• MO | Meg O'Brien is associate business editor at the Chicago Tribune. She's dabbled in online, keeps her hand in design, did the metro reporting thing and teaches occassionally at Medill. E-mail her.


• DS | A copy editor at The Daily News Hole, a Midwestern major metro daily. As an 18- to 34-year-old, he is highly sought after by media outlets and advertisers. When not shoveling copy, he enjoys traveling, cooking and spending quality time with his iBook or TiVo.

Even journalists are out there blogging their tales of self-loathing.

Meanwhile, newspapers are spending some serious money exploring ways to hold on to readers. The percentage of U.S. adults who read a newspaper on any given day has dropped from nearly 80 percent in 1964 to 54 percent in 1997. Don't have more recent numbers, but we have not made notable progress, if any, in reversing the trend.

Interesting that the industry's major studies and the small sampling of weblogs above come to pretty much the same conlcusions. Readers get annoyed with us when we: are inky and smudgy, rehash old news, are too thick and too hard to wade through, behave unethically, overwrite and waste people's time, aren't engaging or interesting or don't deliver on time. They especially dislike us when we call at dinner to ask them if they want to subscribe.

Columnist Dave Barry was able to gather some additional free market research from an 8th grade class in this classic column on newspaper readership and young people. These students advised us to:

• ''I don't like reading about death, war and government. Write about things that we can relate to.''
• ''Make the newspaper more humorous, it is soooo boring. Talk about skateboarding, it is so huge now you don't even know.''
• ''Talk about not boring stuff. Like the peace thing. It's very important, I understand that. But it's boring.''
•  ''When you talk about this stuff make it interesting. Like when we kill a terrorist, don't just say he died, say he blew up in a million pieces."

The paper's Big Idea is to toss a CD containing supplemental information in with the paper -- which makes the answer to these questions a resounding "no."

What with all the boasting, The Guardian's plan to circulate an additional CD-based "section" in the paper the last Sunday of each month at first blush almost seemed like an innovation. But, of course, it's not.

The disc, which will be called "The Month," will contain extra material, including 25,000 words of text, movie and music clips, filmed interviews, DVD offers, games previews and listings -- things the newspaper can already provide online for a lot less money.

The contest solicits entries for prototypes of ideas that would make newspapers better. Some interesting ideas have emerged during the five years the contest has been around, but the well appears to have run dry.

This year's pickings were slim. In fact, there were no winners in the professional category because "the judges felt none of the entries exhibited the innovation necessary for recognition." What's worse, then contest has been cancelled for the future.

How depressing is that? Nobody working in the business had one idea this year to make newspapers better? Sell any stock you have in non-diversified, convergence-averse newspaper companies -- we're doomed.

In looking back at the winners, I do see a common, alarming theme: news put on other products, not newspapers. Students and professionals suggested news on pens, watches and ATM receipts. One contest entry may have even been the inspiration for the short-lived, widely mocked CueCat experiment.