Kevin: Media think tank Polis at the London School of Economics held a panel about social media and journalism in conjunction with the Press Complaints Commission (a self-regulatory industry body here in the UK that has come in for criticism for its deal objectively with complaints). The panel was Chaired by Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis, the discussion began with case studies from Stephen Abell, Director of the PCC and included statements from Janine Gibson (editor, Guardian Online), Anna Doble (litigation specialist, Wiggin LLP), Torin Douglas (Media Correspondent, BBC), Jeremy Olivier (Head of Multimedia, Ofcom), and Professor Ian Walden (Professor of Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London and PCC public Commissioner). It's worth a look and looks at the complex relationship between social media and journalists.

Kevin: Very interesting developments in terms of new news models. John Temple (formerly editor of the now the Rocky Mountain News which shut after almost 150 years of publishing) is the editor of the new Peer News site which is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Temple said that there was no silver bullet. He cast the site as an attempt to create a "new civic square". Even more interesting, he's talking about creating a site based on living articles.

Kevin: From O'Reilly Radar: "According to Eric A. Meyer, an author and HTML/CSS expert, the answer is a definitive yes. In the following Q&A, Meyer explains why HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are the "classic three" for developers and designers. He also pushes past the HTML5 vs. Flash bombast to offer a rational and much-needed comparison of the toolsets."

Kevin: I'm not sure I agree with the dissenting opinion of the Judge Frances Rothschild who said the appellate court ruling “alters the legal landscape to the severe detriment of First Amendment rights.” The exemption of 'fighting words' from First Amendment protection was established in the 1942 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire case. This case may very well be another that refines the 'fighting words' doctrine. However, one of the students threatened to kill the plaintiff with an ice pick and then tried to pass that off as 'jocular' online hyperbole.

Kevin: A chart of 2009 media industry ad revenue in the US by Kantar Media. "The only major growth area: Online ad spending. Internet ads — display only — increased 7% in 2009, according to the report. … Magazines dropped 17%, newspapers and radio each dropped 20%, and outdoor fell 13%."

Kevin: Viv Mag shows off an example of a new video heavy, motion magazine cover for the iPad. It's an interesting look into some of the design thinking behind new content concepts for the media slates like the iPad.

Kevin: Stephen Brook (my colleague at the Guardian) highlights a memo from News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks to staff about an upcoming paywall for subscribers to the Times and Sunday Times. She writes: "Of course, we expect to see the numbers of unique users of our sites come down dramatically. But the people who register to our new digital products will be customers who have made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they value, and they will be those who are more committed to and engaged with our titles." It will be interesting to see how this works.

Kevin: Journalism.co.uk has an excerpt from the inaugural lecture by City University (London) head of journalism George Brock. I'm sorry to have missed it. He takes issue with a 2008 speech by Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. Brock calls some Dacre's arguments "grotesque and self-deluding arrogance". I couldn't agree more. Brock goes on to say, "There are those in society entitled to defend moral standards, but encouraging journalists to see themselves as moral referees has not helped to create or sustain trust in the profession." Absolutely. I look forward to hearing the full speech.

Kevin: With the Economist special on the Data Deluge and this post on TechCrunch about 'Big Data', we're seeing innovative ideas in terms of not only how to handle large data sets but also how businesses are being developed around making sense of these datasets. It's not necessarily new. eBay, Amazon and Google have been dealing with huge amounts of data, but there are new tools to deal with data and new ways to deal with different shaped problems with data.

Kevin: A comparison between sales data for Motorola's Droid, Apple's iPhone and Google's Nexus One. There is some very good, nuanced analysis of the numbers, and this comment from the Android Guys: "Looking at the super phone that is the Nexus One over its first 90 days, one would get the sense that it's a monumental failure."

Kevin: The post covers a panel on crowdsourced or collaborative journalism from the online-only Seattle P-I and the New York Times, Journerdism.com and Gizmodo. The Wikipedia quotes come for a separate interview by Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, said in terms of verifying content via Twitter and YouTube out of Iran last year, it wasn't possible. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event."

Kevin: Interesting numbers from the iPad pre-orders. For the first day, Apple was processing 25,000 orders an hour. The dropped to 1,000 per hour over the weekend. More details, 70% of the orders were the WiFi model.

Kevin: Great summary from Liz Gannes at GigaOm about comments from Clay Shirky about 'public sharing'.

* “How much value can we get out of civic sharing?”

That last point was Shirky’s main thrust — how can people use sharing information to effect change? Civic sharing, as Shirky described it, is “taking what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document.”

Kevin: Adam Astrow at Mashable writes about changes coming up at Digg. He says: "The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook), and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more."

Kevin: Ernst Poulsen writes about a Danish experiment with Google Wave, Bølgen. He says, "Despite the fact that "Bølgen" is just an experiment with a small target group, it may provide inspiration for niche-publications, where readers are often just as knowledgeable and may be just as willing to participate and showcase their own knowledge."

Kevin: A great post on the MediaShift blog about how to 'live-stream' your newsroom. It's a very good, practical list of suggestions on how to incorporate social media into a newsroom workflow. One of the most important lessons from this post is about trying to capture intelligence and information at every stage of the newgathering workflow. Journalists are constantly reading background stories that inform their work. It's important not only from the point of transparency but also in capturing value for readers to use these methods

Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "Total annual revenue at just five of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups fell from £2.05 billion to £1.54 billion through 2009, according to our calculations now that the results are in. That’s £509.7 million wiped off our local publishers during the downturn year." They responded by cutting their staff by about a fifth, cutting 5,000 jobs.

