A Connecticut newspaper reporter who received a series of phone calls from a man who had taken his ex-wife hostage and was holding police at bay says her experience as a journalist helped her through the ordeal.

Karen Florin, a court reporter for The Day newspaper in New London, received the calls from ad executive Richard Shenkman on Tuesday after he took ex-wife Nancy Tyler hostage in their South Windsor home, the paper reported.

"I think my 15 years of reporting experience prepared me for this," Florin said in an e-mail interview. "Imagine being a rookie reporter and receiving phone calls from somebody who was holding a hostage? I had to try to keep him calm at the same time that I was eliciting information from him."

Shenkman called Florin four times over a three-hour period. During their conversations (see video from The Day website) Shenkman made a series of bizarre requests. At one point he asked Florin to have a priest sent to his house to give Tyler her last rites. "I don't understand why you want a priest to give her her last rites if you're not going to harm her," Florin told Shenkman.

At another point Shenkman told Florin, "I don't want to take innocent people's lives."

Florin responded, "Well then why do you have your wife there, your ex-wife?"

Shenkman held police at bay for 13 hours and threatened to blow up the house. Tyler eventually managed to escape, and Shenkman was arrested after setting the home ablaze. He is being held on $12.5 million bail.

Florin said Shenkman probably called her because she had interviewed him previously. Florin had covered the couple's divorce proceedings and Shenkman's 2007 arrest for allegedly burning down a summer house.

"I had listened to him patiently during phone calls over the years and had reported his point of view even when it was unsavory," she said. "I knew him for five or six years. I had covered a local Indian tribe, the Eastern Pequots, when he and his now ex-wife were their media reps. I then covered him when he was charged with burning down a home that was in dispute in the divorce."

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So are newspapers still profitable or not?

That’s the question lingering in the air after the Inland Press Association this week released a report that seemed to suggest the newspaper business was doing better than expected.

But some readers questioned the math and methodology used in the study, which surveyed 120 papers from 2004 to 2008, and a revised version was quickly issued.

So what’s the upshot?

Newspapers are hurting. Declining circulation, advertising and classified revenue has drained profits at U.S. dailies over the past five years. On that point, all agree.

And yet, according to the IPA, many papers are still profitable, though less so than a few years ago.

So what happened to all the dire predictions of just a few months ago that said the newspaper business was on the verge of going belly up?

“The doom and gloom stuff was somewhat overdone,” Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said in a phone interview.

The doomsayers overlooked two things, Edmonds said.

First, “A lot of the declines in ad revenues are related to a large extent to the recession, and it’s not likely that things will continue to deteriorate at this rate.”

Second, big newspaper companies that found themselves saddled with massive debt – like the Tribune Co. – got a lot of media attention, but much of the coverage ignored an important fact:

“Most individual papers are still making a reasonable profit margin – just not as much as they used to,” Edmonds said.

That’s not to say newspapers don’t have a tough road ahead. “The trends are negative and the requirements for cutting expenses have been tough on papers,” Edmonds said.

But the cost-cutting, while painful, should make newspaper companies more viable when the recession recedes, he added.

“At the end of the day, these companies are operating more leanly now,” Edmonds said. “The business will be smaller and there may be more reductions, but there should enough profit there to make a viable business for some years to come.”

And while some pundits still proclaim that the future of news is on the web and only on the web, online ad revenue – which has also waned with the recession – just isn’t enough to support most news companies.

“Display advertising to websites is there, but it’s been kind of disappointing,” Edmonds said. “The very biggest websites have big enough numbers that they get a certain amount of advertising, but with the smaller sites, there’s just not traffic to interest certain advertisers.”

The moral of the story? Online news still needs a money-making business model. And until one is developed, don’t count newspapers out just yet.

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A pop icon dies young, under tragic circumstances. Millions around the world mourn, and the media respond with nonstop coverage – TV specials, newspaper headlines, magazine covers - all of which the public devour. Ratings soar, papers fly off newsstands.

Yet others complain that it’s all too much. The news media should focus on more serious matters, they say – war, politics, the economy - anything but the life and death of a pop singer.

Sound familiar? This was the scene in the hours and days following the death of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980.

The first announcement of Lennon’s death came from ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell, who interrupted a Monday Night Football broadcast to tell viewers:

“Yes, we have to say, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City, John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”

The next evening, anchors of the big three network newscasts all led with the story of Lennon’s death, placing it ahead of serious news like the threat of a Soviet invasion of Poland and negotiations to win the freedom of the American hostages in Iran.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite began his newscast this way:

"The death of a man who sang and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland, Iran and Washington tonight."

Was Lennon’s death more important, in the grand scale of things, than the big issues of the day? Probably not. So why did the media devote such wall-to-wall coverage to it?

Because, as any good reporter can tell you, issues are important, but people – real, individual human beings - are what we find interesting.

A statistics story about the more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq? That’s important.

A profile of a young mother with two toddlers who has lost her husband in combat? That’s interesting, to say nothing of heartbreaking.

Readers may say they’re likely to read both articles, but any editor knows it’s the latter story that most will read, and remember, and comment on.

Fast-forward to today, with 500 TV channels, 24/7 cable news and the Internet. The media environment of 1980 – no MSNBC, no Facebook - seems positively Neolithic by comparison.

Yet even with the enormous glut of information available to the casual surfer or viewer, there are those who still complain that too much media attention has been devoted to the death of Michael Jackson. Indeed, nearly two-in-three Americans feel this way, according to a poll last week.

It makes no difference that even with all the Jackson coverage you still can, with the click of a mouse, call up more news, from every corner of the globe, than you could ever actually read. The complaints still come.

But the news has always been a mix of what we need to know and what we want to know. And sometimes it's not just about presidents and prime ministers, but about artists and authors, singers and dancers.

"A newspaper is like a buffet," a great editor once told me. "There should be something there for everyone."

Now, there are many motivations for the blanket coverage of Jackson’s death, and some of those have to do with profit. Cable news ratings have soared in recent days, and some news websites have seen their traffic skyrocket.

Sure, there are profits to be made with stories like these. That’s why they call it the news business.

But whether it’s war or the economy, politics or yes, the death of a pop star, news, in the end, is the story of people’s lives. And even his detractors must admit that Michael Jackson’s life made for a strange, tragic and ultimately fascinating story.

It's what Walter Cronkite understood when he began his newscast on the evening of Dec. 9, 1980: Sometimes the life and death of a man who sang songs overshadows everything else.

Read more: Dismiss Michael Jackson For His Eccentricities? Maybe. Dismiss His Music? Think Again.

Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images

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There's more bad news for newspapers: Ad revenue was down for the first quarter of this year.

Overall ad sales for print fell 30 percent in this first quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter last year, according to Business Insider. Classified ad revenue, siphoned away by Craigslist, plunged 42 percent in that period.

That's the steepest year-over-year drop ever.

And if you think online ad revenue will save the day, think again: Online ad sales fell 13 percent in the same period. That's the first first double-digit drop in online ad sales since the Newspaper Association of America started measuring them in 2004.

Total U.S. online advertising in the first quarter fell 5 percent compared to last year.

Newspapers have always relied on ads from big-box department stores as a major revenue stream, so it's no surprise to learn that Macy’s has halved what it spends on newspaper ads since 2005. That's $616 million in lost ad revenue.

What to do? Aside from praying the economy will pick up soon, no one really knows. One option might be cooperative arrangements like the one between the Tribune Co. and the Dallas Morning News. Under the deal, Tribune Co., which is itself in bankruptcy, will sell national print and online ads for the Dallas paper. The hope is that centralizing sales through a single clearinghouse will make ad buys easier for large companies.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

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