Several media reporters wrote on Twitter on Thursday that this was one of the worst weeks in journalism, and it’s hard to argue with them. BusinessWeek is canning a third of its staff as Bloomberg gets ready to buy the magazine. The Associated Press is laying off 90 people as part of its effort to cut payroll costs by 10 percent this year.

And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.

The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That’s not as big a number as other places you’ve read about lately, but it’s still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)

Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don’t want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.

Why is this happening? Here’s what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:

As part of the work we’re doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.

The background: The Post’s web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.

With yet layoffs taking place at U.S. media outlets from Conde Nast to BusinessWeek to Time Inc., and advertising revenue showing little sign of rising anytime soon, I have a feeling that we’ll continue to read grim entries like this one.

How can mainstream news organizations retain (or regain) their audience’s trust in skeptical world where almost anyone with an Internet connection can be a publisher? That’s the topic a panel of industry experts will address tonight at the Thomson Reuters heaquarters in Times Square. We’ll be live blogging the event here from 7pm ET.

The panel comprises: Andrew Alexander, ombudsman, The Washington Post; Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor, The Associated Press; Lisa Shepard, ombudsman, National Public Radio; and Dean Wright, global editor of ethics, innovation & news standards, Reuters. Jack Shafer, editor-at-large for Slate, is the moderator.

If you’d like to put a question to the panel, leave it in the comments box below and we’ll ask a selection on your behalf.

Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:

TV Networks Fight Drug-Ad Measure (WSJ)
“Advertising costs are deductible to any company as a business expense. The plan being considered by Rep. Rangel’s Ways and Means committee would eliminate the deduction with respect to prescription drug advertising,” writes Martin Vaughan.

Big media seek 21st century business models (Reuters)
“Media moguls at this week’s Sun Valley conference have spent as much time discussing how to reconfigure business models disrupted by the Web as they have worrying about the weak economy,” reports Yinka Adegoke.

Zucker Says Marketplace Has Reached Bottom (B&C)
Ben Grossman writes: “NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker said Thursday that while the overall marketplace is still challenged, he thinks it may have bottomed out. ‘It’s still quite uncertain and we don’t really see the full recovery we are all hoping for,’ he said.  ’It’s still tough out there, but I think we have seen a bottom.’”

The Financial Times and New York Times make further syndication deals (Editors Weblog)
“Both the Financial Times and the New York Times have announced their international syndications will include additional countries. The FT has confirmed content sharing arrangements with publications based in Turkey, France, and South Korea,” writes Christie Silk.

NBC Reveals Displeasure as U.S.O.C. Unveils Plan (NYT)
Richard Sandomir writes: “The head of NBC Sports said Thursday that he broke off talks in April about combining the Olympic channel that it partly owns with the one being planned by the United States Olympic Committee.”

AP Works Toward Universal Online News Format (Mediapost)
Gavin O’Malley writes: “The Associated Press, along with fellow non-profit The Media Standards Trust, on Friday unveiled a digital news “microformat” to effectively encapsulate the content and key meta-data of every news story online.”

In other news:

• Detroit Free Press exempt from latest round of Gannett layoffs (Crain’s)
• AOL: More Layoffs Inevitable (Business Insider)

“Even Reuters’ Ralph Jennings — of whom I’ve been extremely critical for getting the story very wrong when it comes to Taiwan — tells us that ‘half a million’ attended the protest,” a blogger wrote in October after seeing the Reuters’s write-up of an opposition-led demonstration in Taipei against President Ma Ying-jeou.

China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Ma, Taiwan’s president, likes China. The opposition and the blogger don’t like either.

I poured a beer to celebrate because I had it right, up from a score of “lies” that the same blogger gave me on a story earlier that year.

Not all of us get off so easy. The blogger would write up a former Taipei-based BBC correspondent for “vague and inaccurate descriptions,” one of the friendlier grades given to the British TV network’s Taiwan coverage. The same commentator gave the China Post, a local English-language paper, a score of “Nazism.”