Kevin: This is interesting. I think a lot of people talk about 'quality' or 'relevance' but their systems are geared for 'popularity', which isn't necessarily the same thing. Zemanta (a very useful blogging tool by the way) canvassed their users about 'What is the most important to you when choosing relevant articles?' Relevancy, popularity, recenty, authority. (A pollster might accuse them of a bit of priming because related primes the responsdent to choose relevancy, but that's a quibble.) The results showed: "It seems that our users don’t care about popularity of the sources, care a bit about authority and recency, but really mostly care a lot about relevancy."

Kevin: 37signals looks at how conversation has changed on the site since they made changes to their sign up procedure to curb anonymity. Things have improved. Looking at what they have done, it doesn't seem that they have verified identity as much as trying to get people to provide a name. Maybe the speedbump was enough to increase the quality of conversation on the site.

Kevin: This is a great summary of Google's economist-in-chief, Hal Varian's presentation on newspapers. There is so much good stuff packed in this presentation. I'll just highlight this one quote in terms of new devices for news consumption. Varian says: "The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a “completely different ergonomics for accessing the news…so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news…So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen"

Kevin: Some great thoughts from Martin Langeveld on what the iPad means for publishers. He identifies lots of opportunitis, but he also identifies this threat that should make the blood run cold of any existing newspaper publisher. He believes that the iPad and mobile devices in general threatens pre-print inserts – these are ads from big retailers that are packaged separately and then blown into newspapers. Langeveld says that this is the last bastion of monopolistic pricing power for publishers. Knock this out from newsapapers, and the business has very few places to hide.

Kevin: Outsell in the US expects digital ad spending to eclipse print for the first time. The problem for publishers is that the digital budget is spread across a much wider range of players.

Kevin: Damon Kiesow writes at Poynter Institute: "The New York Times is planning to offer its Book Review as a separate digital e-reader product, disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on the mobile devices, according to James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times." He made the comments at an afternoon session at the Digital Publishing Alliance and E-Reader Symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Kevin: From the Columbia Journalism Review, Terry McDermot looks at Fox News. "The perceived problem is not that Fox’s straight news is relatively bias-free and its opinion programming overwhelmingly conservative. The problem is that the news portion is very small and the opinion portion very large. It would indeed be like a traditional newspaper opinion-news division if the ratios were reversed."

Kevin: Laura Oliver reports: "Multimedia aggregator Daylife will now sell images from pro-am journalism site Demotix."

Kevin: A blockbuster collection of global social media statistics from February 2010 sourced from Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, Forrester, Royal Pingdom. Facebook is by far and away the most popular social networking site. Social networks and forums rank second in terms of UK internet visits, trailing only visits to search engines. That statistic is interesting in and of itself. At 121.6%, visits to search engines in the UK is almost twice that of visits to news and media sites. Another gem in this list of statistics: "Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online."

Kevin: Joshua Benton has a great blog post on new possibilities in terms of news site interfaces. There has been very little interface innovation in terms of news sites. Most of the work for the last five years on news sites have been about social functionality. I strongly agree with Benton's last point: "The main problem with contemporary news navigation is discovery, not depth."

Kevin: Ivan Sigal of Global Voices writes about their collaboration with the BBC. He says: "Since then, we've seen mainstream media cover major conflicts such as Iran substantially through the eyes of citizen content. The idea that citizen journalism is somehow opposed to or in conflict with traditional journalism is now clearly past; it's evident that both exist in symbiotic relationship to one another, with many opportunities to collaborate on the creation of news, storytelling, and distribution of content.

For two weeks, we will be exploring opportunities to put those collaborations into practice."
Definitely one to watch.

Kevin: The BBC will be partnering with global blog network, Global Voices. During a special series on the internet, they will be linking to relevant posts on Global Voices and asking their regional editors "to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news", says Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News Website (and my former manager who got me into blogging in 2004).

Kevin: The Tindle Newspapers Group in the UK has launched four small-run (3000 copies) newspapers in London. Sir Ray Tindle believes strongly in the future of print. They will be selling affordable advertising to local businesses put off by the high prices in other newspapers. They reached their advertising goal four days ahead of schedule.

Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or blogging, or any marriage of the two.

Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters wades into the discussion about Zachery Kouwe, one of the journalists writing the Dealbook business blog at the New York Times. After complaints from Wall Street Journal and an internal investigation at the Times, Kouwe resigned. The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, said that "Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin".
Salmon has a different take, and one that I agree with. He argues that far from adopting blogging culture, Kouwe didn't go far enough. "The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course."

Kevin: Juditgh Townend at Journalism.co.uk looks at whether the culture at the NYTimes DealBook led to plagiarism and the resignation of Zachery Kouwe. Judith does a great round up of the analysis by Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor, at the New York Times and other analysis from Felix Salmon at Reuters. Felix raises another issue for the NYTimes, and one that I tend to agree with. "The answer, in truth, is not that the NYT has gone too far down the bloggish rabbit hole, but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough." Quoting and linking is part of blogging, but if you take text not as a quote by passing it off as your own work and don't link, that indeed is plagiarism.

Kevin: I've been working on how location can easily be integrated into a journalism workflow since I geo-tagged pictures, Tweets and blog posts during the 2008 US election. While many commercial geo-location services have arrived, including Fire Eagle, Gowalla and Four Square, geo-location lags at news organisations. Juniper Research says that mobile location-based services will generate $12.7b in revenue by 2014. As we've seen with other technologies, location is moving from early adopters quickly to early mass adoption driven by social networking applications. The Next Web looks at some of the revenue streams that will drive location based services. Definitely one to read.