The layoffs are already well under way at big media companies including Viacom (NYSE:VIA) and NBCU. But, what about the new media world, all of the blogs which have been created over the last three or four years? Those not owned by large companies (Blogging Stocks is owned by AOL), may simply not make it, even though they have become remarkably popular.

One of the largest blog networks, Gawker, has already said it will need to cut a significant numbers of people. And, it is a profitable company. A lot of independent blogs built up staff and other costs in the anticipation that growing visitors and pageviews would allow them to benefit from increasing advertising revenue. The recession has robbed them of that hope. The blogs backed by venture capitalists may not be able to get more money. Those which never raised money and have never had access to outside capital could be in the most trouble.

Some blogs have been lucky. paidContent was sold to the Guardian group in the UK. Ar's Technical, a tech blog, was sold to Conde Nast. Huffington Post raised $25 million. According to blog measurement site Technorati, Huffington is the top blog in the US. That gives it the advantage of size and branding.

There are several hundred blogs which have become important voices within their fields. Many of those that ramped up expenses in 2006 and 2007 are not going to make it. The revenue they were hoping for is not going to show up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wall st.com.

After saying publicly that he planned to make The Wall Street Journal's website free and rely on advertising revenue to make up for lost subscriptions, Rupert Murdoch has changed his mind.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Murdoch said that the articles and sections "giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service."

I guess we can assume that the paper's editorial page will be free now. Perhaps we will even be paid to read it.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) appears to have gone back and forth on this matter, and I doubt we've heard the last of it. Long-term, I still think that the WSJ website will end up being free. The increasing quality of online business coverage will make a WSJ subscription less of a necessity for many readers. But a free WSJ-website would instantly become the top business news site in America.

As I've already covered on BloggingStocks, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) has been considering getting rid of its premium online service, New York TimesSelect, for several weeks. According to an article in today's New York Post, the TimesSelect content has finally been "freed." The article goes on to state that the service will be discontinued once "software issues associated with making the switch to a free service" is resolved.

TimesSelect was a paid service that allowed readers to access the works of the most prominent and widely-followed New York Times columnists. Pricing for this product was less than $50 per year, but in today's blogging age the internet is loaded with free media and very few people were interested in paying up for newspaper content. As a result, the service's subscriber count fell to about 221,000 in June, down from 224,000 in April.

This move makes perfect sense. The age of paying for content on the internet is slowly losing its appeal to both publishers and readers. Publishers can reach a much wider audience and oftentimes monetize users at nearly the same rates with today's advertising solutions while readers are happy to receive the free information.