Gannett (NYSE:GCI) announced it May revenue results. Nothing in them was surprising.

According to the country's largest newspaper company, "Publishing advertising revenues in May were 14.3 percent lower." Classified ad revenue fell even more, almost 20%. Auto, real estate, and jobs marketing have begun to leave newspapers and financial trouble within those industries has cut their ad budgets to the bone.

The most disturbing piece of new is the report was that at USA Today, advertising revenue was 18.4 percent lower on paid ad pages of 260 versus 324 last year.

USA Today is part newspaper, part daily magazine. It uses color and graphics in a way that is closer to Time, Newsweek, or BusinessWeek than to a typical daily paper. It is also a national product, not local like other papers.

If the country's largest paper, and one of only two papers distributed widely in the USA is in such trouble, it may be a sign that the print ad downturn is moving quickly from newspapers to magazines. Some weekly publications like BusinessWeek are seeing double digit ad drops.

Newspapers may not be the last part of the print publication industry to fall apart.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

When I go to a Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) or a Borders (NYSE: BGP) store, I really can't tell much of a difference. That's not a bad thing – at least for me. Hey, I have lots of choices – and not just books.

But for investors, the situation is a problem. So, instead of fighting, why not B&N and Borders join forces?

Well, according to the Wall Street Journal [a paid publication], there are signs of a possible deal as B&N has put together a team to explore the option.

However, there is a big hurdle: antitrust regulators. The federal government will scrutinize the deal heavily given that Barnes & Noble is #1 and Borders is #2 in the US marketplace.

Barnes & Noble will argue that the market is much different now with online operators like Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN).

And timing is another key. After all, if there's a change in the White House, antitrust enforcement is likely to get tougher.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

In the last few days, bookselling giant Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) has made a few more enemies in the publishing world by forcing the little-known group of print-on-demand (POD) publishers to either submit to using its POD subsidiary, Booksurge, or risk being prohibited from selling on its industry-leading website. No matter the cost and complications of breaking off relationships with other vendors, reformatting books and a host of other problems, Amazon laid down the law, saying convert -- and do it quickly -- or face the consequences.

What's more disconcerting is that an official press release was made public only after smaller publishers like Angela Hoy of Booklocker.com started writing publicly about blackmail-type phone calls from Booksurge representatives. Fearful of losing their businesses literally overnight, many POD publishers such as iUniverse and Lulu have capitulated while strong willed publisher PublishAmerica refused to give in -- and was quickly made an example of when Amazon disabled the buy buttons on their book titles!

As an author selling my own critically-acclaimed POD book An American Hedge Fund on Amazon, outrage has compelled me to write about how unethical and more importantly, monopolistic this all is.

The U.S economy may be in for a period of sluggishness (we hope it's just cyclical sluggishness), but the internet continues its growth ramp, and with this in mind, ValueClick is worth an evaluation

ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK) is one of the world's largest and most diversified online marketing services companies.
Analysts see 2008 revenue increasing 15-20% following a likely 15-17% rise in 2007, as the internet continues to grab an increasing share of marketing budgets. Analysts also expect VCLK to add to its corporate customer base.

Meanwhile, the company's revenue mix remains favorable, and operating margins appear to have bottomed in 2007. Further, there's ample room for VCLK to broaden its international footprint. The Reuters F2007/F2008 EPS consensus estimates for VCLK are $0.71/$0.83.

A piece in today's New York Times reports on the bleak outlook for the newspaper industry. Last year, brought the second-worst decline in ad revenue in more than 60 years, with only 2001, a recession, coming in worse.

Essentially, newspaper advertising broke its cyclical mold -- booming and fading with the broader economy. There was a substantial decline in 2007 unaccompanied by broader economic woes. Print circulation is down, and according to the Times online revenue can't make up the gap: "... for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an Internet reader. Newspapers need to narrow that gap, but the rise in Internet revenue slowed sharply last year."

The problem for most newspapers is that they are finding themselves without much of a moat on the internet -- Being the major newspaper in a small city is very different from competing with literally everyone else for web traffic. News aggregators such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), and RSS feeds are probably killing newspapers.

Warren Buffett was once a big fan of small newspapers but unfortunately, all the reasons he liked them are no longer true: They don't have monopolies anymore. You can set up My Yahoo! to deliver you local news and there's just no reason to buy a newspaper for national news with the wealth of online resources available.

Newspapers aren't dead yet but they're definitely dying and I can't think of anything that could possibly reverse it.

Investors/readers know that higher-profile companies obtain most of the business and financial world's headlines. Still, that's not to say that lower-profile means lower profits, and there's no better proof of this than IHS.

IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS) publishes technical documents for clients in the energy, defense, aerospace, construction, electronics, and automotive sectors, and distributes documents in several formats (Internet, intranet, extranet, CD-ROM).

Analysts really like IHS's energy unit (53% of revenue) which provides data on exploration, development, production, and transportation activities. As one might sense in an oil-hungry world, energy data has taken on added importance with oil's rise in value. The Reuters FY 2008/FY 2009 EPS consensus estimates for IHS are $1.94 to $2.37.

McClatchy Co. (NYSE: MNI) Chief Executive Gary Pruitt was considered by Wall Street a pretty savvy operator, but his reputation has taken a nosedive following his ill-advised decision to acquire Knight Ridder last year. Now, he seems perplexed as to why Wall Street isn't as bullish on newspapers as he thinks it should be.

"Certainly newspaper stocks are out of favor on Wall Street," he told Forbes.com. "That's happened before, and that will happen again. But we're not going to go away."

Then, he defended the Knight Ridder deal, saying that it helped boost revenue and cash flow, and strengthens the company in the long-term. The problem, as he noted, is that investors aren't buying his logic. Shares of the publisher of the Sacramento Bee, Kansas City Star and Miami Herald, have tumbled more than 70% this year, underperforming rivals including Gannett Co. (NYSE: GCI) and New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT), which dropped 40% and 30% respectively.

Billboard reported yesterday that Radiohead and long-time publisher Warner/Chappell Music, a division of Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), have created "a unique 'all rights' digital licensing service for the alternative rock band's new album In Rainbows." This arrangement is in anticipation of the upcoming physical release of the album, following the two months it was available on a special website set up by Radiohead, which ended yesterday.

According to Billboard, Warner/Chappell set up a "global one-stop shop" which allows potential rights users to acquire the rights to the album from one location. In queue with Radiohead's initial decision to release the album without the music labels, this "one-stop shop" effectively removes those same entities from the rights process and keeps direct control with the band and the publisher. Jane Dyball, the senior VP of Warner/Chappell for European legal and business affairs, told Billboard that the arrangement is an "'experimental solution,' which should benefit Radiohead while 'providing all their licensees with a new, highly flexible service.'"

Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), on the eve of a one-year anniversary which saw a unique publishing consortium between Yahoo and large online newspaper publishing sources, has added 17 more newspapers to its stable as of late this weekend.

Yahoo is trying to target the news-seeking crowd that wants local, flavorful content instead of generic, global (or national) news ahead of anything that competitor Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) may be able to offer. Although physical newspaper circulation has been declining for years now as news readers shift to the web, there is still a need for local content that online news aggregators are not fulfilling. Well, according to many of my news-reading relatives, anyway.

Yahoo! announced that The Columbus Dispatch and 16 regional newspapers owned by The New York Times Co. have joined its online publishing partner group. Those additions bring Yahoo!'s total to 415 daily newspapers and about 140 weekly newspapers.

Yahoo! fans are probably cheering this effort, as it could seriously turn into a much-needed victory for Yahoo in its effort to remain relevant for the millions of customers using it for news reading every day. There are still some large partners to recruit -- like The Washington Post and The New York Times -- but Yahoo is easily making progress here.

Playboy Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: PLA), much like its founder Hugh Hefner, continues to show signs of spunk. The adult-entertainment company today reported better-than-expected third quarter profit, helped by strong licensing sales and international TV revenue.

Shares of the Chicago-based company are up about 10% over the past six months. Playboy is gaining new pop culture relevance thanks to "The Girls Next Door" and that will be further helped whenever the big budget movie about Hefner gets made.

Playboy, though, is a small fish in a very big media pond. Net income for the quarter was $2.6 billion, or 8 cents per share, compared with $1.1 million, or 3 cents, a year earlier, beating Wall Street consensus forecasts of 6 cents. The revenue figure of $82.8 million -- only a 1% gain from the year-earlier period -- missed analysts' estimates of $86 million.

NPR, television, the internet, The Daily Show -- consumers get their news from lots of sources these days, and the widespread accessibility to information is having an effect on the traditional newspaper business. Gannett Inc. (NYSE: GCI), which publishes about 90 daily papers including the nation's largest newspaper, USA Today, is feeling the ill effects of such competition.

Earlier today, GCI reported that its third-quarter earnings dropped 11% to $234 million, or $1.01 per share. Revenue was down 4% during the latest reporting period, to $1.81 billion. Newspaper advertising revenue slipped 6% to $1.19 billion and broadcasting revenue was off 3.4% to $189.5 million. Gannett owns 23 television stations in 20 markets, according to Hoover's.

