1. The newspaper layoff trend:

Gannett Co., Inc, the biggest U.S. newspaper publisher, announced recently that it will chop 1,000 positions, or roughly 3% of its total work force at the newspapers.

Some 600 people will lose their jobs, according to the company.

2. The "Let's-take-care-of-our-planet" trend.

A quarter of a million trees are cut per year to provide paper for just ONE major Sunday paper.

Paper costs us in several ways; an entire forest of trees gets chopped down in order to provide one Sunday morning edition.

Manufacturing 1 ton of newsprint, which is enough to create approximately 280,000 broadsheet pages, requires the contents of 12 mature trees.

So let's break it down.

Take, for instance, the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which averages 172 pages and has a circulation of 606,698.

That means that 4,472 cut down trees' worth of paper every week, which works out to a whopping 232,544 trees per year.

(Keep in mind, this is just for Minneapolis--not a very large paper.)

Think of the trees used for the top three selling U.S. papers which are (measured in daily circulation): USA Today, 2,524,965; The Wall Street Journal, 2,068,439 and The New York Times, 1,627,062.

Sadly, many foreign papers have much larger circulations than several of the U.S. Papers put together.

3. They "Hey!- NBC-Revolutionized-the-Olympics" factor

P.I. (Pre Internet), America was fed only those Olympic events selected by the network.

In a bold move, NBC said, "No more!"

Using the cable and the Internet, NBC virtually streamed the entirety of the Olympics to the world.

The amount of hits of people tracking NBC coverage on-line are in the multi-millions.

And people were very pleased, because they got to see any event they wanted to.

4. The "Hey! How-'bout-them-blogs-from-the-conventions" factor!

Amazingly, this election, most of the news from the Democratic and Republican conventions will be published in blogs!

Google is sponsoring a headquarters for about 500 bloggers at the Democratic convention, and will do the same for the Republican convention.

This means that non news people (the bloggers) will be out and about with little digital cameras taking pictures and movies and then going back to the Google center and putting up in picture and prose what they're seeing--in their own words.

This is quite a bit different than networks presenting their "official" pontifications on network news.

"...The times they are a-changin'..." Bob Dylan circa 1963