The sixth annual State of the News Media report was published earlier this week, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report, 800 pages, does not paint the pretty picture the news industry might have wanted. Publishers are struggling to stay financially afloat, and the U.S. newspapers saw a 23% fall in ad revenues the last two years. “(…) less than a quarter of American adults said they read a magazine of some kind the day before — down from a third in 1994.”

We [the PEJ] estimate that roughly 5,000 full-time newsroom jobs were cut, or about 10 percent, in 2008. By the end of 2009, the newsrooms of American daily newspapers may employ somewhere between 20 percent and 25 percent fewer people than in 2001.

When the almighty Web came about, newspapers quickly discarded the idea of charging for online content, to increase readership and boost revenue from advertisers, who were happily paying. Today, things have changed. We’re reading more news online than ever, but the income from ads is failing, and publishers are looking elsewhere to make money off their online content. Wait, are you going to make us pay again?

One suggested solution is similar to the cable TV model—a fixed fee added to your Internet access fee. Exactly how they intend to approach this is not clear, but the report argues that it would require cooperation from many publishers. “The public discussion is focused on micropayments. We think other models might be much more promising,” said the PEJ’s director, Tom Rosenstiel, to Forbes. He has previously introduced this analogy: you pay when you enter the toll road, you don’t stop every 50 feet to pay a fee.

The report argues that several new streams of revenue are needed, and that “The closest thing to a consensus right now is that no one source is a likely magic bullet.”