Hearst is leaking a few hints about a potential online-only P-I. As many of us had feared, it’s shaping up as a barer-than-bare-bones operation, with few of the original-reporting positions that we in the save-the-news crowd are trying to save.

The SeaTimes notes two limited experiments in print newspapers going online-only, and finds them both relatively low-budget efforts relying on subsidies from larger organizations.

The NYT remembers that nonprofit journalistic endeavors have been around since before the Web. One of these, Mother Jones, is hanging in there fiscally, but is not immune to the larger economy’s ebbs and flows.

Chuck Taylor concludes his own “Life in a Zero-Newspaper Town” series with his own answer to funding the new news: There is no one answer. Instead, news Web sites will need what the motivational coaching industry calls “multiple streams of income.”

Nathan Richardson offers some simple things the big Web portals could do to help news sites. One suggestion: Google, etc. could vow to link directly to original-reporting sites, rather than to all those slice-n’-dice aggregation sites. (How would that affect a site like this, which offers both original prose and linkage?)

Alan Mutter believes news sites can indeed charge for online content. The trick: Have some content people will want enough to pay for. That’s not rewritten press releases, human-interest homilies, or ambulance chasing. It’s comprehensive news-you-can-use coverage of consumer, business/financial, and governmental topics.

That’s another ingredient in what I’m calling microbrew news—stuff people really care about reading, stuff people will go out of their way to get.