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."