Two intriguing developments today in the ongoing saga of the vanishing American newspaper: Hearst Corp. will launch a wireless e-reader later this year, and the Long Island daily Newsday plans to end free Web content and charge readers for its online edition. Hearst has a stable of magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen, and SmartMoney, as well as 20 or so newspapers, some of which are on life support. Things are so bad that Hearst may shut down two money-losing dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, if it can’t sell them; the prospect of selling both newspapers is next to impossible in this economy. Can the Hearst e-reader save the daily? Details are sketchy at this point, but the device will reportedly have a large screen that’s better suited to print articles and ads than the Amazon Kindle, but similar to the Kindle in features: low power consumption and an electronic ink display. The Kindle screen’s dimensions are roughly those of a paperback book; Hearst’s e-reader would be larger than that. And since the Hearst reader and its underlying technology would be available to other publishers, the gadget seems like a last-ditch […]