“The facts that are always ignored when AP sells its mendacious stories about Taiwan,” the blogger added. And a one-time Taipei bureau chief with Bloomberg was labeled “China-centric,” with the word “China” in red type.

Getting blog-flogged is as much a part of being a 21st-century reporter as interviewing and writing. But none of the numerous transparency-wary reporters I know here can name the blogger who names us. Maybe it is one of us, someone quipped at a foreign correspondents club meeting. Maybe it’s you, I said. Maybe it’s you, he replied. Another correspondent said she once got into a debate with the blogger about her low grades, but still never learned the other party’s identity.

The blogs that offer Taiwan-based reporters this free publicity identify our sniper only as Tim Maddog, a member of the “education industry” in the central Taiwan city of Taichung. One website lists Michael Turton, a fellow Taiwan blogger, who some correspondents know personally, as a collaborator. But Turton says he doesn’t know who’s mad-dogging us.

On June 14 Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper ran a guest editorial bylined “Jason Cox,” and the blogger claims it’s his. The editorial text identifies Cox as an American-born, one-time student of Mandarin Chinese who gives advice to Taiwan’s main opposition party. The editorial tagline says Cox works in the iron and steel industry. Paid to give reporters a grilling? Nice work if you can get it!

Just about everyone has thrown a thought or two by now into the great bubbling pot of stew that is the future of journalism. Latest in line is Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.

Mayer, one of Google’s earliest employees who gets reams of newsprint in Silicon Valley for her cupcake spreadsheets and love of Oscar de la Renta, spoke before a Senate subcommittee on a future of journalism hearing on Wednesday.

Apart from defending Google, which has come under attack from the news industry — most notably the Associated Press — for profiting from content, Mayer gave some tips on how journalists should write their stories.

Mayer talked about something she called the “atomic unit of consumption” — a news article rather than an entire newspaper, much like one song downloaded digitally instead of buying an entire album. Here’s an excerpt from her prepared testimony:

The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule.

Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper’s homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.

Mayer then went on to suggest that reporters and editors need to think differently about how they write for online:

Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication.

To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

So wait, now the big bad wolf is counseling Little Red Riding Hood before gobbling her up for dinner? Maybe Google and news publishers can be friends… or at least frenemies. Read Mayer’s full testimony here.

Keep an eye on:

• Online video site Hulu signs its first international TV content deals. (Financial Times)
• Former CNBC host lands at MSNBC. (Associated Press)
• Hear it once and for all: Twitter is not for sale. (Reuters)

(Photo: Actress Brooke Shields portrays Little Red Riding Hood at a charity fundraiser/Reuters)

Meet News Corp’s latest cool dude: Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music. They say he’s not only talented, but he’s hip as well — and reports of his arrival were, to say the least, plentiful.

Here is his history, as outlined by MySpace’s press release:

Holt previously served as Executive Vice President of Digital Music for the MTV Networks Music and Logo Group where he oversaw several initiatives for the company’s digital music group, including working with the MTV, VH1 and CMT brands… Prior to joining MTV, Holt was Senior Vice President of New Media, Creative and Strategic Marketing at Interscope Geffen A&M.

It couldn’t hurt that he used MySpace to tout new albums from well-known pop acts such as Weezer, Nine Inch Nails, Beck, Black Eyed Peas, and Audioslave.

CNET’s News.com in October reported that Holt was coming from a little more upheaval at Viacom than might have been comfortable:

Impending layoffs at the media conglomerate, perhaps staged in phases to avoid publicity or shock, have been well documented. And a source within Viacom said that there has been talk of some “reorganization” within Holt’s digital-media division.

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told the Los Angeles Times that Holt brought a blend of knowledge about where music is going as well as the connection to bands that large amounts of people want to hear: “He was the first person that we really found that had the music experience, both from a marketing perspective and from a music programming perspective, the technical knowledge and the relationships with all the major labels as well as independent labels.”

