(Update: Adam Klawonn responds below. Post has been updated with his noted correction.)

The Zonie Report, a project by Adam Klawonn, has decided to shut its virtual doors, for now. Klawonn writes:

I learned some hard lessons in my idealistic crusade to bring better, more innovative journalism to the expectant masses. I’m leaving a lot out, but I’d like to share of them with you now and hear more about your own observations. Feel free to share.

First, the Internet audience is incredibly fickle, so the expectant Zonie Report masses weren’t there. (It turns out there were only about 8,000 of them in a state of 6 million-plus residents.)

Second, the way we consume media online does not lend itself to a deep-reading format, so short stories and truncated video (from car accidents to Britney Spears sightings to bar fights in Scottsdale) proliferate. This says something about the format, about us and about news outlets in general.

Third, it’s tough to sell ads using today’s metrics (i.e., impressions, etc.). Online advertising prices continue to head toward the floor and may never recover.

Finally, people are generally more interested in what everybody around them is doing than what’s really going on in the world. There are some exceptions, but this is perhaps the harshest and saddest lesson of all. Who knows if/when this will change.

These are just a few observations gleaned from my four years (and counting) odyssey in the online world. The list keeps growing, and it includes some positive things as well.

First, there is a growing supply of new and interesting journalism projects popping up. There is real talk about new business models for the industry (beyond simply charging for content), which means new sustainable sources of information for you, the audience.

Second, new devices are moving us closer and closer to being able to consume any information we want, at any time, at any place. These should help the situation if media outlets embrace them correctly.

Finally, content is still king, and there will always be some kind of audience for any kind of content. If you want to write about cats in trees, indeed, there will inevitably be an audience for you. But if this is something you want to do for a living, I wouldn’t hang your hat on it.

We're sad to hear it, but as one colleague put it, "'It didn't work because people only want trash' is a poor defense." The Zonie Report's experience provides several good financial lessons, but in 2010 no one should be using the gripe that's marked every media transition of the last hundred years, that tastes have shifted inexorably to the low-brow and thus serious content can't survive in this new medium. Newspapers, radio, and television were all considered trash at one point, and each eventually carved out a sustainable financial niche that to a large extent serves/served the civic interest.

Yet, in Zonie's defense, an MIT professor writes, "[Klawonn] tried a local, focused, partly free-labor news source model and failed. [...] It remains the underlying fact that he is one of a number of folks finding it difficult to produce an alternative to oligopolistic mass media on one side and boutique or labor-of-love narrowly focused sources on the other."