Kevin: ReadWriteWeb has another take on Altimeter Group's study of social media and brands. "A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers."

Kevin: From TechCrunch "Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million."

Kevin: Slate tries to determine whether newspaper or web readers are better informed. Definitely something to watch.

Kevin: Juan Antonio Giner writes: "When you see thinks like this you recover the faith in creative and innovative story-telling as one of the main assets to deliver the news to a new generation of readers."

Kevin: My colleague Martin Belam writes about how the media in the UK are burying their own bad news. It's a post well worth reading. Martin writes: "With the impact of digital distribution, and the effect of the economic downturn, we have more than enough reasons to think that the news industry is dying. Treating our remaining paying customers like children who haven't learnt to use Google yet makes us look like we have a collective death wish."

Kevin: Washington Post news magazine Newsweek has a paid newsstand circulation of just 67,000 copies a week. That's in a nation with 300m people (the US). Mark Potts writes, "It's a little hard to see why—especially in an age of real-time online news—The Washington Post Co. is keeping Newsweek alive. Readers (and advertisers) just don't seem to care."

Kevin: Condé Nast has hired McKinsey to help it "develop new perspectives" on how to generate money. The New York Observer has a memo from Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend on the "considerable and complicated task, forcing us to rethink the way we do business in many instances and incorporate efficiencies in every step of our process".

Kevin: News monitoring service VMS estimates that the value of the TV news, daytime talk show, magazine and newspaper coverage of Twitter was worth $48m. Twitter received 2.73bn impressions bersus 63m for Microsoft's Bing search engine. For comparison, the value of the media coverage for Bing came in at just $573,834. Fascinating and a bit scary.