With regard to analysts' expectations, the publisher's results were mixed. Earnings were a penny above Street estimates of $1.00 per share, while revenue fell just shy of the $1.82 billion figure expected on Wall Street.

Are big-time newspapers going to survive the instant news rush and immediate availability of the internet?

That question gets bandied around so much every day that some tennis balls would be jealous. But, just like other businesses that continue to be upended by the freedom of the internet, newspapers seem particularly vulnerable. The New York Times is losing readers, other big papers hide content behind "paid access" models on their own websites when anyone can get local and national news on laptops, cellphone screens and any other net-connected device, most often for free.

What do newspapers have left to contribute? A lot, actually -- but not morphing with the times is going to be the downfall of many of them. Newspapers will have to give their content away for free to survive (say some), and in return for losing that revenue, they'll have to get with it in terms of online advertising. Ask Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) about this, as the company owns a billion-dollar empire based on that very principle.

As subscribers (paid ones, mind you) leave in droves, what's to become of many newspaper publishers that rehash the same AP wire stories, mix in local color and commentary and pass off this combo to increasingly leery customers? Some will go the way of the dinosaur unless change is made, as in now. Others, like the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, will most likely figure out how to strike a fine balance of excellent, journalistic content and advertising support behind that content.

For others, what value is left to add to the newspaper business that the internet (like Google News) can't destroy? That's the billion-dollar question for the next decade or so. The days of loading up on wire stories while eliminating local, original content to save money are over, and smart publishers knew it years ago. The ones battling with that concept now are already in a world of hurt. Some don't even know it.

PlanetOut (NASDAQ: LGBT)'s short history as a public company has been nothing short of a miserable failure. After going public at $10 per share in late 2004, the company's stock will, barring bad news, hit a new 52-week high sometime around October 1. The problem is that that will only be because of a 1-10 reverse split announced today. The stock is currently trading at $1.42.

PlanetOut is a media company focused exclusively on the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered market, with such notable properties as The Advocate, Out, Gay.com, and RSVP Vacations. The company took on far too much debt to build its empire, and shareholders recently found themselves badly diluted when the company had to raise money through a private placement with investors including a hedge fund controlled by Bill Gates.

But don't worry too much. The company's insiders have still gotten rich, even if they've wiped out somewhere around $150 million of shareholder value. The insider transactions (very few lately... mostly when the stock was trading over $8 per share) tell the story.

Given the demographic trends that should be so favorable for an LGBT media company, there's only really one explanation for such weak performance: mismanagement. The company's CEO, Karen Magee, said as much on a recent conference call. And no, she won't be returning any of the money she's made.

But everything will be OK. Even if they can't make the company profitable, PlanetOut's management can slice the pie in different ways to raise the share price. What PlanetOut needs is not a stock-split. It needs new management.

Business 2.0 is reportedly being closed. Nope, not sold. Not being put out for more intensive outside interest review. Just closed.

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) has decided that October's issue will be Business 2.0's last, and the editor and nine others will be transferred to Fortune magazine. Time even apparently turned down an offer from Mansueto Ventures, the owner of rival magazine Fast Company, to buy the operation.

Maybe the offers were not high enough. The sad thing is that Business 2.0 was a magazine and a web site that had great proactive tech and trending articles for small and mid-sized businesses. When you read about the death of printing, there are starting to be many more casualties outside of some newspapers that aren't worth their weight. This is a sad one to see get the axe.

Jon C. Ogg produces the Special Situation Investing Newsletter for 24/7 Wall St., LLC and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

The controversial O.J. Simpson tell-all If I Did It has gone onto the presses. Its publisher, Beaufort Books, has ordered a first run of 125,000 copies, and claims to have sold almost the entire run already.

The idea of this book sickens me. I understand that, by court order, the proceeds will be awarded to the family of one of Simpson's victims, Ron Goldman. His family apparently believes that readers will see through the ruse of presenting the work as fiction, and take it as Simpson's confession.

Even if the profits are appropriately distributed, I don't think that justifies buying the work. I'm aghast to think anyone would spend a penny on this book. The mere existence of such a confession rubs our collective noses in the failure of our legal system, and the publicity surrounding its publishing is bound to benefit the author in some way. We all know what he did, and how he did it, and that he hasn't, and won't pay the price for his crime.

The best we can do now is turn our backs on him. Completely. Here's hoping Beaufort Books ends up with 125,000 remainders.