It’s two years since The Rocky Mountain News closed in Denver, Colorado, and the newspaper’s former editor, president and publisher John Temple has surveyed his former journalists to find out what they’re up to now. Rather depressingly, most of them are earning less than they did then.

146 of the paper’s 194 journalists responded to Temple’s survey which found that 67% of them now earn less than in their old job at the Rocky Mountain News, with 57% saying that they now earn “Much less” than in their old job.

92 respondents, or 63%, are still working as journalists and 64 of these are earning less now than in their old job. While the majority of those who have now left journalism also report receiving lower pay now, it’s still a depressing statistic that indicates that journalists appear willing to stay in their line of work despite the poor economic outlook for the profession.

Temple interviewed some of these former journalists, turning up quotes like “There have been very few days and nights and middle of the nights during the past two years when I have not worried about money” and “When I sometimes hear the normal everyday grumbling of my new colleagues, I wonder if they realize how fortunate they are to be working for a great organization making good money in the profession that we all love and how quickly that can be taken away if we are not mindful.”

However, it’s not all bad news – it appears that many of these journalists are actually a lot happier now, with more respondents saying that their lives were better than those who said it was worse.

Choice quotes:

• “Even though I’m making less money than I did at the Rocky, I’m a happier person.”
• “While the closure of the Rocky has not made my life easier, nor more comfortable, it has allowed me to put all my accumulated skills to use FOR MYSELF (as a sole proprietor) and for A GREATER GOOD (a community’s survival). In short, I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, where I am supposed to be doing it at a time that is critical for our community.”
• “I like being my own boss, working from home, learning about the field of blogging, and generally being more entrepreneurial… although I do not make as much money as I did at the Rocky, hopefully that will change in 2011.”

So, there appears to be optimism and a positive outlook among many of those who took a financial hit but stuck to their journalistic guns. While this is reassuring to hear, I’m sure publishers looking to slash their staffing costs are feeling quite reassured by it too.

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Over the past year or so we’ve regularly looked at the way news publishers on the Web are starting to charge their readers. While we’ve usually looked at paywalls pretty negatively, some news out of the US shows that they can work – if they’re set up the right way.

The New York Times, itself planning to start charging for access soon, reports on findings from Journalism Online, a service that helps newspapers charge their users. The company says that after several months, the two dozen newspapers using Journalism Online’s tools have not seen the significant decline in traffic they might have expected.

Journalism Online says that pageviews fell between 0% and 20% and unique visits fell between just 0% and 7% (neither figure a huge disaster when you introduce a paywall), while advertising revenue didn’t fall at all for any of the titles.

It’s worth noting that the newspapers concerned didn’t block all content completely from non-paying visitors. Instead, only readers who view more than a set number of pages per month, usually between 5 and 20, have to pay.

The policy is stark contrast from the most high-profile recent paywall launches – those by Rupert Murdoch in the UK for his Times, Sunday Times and News of the World titles. In those cases, all content is completely blocked until you stump up some cash (or at least sign up for a free trial). We’re still to hear exactly how successful this policy has been. Publisher News International released some vague figures that weren’t very enlightening, while the unofficial word is that the policy didn’t start out well.

While the newspapers involved in Journalism Online’s study were generally small or medium-sized titles, it’s encouraging for audiences that publishers are finding some success in only charging the heaviest users of their sites – blocking out everyone by default will surely just send all but the most committed of users elsewhere for their news.

The Social Guardian has been built using The Guardian’s API and while it looks quite plain, it’s actually an brilliant idea. Logging in to the site with your Twitter account, you can see what other Twitter users are reading using the service, refreshed in real-time as they load new articles.

A feed updates the page with the latest content from The Guardian website and it’s easy to see what others are reading. As you read articles, the site offers up personalised recommendations of others you might like.

While the site is an unofficial, experimental project, it shows what newspaper websites of the future could be like. While it’s possible to bolt social recommendation onto content-based sites using Facebook Open Graph, an approach more tailored to a site’s may well be preferable to many publishers.

The site was built during a Guardian Innovation Day event last week by a team of developers including Guardian.co.uk developer advocate Michael Brunton-Spall, Lisa van Gelder and Graham Tackley. “This does not represent any strategic thinking by The Guardian”, Brunton-Spall tells us. ”The Guardian is not providing any time to work on it at the moment (since I have a mountain of real work to get done), but I’m sure we’ll try a few tweaks in our spare time.”

Brunton-Spall says that while the site is still under development, he’s tempted to monetise it in order to pay for a bigger server to keep it running. The Guardian allows developers to profit from apps that use its API on a revenue sharing basis. “It’s liable to forever remain an experiment,” says Brunton-Spall, “although I dare say over the next few weeks it will result in several conversations about what’s good and bad about its approach to social news.”

The Social Guardian is just one of a number of interesting, experimental projects developed using the Guardian’s API. Earlier this year we were impressed by Today’s Guardian, a website that reimagines the newspaper’s content in a tablet friendly, one-article-per-page format.

While you shouldn’t expect The Guardian’s own website to adopt social sharing features like this in the near future, it’s an interesting prototype of the kinds of social features news websites could have in the future.