Here are a few blurbs to give you today’s look at the wreckage of the newspaper industry:

From the Associated Press:

The Los Angeles Times plans to cut 250 positions, including 150 jobs in the print and online news departments, amid a continuing industrywide slump in ad sales, the paper’s editor said Wednesday.

The decline in advertising, fueled by a weak real estate market, has boosted the copy-to-ads ratio above the industry target of 50-50, giving readers more stories than they can digest, while the paper competes for attention with the Internet and TV, editor Russ Stanton said.

As a result, the paper will undergo a makeover by the fall that will cut pages by 15 percent per week, eliminate some sections and trim story length, Stanton said.

“The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don’t have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day,” Stanton said. “We’re going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter.”

SIDEBAR: Perhaps they should be PICKIER, and not “more picky,” about their grammar. Maybe that would make their stories easier to read. END SIDEBAR

Also from the Associated Press:

Journal Sentinel Inc. will cut about 10 percent of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s 1,300 full-time employees due to the slump in ad sales affecting the entire newspaper industry.

It’s not clear how many newsroom jobs will be lost at the Journal Sentinel, said Amy Rinard, president of the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild and a reporter at the paper. It will depend on which employees take buyouts ... Layoffs will be done by the end of the year.

Journal Sentinel’s stock fell 26 cents, or 5.4 percent, to close at $4.52 Wednesday, and slid to a multi-year low of $4.39 earlier in the session after the announcement of the loss of about 130 jobs. Its shares have ranged from $4.45 to $13.53 in the past 52 weeks ...

The cuts are the latest in a string for the paper. Last October, the Journal Sentinel cut about 50 jobs through buyouts, offering severance packages to employees with 10 years or more of service.

By June, the paper was down 107 positions.

And one more from the AP:

The Tampa Tribune plans to lay off 11 newsroom employees this week and another 10 by early fall as part of a one-fifth cut in the news staff ...

Media General Inc., the Tampa Tribune‘s parent company, is reducing its entire work force by nearly 11 percent. Between 250 and 260 jobs are being cut at the Tribune, WFLA-TV, TBO.com, Centro Grupo de Comunicacion and several smaller newspapers in Florida.

WFLA said it would cut 10 news positions by the end of the year.

Richmond, Va.-based Media General, which also publishes the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch and the Winston-Salem (NC) Journal, expects annual savings of $40 million from the cuts, which began in early 2007.

Note that the headline of its own—shorter—version of the story (which, coincidentally, does not carry a byline), the Tribune says it will “trim news staffing.”

Ah, euphemisms.

But AP writers typically have stronger backgrounds in newswriting than public relations: “The industry has seen hundreds of layoffs as wary advertisers cut back on ads and newspaper costs soar. Half a dozen major newspapers announced layoffs last week totaling about 900 jobs,” one story noted.

Just another day in the disappearing industry.

Tomorrow, I’ll share with you the choice words one of my newspaper friends had to say about this trend. Trust me: You won’t want to miss it.