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The Toronto Star cut 122 jobs following a tough first quarter that saw parent corporation Torstar lose $3.5 million.  About a third of the jobs will be lost  from the newsroom. Employees were enticed to leave with a buyout package that saw long-term employees eligible for up to almost two years of their current salary. The news came at roughly the same time that the New York Times announced it also lost money in the first quarter of the year. The venerable newspaper company posted a $335,00 (US) loss. 

In a time of growing gloom over the future of newspapers, "one of the bright spots on the horizon is the proliferating number of nonprofits that are moving into the vacuum," writes Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review.

Reporting from the Reva and David Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Rieder writes that  while investigative reporting is in "alarming" decline at local and regional newspapers in the U.S., the newspaper business's stream of bad news has led to a growing openness to new approaches driven by ambition for public-interest reporting, rather than by competition.

Nonprofit news is just one indication of the new flexibility, Rieder writes. "Another striking change is how much more open news organizations are to working together, something that would have been considered heresy in the past.... At a panel discussion on Saturday, both Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, and Len Downie, his counterpart at the Washington Post, expressed a willingness to enter into collaborative projects."

Author Eric Alterman takes a long and loving look at what makes newspapers great, why we need them, and why they may not survive the 21st century.

Free newspapers could be prevented from home delivery in San Francisco, under a municipal law recently introduced by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. The city politician is upset at receiving unwanted home copies of the San Francisco Examiner. He introduced a motion last month that would keep free newspapers off lawns, boxes and stoops in San Francisco unless readers have actively subscribed.
Critics of Mirkarimi's move point out that the Examiner is one of the few newspapers in San Francisco with an aggressive team of investigative reporters who regularly break news at city hall. They also point out that Mirkarimi's home delivery ban might violate the U.S. constitution.