struck me because I had just left a seminar at the Poynter Institute on the New Media Ecology. In one room, there was assembled an impressive collection of journalists from across the country, trying to grapple with the new challenges and opportunities presented by our Internet-fueled media structure.

I found myself lamenting that the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided to cancel its annual convention this year. (I have a feeling they were wary of creating an event where editors would be spending money to hang in expensive hotel rooms while their staffs are being cut and resources diminished.)

Because, even as committed content-heads were gathered at Poynter, trying to learn how to leverage Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Web sites and citizen journalism into a new, vibrant structure to serve quality journalism, I wondered how many minds were getting together to figure out how to pay for it all.

I've heard all the arguments about online media outclassing musty newspapers, and media companies laden with too much debt struggling to survive this unexpected depression. But it seems the biggest problem newspapers face is replacing the money engine that made them such successful businesses for so long -- the classified ads. And competitive forces make collaborating on solving that problem a tougher issue -- especially among news outlets in the same communities.

The solutions I've seen so far -- new media platforms, charging micropayments for some online content -- feel too small. So who's brainstorming the next moneymaking model for newspapers?

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