Roy Greenslade: "Lewis Dvorkin says they receive monthly stipends, and some get incentive-based pay, driven by the traffic they attract to the site. But they also have the option of sharing advertising revenue and taking a stake in the company.

In other words, this True/Slant is clearly trying to create a three-way relationship between journalists, readers and advertisers. Is that the future? It certainly seems appealing."

Suw: Demo by Tom Steinberg of the lovely Mapumental, a map mashup that juxtaposes travel time on public transport, housing cost an scenicness to help people figure out where to live.

Kevin: As the post says: "50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter."

Kevin: Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class of 2009 on May 16. "We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history – as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily – just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we – journalists – we can't stop doing what we do."

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent observation in his latest Guardian column: "We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall."

Kevin: Grim reading for newspapers in the US as advertising revenue sees a record drop in the first quarter of 2009, falling "by an unprecedented 28.3%", blogs Alan Mutter. What is even more grim reading for US newspapers is that while the first three months of 2009 saw advertising revenue fall off of a cliff, the decline has started in 2006 and has been almost unabated since. That decline started long before the US went into recession, indicating that not all of the decline can be attributed to the economic downturn.

Kevin: Some observations about the thinking behind the Stephen Brill and (ex-WSJ) Gordon Crovitz Journalism Online project. Their promise to content companies is their ‘88-91’ formula – "that publishers can keep 88% of page views and 91% of online ad revenues while adding significant online circulation revenues (80 cents to $1.00 x 10% of monthly unique) AND boosting PRINT circ revenue (with bundled offers) while lowering PRINT sub acquisition and retention costs.”

Kevin: Zach Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard unpacks ideas around newspapers erecting paywalls. It's not necessarily about generating revenue but creating scarcity and protecting the high revenue print product. It's not a binary decision of paywall or no paywall. Newspapers are working on new premium information services. Also, content paywalls probably aren't the long-term solution but rather a short-term, stopgap measure.

Kevin: Tom Steinberg of mySociety (a digital empowerment organisation in the UK) suggests how government can be on the side of citizens (probably more than they are now).

Kevin: Video of Jeff Jarvis' talk to Google's headquarters in Washington DC.

Kevin: "Here at the acoustics research centre at the University of Salford, we hope to discover how and why people react the way they do to the sound around them using a revolutionary combination of mobile phone technologies. This allows members of the public to carry out sound surveys themselves, something that until now had not been possible."

Kevin: Josh Marshall talks about the origins and development of Talking Points Memo. It started off during the 2000 Florida recount in the US presidential election. From that, the site has grown to 10 employees and has one to two million readers. Some of the early money came from calls to readers to sponsor his journalism such as when he wanted to cover the US elections in 2004.

Kevin: Robin Wauters at TechCrunch adds some levity to the idea that Twitter's trending topics are a good indicator of breaking news. Like most social networking, social media sites including Twitter, Digg and Reddit, the communities all have their own particular interests and agendas. Also, as has been said before, Twitter has thousands of communities. I find the best tips on information come from the community that I have cultivated on Twitter that tracks my personal and professional interests. That's probably the big take-away.

Kevin: Paul Farhi writes in AJR: "For journalists, the real question is whether Twitter is more than just the latest info-plaything. Does it "work" in any meaningful way — as a news-dissemination channel, a reporting and source-building tool, a promotional platform? Or is it merely, to buy the caricature, just a banal, narcississtic and often addictive time suck?

The unsatisfying answer: It all depends. "

Kevin: Patrick Smith at paidContent (owned by employer The Guardian) looks at a Wessenden Marketing and Wide Area Publishing Futures survey that says that most publishers in the UK are naive about the "actual costs of building and maintaining a web presence". One spot of hope is that the study found that the job cuts might be over, 74% say they have already made the cuts they need to weather the recession. High on the agenda is integrating print and online.

Kevin: The Pew Research Center for People & the Press finds: "As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community "a lot." Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available." Most Americans regularly get information from their local television station (68%). The other interesting point is that Generation Y (born after 1977), only 27% have read a newspaper the previous day, versus 55% of those born prior to 1946.

Kevin: Chris Brogan has written what he describes as the Next Media Company Manifesto. One of his first bits of food for thought: "Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff." He believes that advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue, which upends the majority of content business models right now. He believes inline content marketing and value-added services can be new revenue streams for media companies.

Kevin: "ProPublica's new open-to-all citizen journalism venture, the ProPublica Reporting Network, launched this week, with an aim to track US government stimulus construction projects. "

Kevin: "The average time spent at newspaper Web sites is still relatively low — an individual spends an average 11 minutes a month at the (US) nation's top 30 newspaper Web sites. In April, only half of the top 30 sites increased the average time spent per person, according to Nielsen Online data. "

Kevin: Steven Johnson and Paul Starr debate the question. Steven Johnson believes that while the newspaper industry will look fundamentally different in 5 to 10 years that the news system that is currently evolving might actually look better than the one that we have now.

Kevin: An excellent article in the Economist about the news business, not just the newspaper business and its well documented woes, but changes in the news business across sectors and media. Here is a key finding: "Technology has enabled well-informed people to become even better informed but has not broadened the audience for news. The Pew Centre’s most alarming finding, for anybody who works in the trade, is that the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who got no news at all the previous day has risen from 25% to 34% in the past ten years."

Kevin: " Twitter is working on various ways to make money from its fast-growing microblogging service, but advertising is an option that is not currently being considered.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Monday that the company is developing various add-on tools and services for the businesses and professional users of Twitter, which could create a revenue stream for the company. He said Twitter plans to introduce some of these tools by year end."

Kevin: Mart Potts looks at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which charges $60 a year for an online subscription. Owner/Publisher Walter E. Hussman Jr. is getting calls from other newspaper publishers frantically trying to salvage their businesses. But Mark is a bit sceptical that the the Democrat-Gazette's model is one that can be generalised. Mark is thoughtful and nuanced, something that is sorely lacking in too many debates. His big concern is that Hussman's strategy of defending the print product is short-sighted and can't be sustained, and it hasn't protected the newspaper from the downturn. "But I worry that the Democrat-Gazette publisher is being fatally short-sighted. Hs strategy may be propping up circulation, but print advertising revenue is declining precipitously, even in Little Rock—even with its against-the-grain strategy, the paper has had to do two rounds of layoffs since the first of the year. "

This illustration was created in early 2006 using logos of Web 2.0 companies that made headlines or were launched around that time. Obviously, lot of things changed in the last three years – some companies got acquired, some became successful on their own while others went bust.

Dear Publishing Industry, Please don't make the same mistakes as the music/film industry. Sell ebooks of everything at affordable prices and the eworld is your eoyster.