The Sacramento Bee laid off 12 employees, at least two of whom were in the newsroom: a librarian and a photo lab technician.

Two new Fox series, "Ben and Kate" and "The Mindy Project," will have streaming debuts two weeks ahead of their Sept. 25 debuts on many venues including Hulu, AOL, MSN, Fox.com and Xfinity.  And to boost numbers for the network's sophomore series "New Girl," Fox is offering "free encores of the Zooey Deschanel comedy's 24-episode freshman run" on Yahoo TV, writes Michael O'Connell.

The Baton Rouge Advocate, a newspaper that covers the Louisiana capital 80 miles  from New Orleans, is planning to expand into New Orleans to pick up the slack when its hometown paper, The Times-Picayune, cuts staff and frequency in October. The New Orleans version of the Advocate will have its own front page along with additional staff.

Two more newspapers are making moves to cut staff. At the Boston Globe, 43 members of the editorial and advertising staffs were offered voluntary buyouts, while roughly 10 employees (but no one in the newsroom) were laid off. And, at The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, 155 employees with at least 20 years of experience were offered early retirement. “We’re expecting less than half to accept," a company exec told Bill Shea at Crain's Detroit Business. "It’s a totally volunteer program."

DreamWorks Animation SKG may create its own cable channel once it's finished buying Classic Movie for $155 million. That purchase will give DreamWorks the rights to over 450 titles and more than 6,500 animated and live action episodes featuring characters like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Lassie. "A channel is one of the many opportunities we see for combining the DreamWorks brand with this extraordinary library of characters," Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg tells Ronald Grover, adding that "It could be a domestic cable channel, international, even an Internet channel."

It's CNBC that's being brought under the same corporate umbrella as NBC News and MSNBC  -- not CNN, as was erroneously reported when we linked to a New York Times story about the move. We regret the error.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has resigned from directorships in three corporate subsidiaries that control major newspapers in his media empire: NI Group, the Times Newspaper Holdings, and Newscorp Investments in Britain. This move is a "remarkable turnaround" from his previous hands-on overseeing of such pubs as The Sun, "raising fresh speculation that he may be planning for an eventual sale of [those] newspapers," writes John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya.

New owner Scholastic is shutting down Weekly Reader (formerly My Weekly Reader), the noted 100-year-old school newspaper, folding it into Scholastic News and "axing all but five of Weekly Reader’s 60 employees in White Plains, NY," writes Josh Kosman and Keith Kelly. Scholastic had bought the paper from Readers' Digest in February, but Weekly Reader's subscription base had fallen by two-thirds.

As U.S. fashion magazine publishers -- with one exception -- hold off on reporting ad page counts for that all-important September issue, both Hearst and Conde Nast are racking up big ad sales for luxe fashion pubs in an unlikely-seeming location: mainland China. "Elle now publishes twice a month because issues had grown to 700 pages," writes the New York Times' Christine Haugney and Jonathan Landreth. "Vogue added four more issues each year to keep up with advertising demand." As for that exception to publishers not releasing September ad page counts yet, it's Hearst, "which could end …

Two instances of citizen journalism last week -- the first, reporting on a less-known story about gunplay in Toronto, the second, the more widely reported massacre in Aurora, Colo. -- are further examples of how "how someone with a little time and resourcefulness can generate something journalistic about a breaking news event," writes Matthew Ingram in Gigaom. Paraphrasing a recent post by Web developer Stijn Debrouwere about "the future of journalism," Inrgram writes "that the news business is being disrupted not just by digital forms of traditional media, or things that are recognizable as …