I'm not sure if the NYT Business Section editors intentionally set a theme for coverage this fine Monday morning, but planned or not, the business section is a great look at the challenges and opportunities facing journalism today.

First up,  David Carr examines "The Wire" as a love song to the way newspapers used to be, and along the way nails the singular challenge that must be face:

But there are other villains in the story of the daily newspaper that do not lend themselves as well to television. A secular shift in consumer habits and a corresponding outflow of advertising has put many papers back on their heels. Mr. Simon and “The Wire” flick at those broader challenges, but the series mostly shows an institution collapsing from within.

Then, Richard Perez-Pena covers Michael Yon, a non-journalist who now grudgingly accepts the moniker and has been blogging from Iraq for three years. He's not on the staff at any publication, and but is doing great work.

Mr. Yon, however, does not work for any organization; no news outlet pays him for the hundreds of dispatches and photos he has produced. He publishes his work on his own Web site, michaelyon-online.com (some will appear again in a book set for release in April), and he also posts submissions from military people serving in Iraq. He says contributions from his readers have paid most of his costs, though he declines to say how much they have given.

The Internet has fostered such citizen journalism, shaking up ideas about where news comes from, but few have taken on the expense and danger of working in a war zone. Mr. Yon’s daily expenses are small, but he has paid tens of thousands of dollars for computers, cameras, phones and body armor.

The question I have about Mr. Yon is how sustainable his work is, the decision to not declare how he is funded worries me a bit. Transparency would be good here.

Next up: Noam Cohen writes about the growing use of Twitter in campaign reporting, noting that Slat'es John Dickerson was the first to really use the tool, and examining some of the pros/cons, along with who else is coming along for the ride.

Some might consider the idea of a barrage of text-messaged snippets about the presidential election the final dreadful realization of the news media’s obsession with “sound bites.” And spending time with the Twittered campaign reporting can mean wallowing in skin-deep observations, anonymous trashing of candidates and more than you would want to know about the food and travel conditions for the reporting class.

But it is genuine, and at times enlightening, which is more than you can say for the candidates themselves, who have also taken to using Twitter to update their supporters. (The septuagenarian Ron Paul, for example, is an ardent Twitter user, it appears, though he has a penchant for exclamation points that would make a teenager blush. Typical Ron Paul Twitter message: “Thus far in the race, I’ve received more votes than Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. Freedom is popular!”)

I continue to be a bit resistant to Twitter, mostly because I already feel too fragmented and short-termish about how I receive information, but there is no doubt that it's a growing tool for dissemination of information, when it works (see: MacWorld).

On a bad note, the editor of the LA Times, chosen, some say, to push job cuts, resigned from that once great paper. Here is the important data:

The Times had a newsroom staff of more than 1,100 people at the start of this decade, but the number has declined to below 900, officials say. Its weekday circulation has dropped to about 800,000, from 1.1 million.

The difference between the LAT and most other publications is simple: it had dreams of being a national paper, and is now caught in the terrible middle, not doing a great job of being a national paper and not being a great local paper, so is missing on both sides of the ability to sell ads.

Finally, Perez-Pena (wow, three stories here!) looks what the Atlantic Monthly is doing with its web site, and mentions the most important word of all: Profit.

Readership will get another boost starting Tuesday, when TheAtlantic.com will abolish the fire wall that has allowed only subscribers to the print magazine to see most of its articles online. It will make its archive accessible, too.

Executives hope that a rise in traffic brings to The Atlantic, one of the nation’s oldest publications, something it hasn’t had in many years: a profit.

Think back three or four years, when editors and writers and publishers were in denial about the challenges they face. The challenges are still there -- but the explosion of new things and new tactics employed by individuals, corporations and communicators of all stripes indicates, to me at least, that the future is looking bright(er).

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