Did you see the “breaking news” yesterday afternoon that the Advertiser is boosting its street price to 75 cents daily and $2 Sunday?

Of course, the Advertiser is not alone. We’ve seen recent price increases at the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times and P-I, and at a slew of other papers in the Gannett chain. A Google search turns up quite a lot of other dailies boosting their prices.

But some see this as a risky strategy in the Internet age.

Now, newsstand prices are also set to rise at 20 of Gannett’s local newspapers, beginning with The Burlington Free Press, where the newsstand price rose from 50 cents to 75 cents.

This is a crucial area of difference, according to Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc. “I think The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post can get away with it, because they are big products. But I’m more dubious about the local papers having price increases.”

According to Doctor, many smaller papers are also cutting their newsroom staff, so the amount of content is decreasing. Coming alongside a shrinking print product, a newsstand price hike may prove to be a deal-breaker for local papers.

Here’s a line to remember from a blog by former Los Angeles Times reporter William Lobdell, speaking of newspapers:

As a friend told me last week, “Bro, face it. You guys are the 8-track cassette of news.”

In any case, his “42 things I know” is well worth reading in the context of these almost across the board pricing moves.

I’m sure it was just a coincidence that on September 15, the 9th anniversary of the events that eventually led to the end of my job as an investigative reporter for the Star-BulletinDoonesbury launched a sequence about an investigative reporter being dumped from a newspaper because of cutbacks.

I have to credit Joe in Japan with calling the sequence to my attention. He wrote:

Seems like Garry Trudeau is writing this week’s comic with this anniversary in mind. The protagonist even bears a passing resemblence to you!

This cartoon, with the advice to become a blogger, appeared a few days into the series.

Check out these charts flagged by one of my favorite blogs, Infomaniac: Behind the News.

I think that’s also where I saw the link to Impalin’, the blog. And, still on the presidential race, there’s quite an unflattering account making the rounds about John McCain in which a woman describes her experience of a vacation in Fiji when McCain and his family were also present. There’s some debate over whether it is real or fiction, but so far it has held up.

I was glad to see the Advertiser’s editorial this morning: “Lingle should be on the job, not the road“. I had the same reaction when I saw news of her long mainland trip alongside news of state departments in the process of planning huge budget and program cuts, etc. This seems like a time for leadership that’s hard to provide at a distance.

I’ve been trying to get a good video of Mr. Yeats in action and finally succeeded. He takes his morning dog biscuit with great relish. I really should fiddle around and figure out how to get that big bite in show motion. But you’ll get the idea. If clicking on the picture doesn’t work for you, try this.