Let’s look at Pennsylvania to see what happens when a budget process goes wacky and regular people get all wiggins when everything from health care clinics to educational programs aren’t funded. Pennsylvania hit the amazing benchmark today of going 100 days without a state budget for this year, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. For that dubious honor, that state’s governor and legislative leaders earned this description: “It reminds me of a class of fourth graders,” one Pennsylvania lawmaker told the Inquirer. “Actually, they are more like kindergartners fighting over their toys. . . . I have lost my sense of trust here, and I don’t trust what anybody is saying.”

I don’t think we’re headed to that place in New Mexico, but let’s let Pennsylvania stand as a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, in the media world, the BBC Trust issued a new set of editorial guidelines that place limits on what editorial staff can say online, covering everything from bad language to impartiality, the Guardian reports. The guidelines state that,”Nothing should be written by [BBC] journalists and presenters that would not be said on-air.” The BBC’s move continues a trend as media outlets try to get a handle on how the media interacts with the public online. It’s an ongoing process, and look for more and more media outlets addressing similar issues in the near future.

Russia’s crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya is still remembered for her assassination three years ago, which some believe was backed by the Kremlin. Her murder now has become a symbol of the challenges journalists face in Russia when they try to do their job, The Christian Science Monitor reports today. The paper writes, “The still unsolved murder of Russia’s best-known investigative journalist raised suspicions of Kremlin involvement — which have yet to be laid to rest — and highlighted the plight of Russian media workers, who often face intimidation and violence when they attempt to do their jobs.”

A developer on Wednesday moved a step closer to taking over the Chicago Sun-Times after the paper’s largest union agreed to changes in work and health care rules, the Chicago Tribune reports. Jim Tyree’s bid to own the Sun-Times has been this week’s drama in the world of newspaper journalism. No other bidder materialized Monday to take over Chicago’s second-largest paper, but Tyree had said his bid of $26.5 million was conditioned on the paper’s unions agreeing to certain changes. Tyree appears to have gotten at least most of what he wanted with when four four bargaining groups ratified a Wednesday afternoon agreement between leaders of the Chicago Newspaper Guild and Sun-Times management, the Trib reported. Among other things, the contract locks in for three years the 15 percent benefit cuts that workers accepted earlier this year and freezes the company’s pension plans, which will be replaced by 401(k)-like plans; management agreed to provide eight weeks of severance for workers who lose their jobs in the first six months after Tyree gains control of the company; and the company will void seniority rules, as Tyree had demanded, and it gains the ability to transfer unionized editorial workers between its publications, the Tribune reported.

On the scandal-monger front, colleagues at CBS are dumbfounded by the extortion effort authorities say Robert Joel Halderman thought up and tried to execute against late night talk show host David Letterman. Halderman appears to be a well-liked and respected CBS producer who, on the face of it, seemed to like the reporter/producer’s life. One co-worker described Halderman as having “a big personality with a penchant for running to the hottest news spots — the Falkland Islands, Bosnia and Somalia. Another colleague told the New York Times: “Joe went to every nasty place there was.” But he also had a checkered love life, another colleague tells the Times.

“He lived on the edge,” said the colleague, who asked not to be identified because of the limit CBS has imposed on comments about the case. “He had a bit of a checkered love life.”

Meanwhile, making a jump to high culture,Herta Müller has won the Nobel prize for literature, the New York Times reports. I haven’t read this writer, but as nearly always the Nobel introduces the broader world to a writer who has written powerfully and compellingly about the human condition. In this case, Müller “has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile,” as the Times described it. She is an ethnic German and the first German to win the Nobel since Günter  Grass won in 1999. Grass is another writer worth picking up. His most famous work, The Tin Drum, became a international best seller and was made into a movie.  But my personal favorite is Dog Years, which is the third book in Grass’s Danzig Trilogy.

This from a guy who is the former editor of the Twin Cities Reader and Washington City Paper, two free weeklies. And in a newspaper that abandoned its own failed pay-to-read-the-opinon plan.Why did the paper ditch Times Select? From its own story on the subject:

… Many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Dig that? People come to news sites now from search engines and they won’t pay just to read one article. But if you open it up, they’ll be looking at an ad. Yes, online ads are pretty cheap, but the Times decided it was worth it. In 2007, when it stopped charging for that content, the Times had 13 million unique visitors per month, by far the largest number of readers of any other newspaper site.

