links for 2009-03-26

  • Kevin: In case you missed this at the time, Kevin Marks has written a wonderful parody of the newspaper columnists writing about Twitter, mostly out of ignorance. As he writes: "Feel the need to tell everyone everything what to think all of the time? Then a newspaper column is for you." Bit rich newspaper columnists tweaking people on Twitter for compulsive self-revelation.
  • Kevin: Steve Yelvington challenges the idea that making newspapers in the US non-profits is a way out of the current newspaper crisis. Investors waiting to buy up and under-invest in newspapers is also no solution. "Newspapers got where they are today by underinvesting in R&D, not overinvesting. The debt load didn't come from building websites. Newspaper companies borrowed to buy more of the past, not to build a future."
  • Kevin: Robert Picard looks at the figures behind the worries about a decline in journalism jobs. "Even granting employment losses of 2,000-4,000 since the last census, employment is still about 18 to 20 percent higher than it was in the 1970s." But Picard doesn't see an increase in the quality of journalism. "If you look at newsrooms you can see the problem. Most journalists in newspapers do everything BUT covering significant news."
  • Kevin: Some details on the advertising climate for newspapers in the US. Newspaper advertising has been in decline since 2005. Since peaking that year at $47.4B, ad revenue has now dropped 40.5% over three years to $28.4B. Ron Shuttleworth writes, "This industry has missed so much opportunity to transform. Here is the laundry list of already missed billion dollar opportunities: search, RSS, ad networks, video, blogsphere, social networking, social broadcasting…uh…the point is made." Is it too late? For some newspapers, obviously it is.
  • Kevin: "Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services." With the number of services and information sources, aggregation services will become more important. At some point, we'll see consolidation in the social networks and services, but until that point, aggregators will become increasingly important.