Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

The Rocky Mountain News is one of many newspapers closing around the world today.

Reams are being written as to why newspapers are closing, whether bloggers can replace them and what can be done for newspapers to stay open.

But this is just a documentary about all of that.

Sam Leith is an acquaintance of mine. He is also a terribly good writer. This evening I got a message in my HelloTxt (a status feed agregator I work on) feed, it said:

Sam Leith is fired, pending appeal.

On Facebook I was greeted by a stream of disbelief from other fiends. One pointed us to to an official confirmation.

On this blog I have written a lot about the shake up of traditional media by new media like Facebook. Now new media (social media) is beating old media with the most authentic news of old media’s own demise.

Sam is a gifted journalist and was the Telegraph’s literary editor. He once wrote about Facebook and its News feed:

“Then there’s the “News Feed”. Facebook is the Reuters of irrelevance, the AFP of inanity. Look at it now. The “top news line”, as we call it in the trade, is that at 10:51, Larushka Ivan-Zadeh became “undecided”. Just three minutes before that, Toby Young added Rio Bravo to his list of favourite movies. Mo Kanneh, I discover, became “chill” at 11:59pm, 3:01am, and 5:04am. Presumably he now resembles a fish-finger after a big night out in Aberdeen. Update! 11:11am: Ben Price removed Dirty Harry from his list of favourite movies.”

Just earlier this week Facebook’s newsfeed was deadly serious.

If you read the English press you might be aware that there’s some bad things going down in South Africa (yes again).

An old school friend updated his feed just this week. It read:

“A J…is sad. His best friend was shot dead in a robbery last night :(.”

The Financial Times recently reported a surge in sales. In times of crisis people turn to quality reads. Social Media is no different.

Update: Sam on being made redundant.

The purported influence of the internet and digital has been said to be threatening the media landscape with enormous change for some time. But could it be that major shifts are now actually taking place?!

A few news items that recently caught my eye. The Lostremote blog reports an increase in the consumption of news online, a good thing, because The Media Guardian reports that not even the interest created by the stunning success of the British Olympic team in Beijing could prevent all the British quality dailies registering a year-on-year fall in circulation for August.

But theirs trouble on the advertising front. According to Techcrunch the decline in newspaper ad revenue is accelerating. Yes, and even their ad revenue online is decreasing.

In TV the situation is as dire. The Media Guardian reports that although event shows and soaps are holding up, the traditional UK TV peak time has been decimated.

But it is the layer beneath the top tier where ratings have collapsed and hit the average peak time share, defined as between 5.30pm and 11pm, of the main channels over the past five years. BBC1’s share of evening viewing has fallen from 27% in 2003 to 23.1% in 2008 to date. On ITV1 the decline is more marked – from 28.4% to 21.8% over five years. Among 16-to 34-year-olds it is steeper still. BBC1 fell from 23.9% to 17.1% and ITV1 from 23.6% to 15.6%.

This comes hot in heels of news of media entities that are making money.

Applications can make money. Some of those apps on Facebook are making money. (Yes, even the inane ones.) And so are some of the useful apps on the iPhone making decent returns in sales.

And there has been other more predictable news: Search based text advertising is making even more money. The advertising spend has not disappeared. It has moved.

The result? Google is not just withstanding the advertising downturn. Google’s search based revenues are still growing according to the Wall Street Journal. Even when other forms of online advertising (like those on newspaper sites mentioned above) declines.

Spending on Internet advertising is climbing at a healthy clip — rising 20% in the U.S. in the second quarter — and growth forecasts are strong despite the weak economy. But that growth isn’t being enjoyed by everyone.

It’s internet display advertising in particular that has taken a massive hit.

The gap is widening between spending on simple search ads, Google Inc.’s core turf, and spending on flashier display ads, which companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. had hoped to use to gain ground on Google.

Faced with a slowing economy, advertisers are sticking to what they view as the safest way to reach online customers directly: the plain text…

Another item of note. In line with the failure of online display ad revenue is the news of the failure of online video ad revenue. Even Google is not making much money from YouTube yet.

And Rhythm New Media (disclosure – I used to work for Rhythm), the groundbreaking start up that placed dynamically targeted ads around a number of UK operator’s mobile videos, has announced it’s pulling out of the UK. It’s worth noting that Rhythm has recently released a very succesful iPhone application in the US.

What to make of all this?

If your an advertiser – It’s been the case for some time that if advertisers wanted to reach young people, they could not really do so through TV. This trend is accelerating. This demographic is to be found online. Expect this trend to spread to older demographics sooner rather than later.

If your a brand owner one has to wonder how and where your going to advertise to build your brand. With TV audiences dwindeling and online growing the answer should be – on the net. But successful brand advertising is measured in reach (the amount of people who saw and add) and frequency (the amount of times they saw the add).

With online display advertising the former is hard. Users are often spread over thousands of websites, not a few TV channels. The later, how many times users have seen an add, can be even harder to achieve or measure. Unlike TV advertising which interupts and dominates TV viewing, web display ads rarely do. Have people really noticed your ads?

Perhaps it’s time to sponsor those large live events?

If your a creative type there’s reason to be worried. Particularly during this recession and particularly if your working in video. You might want to take a cource on search engine marketing and Google Adwords, but job satisfaction is unlikely to come with Google Adwords.

If your a new media agency specialising in flashy display ads, its time to consider moving into building apps or perhaps social media.

If your a newspaper or magazine or TV channel one has to wonder how one could arrest the steady fall of readership or viewers. How does one compete with the wealth, quality and immediacy of online content? How does one compete with the volume, quality and low cost of user generated content?

(Jeff Jarvis does make some suggestions as to how newsrooms will have to adapt.)

At least newspapers and magazines have a more clearly defined and more niche identity: A more rounded brand that can be leveraged online. TV stations do not. TV is supposed to be a mass medium. A prediction – TV stations are dying dinosaurs and will only survive to bring us mass live events.