Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry. Rich cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper. What started as layoffs and buyouts, are edging towards closures and bankruptcies. While the Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, it has also allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.

Newspaper web sites attract more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 – a record, at a 12% increase over a year ago. Recent analysis shows that 40% of all Internet users visit a newspaper site. The Web is the future, yet newspapers are hemorrhaging money because online advertising accounts for only approximately 10% of total ad revenue.

The Web format, in its current form, will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation’s biggest papers. Contributors to sites like The Huffington Post make low to no pay because they can afford to work for free unlike average journalists who work for wire services like the Associated Press.

The East London Advertiser is celebrating more than 140 years of publishing. It began life as the Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser in the days before the County of London was even set up. The first edition, on November 17, 1866, reported the typhus epidemic sweeping the parish of Bethnal Green and the fight by environmentalists of the day to save the new Victoria Park from the gas companies’ encroachment.

The editorial spoke of creating a paper solely devoted to the interests of the ratepayers, especially its justice and impartiality. The paper promised its early readers to campaign on issues of the day: Parliamentary reform, rates reform and preservation of open spaces for the people. The big stories down the decades included the 1888 Whitechapel Murders, when Jack the Ripper was on the loose targeting prostitutes in the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The same year saw the matchmakers’ strike at Bryant and May’s factory in Bow.

The Advertiser covered all the big events of the day, from the opening of Tower Bridge in 1994 to the death Queen Victoria in 1901. The paper celebrated their own centenary in November 1966, then continued reporting past the Millennium and into the 21^st century, marking their 140^th birthday in 2006.

United Kingdom tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, called in an army of designers to give the 105-year-old publication a fresh new look. The new look is an attempt to end a 40-year identity crisis brought on by the relaunch of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun in 1969. Since then, The Daily Mirror has struggled to define itself against its old rival.

The Mirror’s associate editor led the paper through the 18-month design process, with Trinity Mirror hiring Spanish design firm Cases Associats. The paper held focus groups and found that while loyal readers could see the difference in appearance and values compared with The Sun, occasional buyers could not. Some have called The Mirror’s new look magazine-like with its entirely different fonts, headings, full-color pages, icons, graphics, and more coherent features section such as Your Life, a women’s features section modeled on women’s glossy magazines.

The Mirror’s web site is also being redeveloped and is expected to be relaunched this year. The paper’s design team now treats stories according to what is deemed “important” and “interesting.” For lighter human interest and showbiz stories, the headlines are italics and pictures are bigger. For serious, hard new, color is still used but the headlines are straighter and there is more text.

The Sunday Times will launch its long-awaited full-color redesign on July 6, 2008 with a new masthead, new font and updated slogan. It will also introduce a redesign across all sections of the paper except for the Sunday Times Magazine and the Culture magazine. They will be redesigned at a later date.

According to the Sunday Times editor, the changes will make the paper bolder and brighter while still retaining its authority. The plan is to use color to rid the paper of its greyness and revitalize the newsprint sections. The masthead has been tweaked, maintaining the paper’s traditional look and the typeface will be a customized font designed for the paper.

The redesign was masterminded by Al Trivino, the art director for News International projects, and Tristan Davies, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday who was hired as Sunday Times executive editor in February. The paper will also introduce blogs by some of its star columnists on the TimesOnline website. The paper’s price would not rise in the near future. This redesign came after the Mail on Sunday relaunched at the start of 2008 in color.

The Mail Online is the umbrella site for United Kingdom newspaper, the Daily Mail and features a mix of news, celebrity and controversy. It has become the highest circulating UK newspaper online. It marks a rising trend with online newspapers becoming “category plays,” targeting sectors of the market, such as entertainment, news, video or business. The modern newspaper website can now include everything from bingo games to nearly full blown television reporting.

Circulation figures show that global unique users of Mail Online have doubled since May 2007. The site overtook telegraph.co.uk and guardian.co.uk in May to become the UK’s most popular national newspaper site, with 18.7 million unique users – a 100% year-on-year growth and a 3.7% increase over April. Celebrity and sensation are likely to have been the key to Mail Online’s growth.

Celebrity and entertainment stories are increasingly international but of little use if they can’t be sold to advertisers. Mail Online had 5,090,981 users from the UK, who can be served by UK advertising, or 27.2% of its audience. This is the lowest UK audience for any national newspaper site. Broadsheet sites like this are carrying what are known as “link-bait” stories that editors know will get traffic because they are sensational or funny. Hollywood gossip site TMZ.com has more than 10.2 million users.