Where are newspapers headed? It’s hard to say given the varying tone of reporting on the newspaper industry and fate of newspaper reporters. On one hand, Journalism.org’s The Changing Newsroom study describes today’s newspapers as being run by smaller, younger, more tech-savvy staff. But Mark Glaser, writing in his MediaShift column at PBS.org, says papers need to do a better job innovating or they’ll lose those young, new media-savvy writers. Meanwhile, writers are still trying to figure out where Twitter fits in as a form of reporting and writing. Read on:

Out with the old, in with the new – Newspapers across the country have slashed jobs to deal with shrinking revenue, and many cited the departure of long-time journalists as their single greatest loss, according to The Changing Newsroom, a study of U.S. daily newspapers conducted by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Read all of the findings here.

Young reporters leaving newspapers - At a time when newspapers have every reason to innovate, some of their most progressive thinkers – young journalists – are leaving. Why? Frustration with the slow pace of change and papers’ often-stifling top-down newsroom management style. Read more on the phenomena from MediaShift’s Mark Glaser here.

Twitter no threat to traditional reporting – John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for Slate, postulates in this article in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports that while Twitter isn’t the next great thing in journalism, it’s not the end of reporting as we know it either. The microblogging service has its uses, Dickerson says:

Twitter is the perfect place for all of those asides I’ve scribbled in the hundreds of notebooks I have in my garage from the campaigns and stories I’ve covered over the years. Inside each of those notebooks are little pieces of color I’ve picked up along the way. Sometimes these snippets are too off-topic or too inconsequential to work into a story. Sometimes they are the little notions or sideways thoughts that become the lede of a piece or the kicker. All of them now have found a home on Twitter.

To start the week, here’s a round up of recent stories about happenings in the online news business:

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.