DeWolfe also liked the cut of Holt’s jib, apparently: “If you look at Courtney, from the clothes he wears to the glasses that he may wear, he’s got a very eclectic style to him… A very unique style.”

It almost feels like a Pet Shop Boys song: I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money!

Keep an eye on

• Associated Press union members say contract talks show that the news outlet is trying to justify the old phrase, “You can’t spell cheap without AP.” (Editor & Publisher)
• Jeff Jarvis, the new media guru, gets the Tolstoy treatment in this lengthy story. Conclusion? The medicine he gives old media executives lists nausea as one of its side effects. (New York Observer)
• Newspapers aren’t the only ones trying to claw their way out of the pit of despair. Read about radio, the other revenue-challenged medium. (The New York Times)

(Courtney Holt photo: Courtesy of MySpace)

Another dark week for the publishing business, capped by a double-barrel blow yesterday when news emerged that the New York Times was slashing its dividend and the Associated Press was slashing its workforce.

New York Times’ decision to cut its dividend is particularly noteworthy, since it could up the pressure on the Ochs-Sulzberger family to make even more dramatic moves down the road — like maybe selling parts or all of the media company.

The family has resisted any calls to sell the famous publishing company, but cutting the dividend makes it tougher for some of the younger family members who rely on that income. Check out the recent profile of family member Dave Golden in New York magazine.

Meanwhile, the New York Times said it would curtail capital spending and lower its operating costs. It did not say whether it would cut more jobs… although the Associated Press pretty much the stole the show on job cuts, anyway, with its announcement that 10 percent of its workforce would be eliminated.

Good times.

Keep an eye on:

• Concerns are growing in Hollywood that buyer interest in DVDs is plummeting as the global economic crisis worsens (NY Times)
• After weeks of shuttle diplomacy, a U.S. federal mediator brought labor negotiators for major Hollywood studios and the Screen Actors Guild back together for their first meeting in four months (Reuters)
• High definition Blu-ray disc players may be one of the holiday season’s best sellers, but they will still fall short of expectations, due to the tough economy, the head of Sony’s U.S. electronics unit said (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

What the world needs now is a little less news.

A new study by the Associated Press and “ethnographic research firm” Context-Based Research Group says people aged 18-34 are overloaded with facts and updates and have trouble connecting with more in-depth stories. At the same time, they yearn for quality and in-depth reporting while having difficulty getting immediate access to that content.

The study, which surveyed young adults in Britain, India and the United States, also helped the AP and Context develop a new model for news consumption after discovering that younger generations get their news in a dramatically different fashion from their elders.

Namely:

Participants in this study almost always consumed news as part of another set of activities and therefore were unable to give their full attention to the news. This is very different from previous news consumption models where people sat down to watch the evening news or read the morning paper. Multitasking prevented participants from becoming completely engaged with a news story and therefore interaction with the news was limited to headlines and news updates

News Is Connected to E-mail: Many of the study participants digested news alongside their e-mail. “I get my news when I check my e-mail,” was a common statement from study participants. However, the small doses of news in e-mail formats mostly failed to deliver the deeper content that might have produced a richer and more rewarding experience for participants.

The report covers a lot of ground, but one of the most interesting conclusions is one that most people who sit in front of a computer all day already know:

Participants in the study said they checked updates and headlines as a way to pass time and break boredom.

Overall, participants in the study constantly checked for news and therefore technically consumed news on a very frequent basis. However, the news they most frequently accessed largely consisted of headlines and updates. Their behavior therefore suggested a “false positive”; that is, the participants were checking news more frequently but not exploring stories in any depth.

And on a side note: The case studies include the story of Raj, a hyper-frequent news consumer, who clearly has a knack for pleasing the people studying him:

Raj said he normally checked the news eight to 10 times a day when he was busy and up to 20 times a day when he had more free time. Raj’s preferred sites were NDTV and Yahoo. He was also very familiar with The Associated Press.

(Photo: Reuters)