Matt Drudge writes, "Threatened By The Internet, Time Magazine Slims Down":

TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead.

"I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda," explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor.

NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME's first weekend parade:

"At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division... In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine has been cut by almost 20 percent, the street date has been moved, and at the end of the month, the standard editorial model -- a centralized, well-paid cadre processing every bit of copy that comes in the door -- will be kaput..."

Carr explains: 'A tremendous amount of effort has been expended on TIME's new Web site, which makes its debut Monday."

Carr knocks the print magazine: "In its current state, a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper, TIME magazine is not much of a thing to behold."

Not that the New York Times is the picture of health of course, either financially or in terms of flawless journalistic credibility. The Feiler Faster Principle and the Long Tail of the Internet have both radically reshaped the media environment that both of these two old liberal warhorses compete in.

James Lileks once described how that world used to work:

The News was a venerable symbol of childhood’s World of Authority, like Life magazine and those boring but somehow important “White Paper” documentaries on TV. The news was handed down, not passed around. The news was bestowed, not shared.

The news wasn’t out there 24-7, swirling around, waiting for you to open a window; it came in predictable intervals in varying portions. The radio news in the morning came at eight, brought to us by Northwest Orient (gonnngggg) Airlines; nothing happened in the world for the rest of the day. Paul Harvey summed up the general pith of the global gist at noon, but he rarely broke news. (He will, nevertheless, outlast them all. Because he's radio.) The paper came at four. It was a careful, measured thing, having had all day to think about matters. Then came the evening news: black and white, bare sets, Authority Men in grey suits with black glasses and the sober look of judges who had left the robe at home for a day. Nothing happened for the rest of the night; the ten o’clock news managed to squeeze the entire world through the tiny aperture of All Things Fargo. The world, in general, kept its distance – thanks to Cronkite and the AP wire.

In this context, a Special Bulletin would make you soil your drawers. They didn’t break in for anything. When you heard the words “We interrupt this program,” the best you could hope for was an assassination.

The news was like oil – pumped from select locations, refined by a few big companies.

Unless you're in the demographic that's utterly frightened by the Internet (and you're not, since you're reading this), that's not at all how you get your news these days, is it?

Of course, it's not like these trends haven't been continuously predicted since about forty years ago. But as I've noted before, the mass media seems utterly resistant at times to new trends. But in the 1990s, as the rate of media change began to dramatically accelerate, the legacy media seemed to think that attacking newcomers to the information sphere was a better plan than actually preparing for the current environment.

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus:

Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ...

In the meantime...