I need a break. No, let me refine that statement: I need to concentrate on other, income producing pursuits, but I also need a break from the mental/psychic wear and tear that comes with being a blog superstar. (If there was an emoticon to signal wry self-deprecation, it would have followed that sentence.)

As a result, I’ll be tending to other matters for a while. There’s a risk to this hiatus, of course. Russian spammers might stop sending me their hilarious, ineptly worded “comments” that jam my site every day. Like this one:

Yo!, please, need your help. Can you recommend me a good quality beer which easy to find any where in the world!?

Thenks, bro. I am vaiting for answer!!!

Well, thenks for reading, comrade. But count on vaiting a long time. As for everyone else, please bear with me as I keep the wolf from the door.

McClatchy Newspapers, owner and gutter (as in that which guts) of the News & Observer, filed its first quarter financial results Thursday, and the news was even worse than expected. But here are a few nuggets of information you had to dig for, and because most people don’t — what with lives and real jobs and all — I did the digging for them. (All information below was harvested from documents filed by McClatchy with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

At the end of every day, McClatchy falls a little further behind. The amount of money the company lost on its operations during the quarter (after backing out numerous one-time charges) was $22.9 million — or $254,000 every day during a 90-day quarter. Interest on McClatchy’s $2 billion debt for the quarter was $33.9 million — or $377,000 a day. At the end of 2008, McClatchy had $5 million cash in hand. Needless to say, that’s a discouraging cluster of numbers.

McClatchy is now closer to default on its debt agreement than it was three months ago. Under the terms of its agreement, McClatchy has to maintain a 7-to-1 “leverage ratio” — meaning its debt can’t be more than seven times higher than its cash flow. At the end of 2008, that ratio stood at 5.1-to-1. It is now 5.9-to-1, a huge jump in the wrong direction. There are only three ways to reduce that ratio: Pay down the principal on that $2 billion debt (with what?), somehow increase revenue during the worst recession in a generation (not gonna happen), or cut costs (the only viable choice). In short, McClatchy can keep the ship afloat only by continuing to throw people overboard.

A “retired” debt isn’t always actually retired. In its earnings announcement yesterday, McClatchy included this sentence:

The company noted that on April 15, 2009, it retired $31 million of unsecured notes which had matured.

Sounds like some of the debt was paid down, right? Sure — until you consider this passage from McClatchy’s most recent annual filing with the SEC:

The Company has $31.0 million of public notes maturing in April 2009 which are expected to be refinanced on a long-term basis by drawing on the Company’s revolving credit facility and accordingly, were included in long-term debt as of December 28, 2008.

This is like taking out a second mortgage on your home to “retire” your first mortgage. That debt hasn’t been paid. It’s just been moved to a new spot on the balance sheet.

It’s a longstanding tradition in the newspaper business that when anyone leaves a paper, their colleagues prepare a mock front page to mark their departure. It is further tradition that the faux front be caustic, sarcastic, borderline libelous and R-rated. I’ve had three of them done for me, and I tend to keep them out of sight of decent people. But I treasure them.

It’s a measure of the state of the industry that many departing journalists don’t get such individual send-offs nowadays, simply because there’s no time to prepare them all. When 31 reporters and editors left the News & Observer Tuesday, after having had their jobs eliminated in the latest round of cuts, one fake front page had to suffice for all of them. And rather than focusing its sarcasm on the departed, the front page took square aim at McClatchy Newspapers, owner of the N&O, and its CEO, Gary Pruitt — who are portrayed as the Titanic and its captain, respectively. (You can see the page at this link. Click on the words “mock page one.”)

What you’ll also see there is a comment from former top McClatchy editor, Howard Weaver, who scolds the N&Oers for the “thoughtless and unfounded recrimination” he senses in that fake front page. On his blog, Weaver has more to say on the subject:

” … those who argue that McClatchy took over a thriving N&O and greedily ran it into the ground are misinformed, and perpetuating that myth hurts the cause of reconstruction.”

That’s right: On the occasion of the end of their careers, Weaver is chiding the journalists for letting off some sarcastic steam. Good God, how dense and self-involved can one human be? These people have just lost their freakin’ jobs, and Weaver’s response is to demand they stop “perpetuating the myth” that McClatchy has anything to do with it.

Really, it’s breathtaking. Weaver spins the corporate line with a vigor and shamelessness that would embarrass even the most jaded public relations hack. For all his talk about “facts,” Weaver can’t seem to acknowledge one simple, obvious one: The News & Observer has diminished dramatically under McClatchy’s ownership, and only part of that decline is attributable to a poor economy.

Furthermore, that fact is confirmed by an unimpeachable source — the guy who sold the N&O to McClatchy.

Howard, on behalf of those at the N&O who are too polite or too restrained to speak plainly, let me offer this thought, delivered to you with journalistic concision and no ambiguity: Bugger off.