Kevin: Forget the banks. Old media is paying for failure. Johnston Press CEO John Fry took home almost £1m in compensation last year as the group saw pre-tax profits decline by 56%. Granted he was in a new position and entered in the middle of the terrible recession and the ongoing decline of the print sector. However, compensation at this level is indefensible especially considering the lack of living wages in local journalism.

Kevin: Jon Slattery writes: "Former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, now launch editor of online business news service TheBusinessDesk West Midlands has good insights into old and new media."
Reeves writes about the pension commitmens and high capital costs of established media. It reminds me of speaking to a former Xerox executive talking about how expensive it would have been for them to bring a GUI-based computer like the Mac to market, even though they had developed most of the technology at PARC. Established media companies have resources that no small digital entrant can match, but most of those resources are already committed to ongoing costs. Meanwhile, the costs of entry for digital start-ups has radically declined over the last decade. Disruption will continue.

Kevin: Interesting move by Google. They acquired the VP8 video codec with their acquistion of On2 Technologies in February, and now they plan to release it as open-source. Good post looking at new video codec issues around HTML5 and H.264 versus completely open-source Ogg Theora.

Kevin: Great to see Sheri Fink of new investigative news organisation ProPublica winning a Pulitzer for their work with the Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine. Collaboration will be key on big projects like this as individual news budgets won't support the costs of expensive investigations.