This week saw the launch of a hyperlocal news map for the Liverpool Echo, as announced by Sly Bailey at the AOP Digital Publishing Summit (follow link for

For newspapers, there is no magic bullet. Charging for online content is not a magic bullet—in fact, in most cases, it may do more harm than good. Micropayments are not a magic bullet—though they may (or may not) bring in…

Journalism jobs, news and links for journalists working online and in print media

Kevin: Christopher Wink lists some things that journalism courses should include at universities. I'd agree that journalists need to be prepared for freelancing during their careers and need more education on the business side of journalism. Ignorance of the business of journalism is a luxury that journalists can no longer afford. I think that multimedia training is much more common at universities than it was even two or three years ago. I also agree that specialisation in journalism should increase. I think that journalists as generalists is a dying position. The stories that we cover are too complex for generalists, and I would strongly encourage journalism students to double major so that they take some expertise with them to their beats.

Kevin: A PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey finds news readers unlikely to pay for content online. Niche news readers are the exception with sports and financial news readers more willing to pay for content. "The PricewaterhouseCoopers survey on the outlook for newspapers in the digital age, Moving into multiple business models, found papers and online are likely to co-exist in the longer term. Yet despite the "huge potential" for online, print revenues would dominate 'for some time'."

Suw: Report into how associations (third sector etc) are using social technologies.

Suw: More details on Jeremiah Owyang's social media report.

Suw: The data's from last year but interesting nonetheless. Would like to see data like this from the UK.

Suw: Another Forrester report that looks interesting

Suw: This report could make for interesting reading, if I ever get to see a copy.

Suw: Jeremiah Owyang's ideas about how the social web might develop.

Suw: List of mainly US organisations using Twitter

Suw: Wiki collating US non-profits using social media

Suw: "Only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that have turned to Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000, according to data available on the Causes developers' site."

Suw: Is 'Facebook Causes' useful for charities and non-profits? It's certainly not much use for organisations outside North America, but could organisations do better in their use of social media?

Suw: Is cyberspace really filling up? Or is bandwidth increasing in step with demand? Where does this article come on your BS-o-meter?

Kevin: Reuters Global Community Editor Mark Jones says that journalists should look to the 'online footprint' of of those who submit user-generated content. It will help verify the agenda and background of contributors. Mark makes a great point and one often overlooked by journalists not familiar with establishing online identity. Mark goes on to say, "We have some fairly well-established instincts now." Social media journalists develop these instincts just as traditional journalists have with other cues to establish the veracity of statements made by sources.

Kevin: This is very interesting, and I think that we'll see more things like this. Reuters-Thomson, working with a company called phase technology, has released a specialised Drupal installation that incorporates Reuters-Thomson's Calais semantic-marking technology and also allows easy integration with Google Maps and Flickr photos. Steve Yelvington with Morris Digital Works in the US is working on another specialised version of Drupal for social media journalism. We'll see more of this, and news organisations would be wise to rally behind them. These projects will deliver great value, especially for small and medium publishers, at a much lower cost than the commercial CMS solutions on the market currently.

The worsening advertising climate is forcing many publishers, facing only modest online gains after a decade of digital investment, to consider charging for content. News Corp is considering a strategy that may involve e-readers, GMG is mulling charging for MediaGuardian.co.uk and doubtless others are wondering how to finally start making real profits from online traffic. But there are risks and challenges – here’s a rundown… —You can’t charge for abundance: First thing’s first – there is still a healthy market for business-critical information. WSJ.com has steadfastly stuck to subscriptions, FT is profiting nicely and there are still dozens of B2B…

Digital news, Media news, Google news, Apple news, Publishing news, Entertainment news, Microsoft news, Yahoo news, GE News, Amazon News, Business News, Technology News, M&A News, VC News, Social Media News, Advertising News, Internet News, Guardian News, UK News, London News, Europe News, BBC News

Kevin: David Griner writes a very good post on some of the pitfalls of using social media. The seven deadly sins are a nice conceit for some of the most common mistakes. David writes: "There are a million ways for businesses to use social media well, and only a handful of ways to do it horribly wrong. So why do companies keep falling into the same traps?

The answer is easy: human nature. And as we all know, humans are constantly beset by malicious temptations."

