Another newspaper is circling the bowl — this time, the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two papers in that Arizona city. Gannett says it will croak the 139-year-old paper on March 21, just past the vernal equinox, if a buyer is not found. Good luck with that. On the block with the Citizen are the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and God knows how many other venerable fish-wrappers as the decline in circulation not only continues, but accelerates.

The Boston Globe is lopping off heads in the newsroom, as are the Casper Star-Tribune and Billings Gazette. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, meanwhile, has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition.

New York Magazine is taking a different tack, informing its core writing staff that their paychecks will be getting a little skinnier, a concept that I expect to quickly gain traction with publishers nationwide, if it hasn’t already.

Interestingly, New York is also reducing its use of free-lancers like yours truly, a trend that will not please folks like Eric Butterman, who with JournalismJobs.com teaches an online course on free-lance pitching and writing. I find this tactic slightly surprising, considering what a bargain free-lancers are, providing as we do our own hardware and software, office space, health care and retirement accounts. But then I was shocked when my buddy Hal, another free-lancer, got the hook at The Pueblo Chieftain. Good and cheap do not always reside in the same person, but they did in his case.

Still, if you have any staff left, it must be cheaper to squeeze ’em like a nearly flat tube of toothpaste than it is to hire a free-lancer, no matter how reasonably priced he or she is. If the person thus squeezed runs completely dry, well, there’s a line of the poor sonsabitches stretching down the block and around the corner. Pick one, any one, if you have any budget left. Squeeze, discard, repeat.

Hal and I have been trying to figure out what the future of newspapers might look like, and Hal has suggested that a functional model might blend a frequently updated, hard-news website with a free, once-a-week hard-copy edition, perhaps published on Thursdays, focusing on opinion, analysis and what’s happening on the weekend. It sounds something like this vision of the upmarket newspaper from Philip Meyer, published last fall in American Journalism Review.

But then you’re still dealing with all that old-media dreck, like newsprint, printing presses and circulation, plus an online audience conditioned to getting everything for free. So I remain unconvinced, despite Bryan Appleyard’s witty take: “(T)he only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of  pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”

What’s your take on the Newspaper 2.0? Leave your thoughts in comments.

Judas Priest, a guy can’t log onto Al Gore’s Intertubes any more without seeing a newspaper sinking into the tar pits. This time it’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which parent company The Hearst Corp. says is headed for a sale, web-only operation or closure in 60 days. To add insult to injury, the P-I was beaten on the story by a TV station.

The newspaper business can be a very small world. P-I managing editor David McCumber and I briefly worked together at The Arizona Daily Star, where he oversaw a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the University of Arizona football program and I was a copy editor (and not a very good one). He later worked with Hunter S. Thompson while at the San Francisco Examiner, if memory serves, editing “Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream.” And P-I editorial cartoonist David Horsey used to flog me in the annual SPJ awards when I worked for the Corvallis Gazette-Times as a slightly improved copy editor and occasional editorial cartoonist.

The G-T published my first cycling cartoon, way back in 1982. Interestingly, it was not a cyclist-friendly cartoon. I spent a lot of time strolling the Marys and Willamette river trails in various states of consciousness and considered the omnipresent speeding bike weenies to be a pain in the butt.

Twenty-seven years and three newspaper jobs later, they are the source of my beer and skittles. Here’s hoping McCumber, Horsey and the rest of the P-I staff prove equally fortunate and land on their feet in some other, better place where they can continue to practice their craft.