The Rocky Mountain News shuts down forever, leaving another major American city a one-paper town. Rival Denver Post pays tribute in Rocky’s Last Run.

Hearst Corp., which owns the San Francisco Chronicle and other dailies, attempts to avert closing any of its papers by announcing a precedent-setting deal with Helium, the Web content mill site. Helium’s “citizen journalists” will produce local and lifestyle stories in a test roll out with two Hearts papers in Connecticut.

In magazineland, Mr. Magazine, aka Samir Husni, a journalism prof and head of the j-school at the University of Mississippi, declares America’s magazine publishing model DOA and announces a new center dealing with magazine and print innovation called Magazine Innovation Center.

The Columbia Journalism Review jumps onto the magazine reinvention bandwagon too, getting a $230,000 MacArthur grant to study how magazines can adopt best practices and improve editorial content on their Websites.

Speaking of CJR, the magazine’s Megan Garber turns in a cheeky Dear Abby-style advice column to explain the do’s and don’ts of  using Twitter while poking fun at the techies, TV news stars and celebs who’re quickly populating the au courant microblogging service.

One more I forgot about – Jonathan Weber, founder and CEO of NewWest.Net a Rocky Mountain West news site, and former EIC at The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom, debuted a weekly column on The Big Money about the realities of running a Web 2.0 business. Weber’s a great thinker and a great writer (disclaimer: I’ve worked with him before so I’m biased) – a definite must read.

That in and of itself is cause to stand up and cheer. It underscores the fact that independent writers are out there doing important work, work that is being recognized by some of the country’s best-known journalism educators.

But it’s the exception rather than the rule. Why don’t more freelancers go after grants and fellowships? Is it because we’re all too busy pitching stories and chasing deadlines to take the time to apply? On a message board for freelancers I subscribe to, one writer recently shared that she’d received an all-expenses paid fellowship to study health-care reporting at the University of Southern California, but only because an editor she works for urged her to apply.

Not applying for fellowships and grants is short-sighted. For freelancers who want to specialize, there’s no better way than attending an intensive course to get up to speed on a subject, cultivate sources and brainstorm story ideas.

I will predict this: If established independent writers don’t take advantage of these opportunities, they’ll lose out to all those recently departed daily newspaper reporters and editors now joining the freelance ranks, journalists who come from newspapers that routinely submitted their work for awards and put them up for fellowships. Don’t let them beat you to it.

If you’re interested in applying for journalism fellowships and grants, here are a few sources:

JournalismJobs.com’s listing of U.S. journalism fellowships

The USC Annenberg/California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships

Arizona State University’s National Center for Business Journalism, Reynolds Center Awards & Scholarships

CJR on NY Times’ online holdings – The cover story of the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger at the Barricades: Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr. transform The New York Times for the digital age? reveals the paper’s digital business is gaining traction despite continuing financial woes on the print side. According to author Douglas McCollam, the Times’ digital-only properties, including About.com, the search service the paper purchased in 2005, still account for only 3 percent of its annual revenue. However, revenue from all digital media operations grew 10 percent in 2007, to $330 million, topping an 8 percent jump the previous year, according to McCollam. Still, McCollam asks:

“When will gains online realistically make up for losses on the print side? “We don’t know when digital revenues will offset the decline in print,” (Publisher Arthur) Sulzberger wrote in an email, adding that “this is a question we often ask ourselves.”

Ironically, the article isn’t available on CJR’s Website yet, so if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to find a copy or wait until it appears online. 7/16 UPDATE: The story is now online, and I added the link above.

Glaser on the demise of OJR – As I previously discussed on these pages, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications recently shut down the Online Journalism Review, which had been charting the course of online news for more than a decade. This week, Mark Glaser used his MediaShift column at PBS to “dig deeper” into the story, revealing that with a new dean and director of the journalism program, the school is in transition and rethinking where OJR fits in. Glaser raises a couple excellent points: can a school without faculty devoted to teaching online news support a Website devoted to the subject, and when all news is moving online, is the idea of an academic journal devoted to online news outdated? Read more here.

PaidContent purchased for $30 million – It’s not every day a single blogger turns a passion for reporting on the online news business into a sustainable enterprise and then gets bought out for a reported $30 million. But that’s what happened to Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent, a six-year-old news site covering all types of paid-content business models, which he sold last week to Guardian News and Media, a British newspaper publisher. By Ali’s account, Guardian will run ContentNext, the parent company Ali started to run PaidContent and several related blogs, as a stand-alone business. Read all the details here.

Make it a practice to send a headline – and a deck too if a publication uses them – with every story you submit. Whether an editor actually uses your headline is beside the point. Writing headlines is good practice. And it shows that:

• You know your story well enough to summarize it quite succinctly.
• You can write short as well as you can write long.
• You care enough about your story to apply all the finishes touches.
• You care enough about your editor to want to make their life easier by doing some of their work for them.

What’s the worst that can happen? The headline ends up on the virtual cutting room floor. What’s the best? Your editor remembers you as that thoughtful freelancer who always includes headlines with their copy – and gives you more work because of it. Or your headline ends up in print. Given the chance, wouldn’t you rather have your story called by the name you gave it than by someone else’s?

Headline writing is an art. The best are like the best kind of diet food: meaty yet lively – and sometimes downright spicy – but without a trace of fat. Cut out articles like “a” and “the.” Use active verbs. Use puns or other word play when suitable. Avoid cliches. Ditto phrases that could be read more than one way – like the headlines that end up on the back page of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Newspaper copy editors are masters of the art of headline writing. Here’s an article about how newspaper copy editors write headlines from Gannett Corp.’s weekly Newswatch column. The story’s really old but the lessons still apply. Magazine and other freelance non-fiction writers can also learn a thing or two from advertising copywriters, who specialize in snappy catchphrases. Here’s a good article called How to Write Headlines That Work in Copyblogger.

Another reason to focus on headlines: your blog. If you’re one of the legion of freelance writers with a blog, it behooves you to write good headlines so your blog posts get maximum exposure. There’s a special art to writing blog headlines. Learn more here and here.