Carr acknowledges that charging for access will alienate lots of readers. But he suggests the solution may be a tiered plan of access, with some free content, some available at a lower rate and more available at a higher rate. Sounds like a hard sell to me.

Meanwhile, The Christian Science Monitor, which recently stopped publishing a print edition to focus solely on online news, has a story today by Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor, who suggests, “Professors could rescue newspapers.” His idea:

… It’s getting too expensive to gather news. So here’s a novel idea: Let’s get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge. Remember, most professors aren’t paid for what they write now. When I publish an article in an academic journal, I don’t earn a cent. But I also don’t engage more than a handful of readers, mainly fellow specialists in my own field. It wasn’t always that way. A hundred years ago, many of the leading lights in the social sciences and the humanities wrote for the popular press. If we want to revive the press – as well as our own struggling disciplines – we might look to their example.

I’m sure there are some professors who would gladly go along with this, but others who are sick and tired of writing for free! Still, Zimmerman makes the idea of professors as writers sound appealing:

Economists could report on the recession, of course, providing on-the-ground analyses of bank failures, housing foreclosures, and more. Biologists could cover climate change and other environmental issues, English professors could write about the book and film industries, and anthropologists could send dispatches from faraway lands.

… Law professors could cover knotty questions before the Supreme Court, ranging from the detention of suspected terrorists to church-state separation. Medical school professors could describe the latest advances in patient treatment, architecture scholars could write about design, and professors of education could report on school reform.

Then again, how many professors have the time or interest to sit in city council meetings all night or follow Senate proceedings for 10 hours on a Saturday or cultivate sources for a series of stories on corruption at the regional housing authority? Maybe some. (Call us, guys!)

The Albuquerque Journal had a great cartoon by John Trever today (of course it’s not available online yet), slamming the Legislature for not opening conference committees. The committees work out the differences between bills passed in the House and Senate, and are closed to the public, despite the pleadings of ethics-reform advocates.

The cartoon shows a donkey (read: Democrats) poking his head out of the door of the conference committee, telling some regular guy: “Laws are like sausages…You really don’t want to watch them being made!” And the guy is saying, “Maybe not, but I sure as heck want the meat inspector to…” while jabbing his thumb at a man wearing a white butchers’ coat and a press badge (read: Us).

As he notes in somewhat understated fashion, it’s been a tough few days for newspapers and magazines, an industry in which I labored — mostly contentedly — for close to two decades.

Here’s the rundown that has Carr doing his best Chicken Little impression.

The inimitable Christian Science Monitor, which has published for a century, announced it will become a Web-only paper starting in 2009.

Time Inc., publisher of such identifiable brands as TIME and Sports Illustrated, has announced it will eliminate 600 jobs.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., the 15th largest paper in the nation, will reduce its editorial department by 40 percent.

Gannett, which publishes USA Today and dozens of newspapers across the country, announced that it is cutting 10 percent of its staff — or, as Carr notes, up to 3,000 jobs.

And the Tribune Company let it be known that it will cut 75 jobs from the Los Angeles Times, once the possessor of one of the most muscular newsrooms in the country.

Clearly the sky is falling — for old media.

For someone like myself who worked at newspapers for most of my professional life, it’s painful to watch, this drawn-out death by a thousand cuts, whether they be layoffs, buyouts or positions going unfilled. First and foremost, some of those jobs being eliminated may well be filled by people I know. And secondly, the timing of these announcements possesses a hint of the ironic. There’s an historic presidential election, an economic collapse, two U.S. wars, corruption aplenty by public officials and a dramatic story around every corner it seems these days. There’s more than enough news to go around for everyone.

And yet … and yet … we wake up every other week to news like this.

As someone who now makes his professional home in the new media, my hope is that we can help fill in the gaps left by a newspaper/magazine industry in retreat. I say that as someone who sees tremendous opportunities in new media. But I say it also as someone who respects the service the media has performed — and still performs. And that is to inform a sometimes grateful, often distracted public. The American people need a vigorous press, if only to uncover what’s going on. We in the new media need to step up to the challenge. Otherwise, we all suffer.