I saw a European publish on Charlie Rose the other night (sorry, blanking out on his name — he’s Irish) and the views readership decline, pretty much, and an American thing. It isn’t happening in other parts of the world. Interesting …

I think the biggest threat to newspapers is blogs … nibbled to death … more and more bloggers are making money, more and more are doing original reporting, more and more are entering the local markets. That should be more of a concern than investors putting together a concerted effort in a local market (though LA is ripe for it). I’m not talking, btw, about the straw man of blogs that MSM reporters like to dismiss and ignore, but blogs of substance, and there are many, that MSM journalists ignore to their own detriment.

Hong Kong not only reads the South China Morning Post (SCMP) which claims to be the world’s most profitable newspaper per capita (they’ve come up with a statistic to measure Hong Kong’s per capita ad revenue) the Post’s ownership also is all-powerful.

It sequesters virtually ALL SCMP web content behind a pay wall bigger than the Great Wall of China. Last month, a personnel dispute between Mark Clifford, the Woodwardian-era American-brand of print journalist who has become the paper’s editor, and the polyglot (think Chinese, Indian, Australian, Sri Lankan) editorial staff went pretty much unreported by the local media. Clifford summarily fired some senior journalists and and his actions would have remained unknown to the larger world were it not for the IHT, which covers the Hong Kong beat thoroughly and called the incident a “clash of cultures” in the newsroom.

My favorite SCMP moment, though, came a couple of weeks ago when one of Hong Kong’s leading internet providers, Netvigator, whose owner has ties with the paper’s owner, started blocking access to Not The South China Morning Post (NTSCMP.com) a rival site that lampoons the SCMP. Charges of censorship flew across the Hong Kong blogosphere, and soon Netvigator — which also happens to be my internet provider — was obliged to stop censoring NTSCMP.com

A small victory for freedom of the press in a place where that freedom is first and foremost oppressed by media dinosaurs like the SCMP. Watch Asia for some real fisticuffs between old and new media.