Kevin: Paul Bradshaw highlights research about why people aren't using the internet (whether mobile or fixed line). There are still socio-economic and age disparities. What is amazing is how internet and computer skills correlate to economic opportunity, employment and confidence. Is the lack of confidence due to lack of computer skills or did the lack of confidence lead to a lack of skills with computers and the internet? The presentation is definitely worth viewing.

Kevin: Laurel Papworth brings together two points of view, looking at Rupert Murdoch's pledge to end the internet as we know it and start charging for content, and comparing that with Amber Smith at Save the Media writing about how newspapers should change based on Jeff Jarvis' views from his book 'What Would Google Do?' At the end of it, Laurel again returns to the idea that media need to reconsider their value-adding proposition. What value do they add, and if they don't add value that is probably why people view news as a commodity.

Kevin: Fiona Campbell-Howes writes an excellent summary of a talk by Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News and Media (yes, my employer). She was talking about the future of journalism. I think that one of the most important points is that journalism will be networked, not siloed. I think that some newsrooms have done well networking with their communities, but they still suffer from a lot of siloed thinking inside the newsroom. Another thing that will probably come as a shock to most is Emily's comment: "News has never been profitable".

Kevin: A great round-up of the views of multimedia professionals with a grid of questions. Just click on the 'play' button to hear their views on definitions, essentials of good multimedia and accepting contributions from members of the public.

Kevin: "While some news outlets have been trying to put the H1N1 flu virus in perspective, others just can't resist a good panic story. They've been contacting New York University Sociology Professor Eric Klinenberg asking him to talk about the widespread panic in reaction to the flu. Only problem, there is no widespread panic. Klinenberg explains."

Kevin: A list from Flowing Data on their favourite data and visualisation blogs.

Kevin: Newsweek announces a major shift in how it reports news. They won't 'scramble the jets' to cover a story that is already getting saturation coverage from 24/7 cable news and daily newspapers. "We will no longer reflexively cover the week's events if we don't have something original to add," says Kathleen Deveny. I could ask why the Washington Post and Newsweek didn't cooperate more, but working in the industry. I know the question to that. It's difficult to get journalists in the same newsroom to collaborate and cooperate much less journalists in sister publications.

Other things to note from this announcement: 1) "We will drop our guaranteed circulation from 2.6 million to 1.5 million by next January." Ouch. 2) "We will focus on a smaller, more devoted, slightly more affluent audience." 3) They probably will charge more.

Kevin: Harris online poll looks at social networking use in the US. One data point to note is the low use of Twitter. The highest rate of use for Twitter is amongst 8% amongst 18-34 year olds. Twitter is immensely useful for communications, filtering and aggregation, especially the eco-system of applications that has grown up around it. Does it need to be a majority or mainstream activity to be important? Is this a reality check? Or as one of the commenters says, more broadly than Twitter, does this study show how quickly social networks have risen.

Kevin: Ten lessons from Mark Goldenson who tried to start "an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe". One thing to note for journalists looking for new opportunities: "Content businesses suck (or: do it for love and expect to lose money)." And as many have written about, media start-ups are not job creation programmes for journalists. They are usually small on staffing and funding and big on risk.

Kevin: Alex Lockwood looks into the future of local journalism and local government in the UK ahead of Parliamentary inquiry. Alex repeats what is becoming a more frequent call that journalism, not newspapers, needs saving. He adds: "What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project."

Kevin: Robin Hamman talks about a major study that he is working on with several others to study the BBC's use of user-generated content. As Robin says, it is an ambitious study that that will interview BBC staff and managers as well poll the public on their views of BBC UGC.

Kevin: Bill Grueskin at Reflections of a Newsosaur speaks with Scott Karp of publish2 and Gordon Crovitz of Journalism Online, two journalism startups with very different models. Crovitz explains the strategy or Jornalism Online: "he outlined a four-pronged strategy, ranging from providing a commerce system for publishers to devising aggressive marketing plans to sell subscriptions across the board for multiple outlets. His group also wants to help negotiate licensing and royalty deals with aggregators, which may explain why they brought attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olson to the company’s board." For publish2, Scott talked about developing a tool that would allow news organisations to pool their reporting resources and expertise. He sees Publish2 revenue streams as "paid, commercial applications of his platform, as well as building a broader advertising network among news organizations." Two different models, and there is a good overview of them both. Well worth reading.

Kevin: The title is pretty self-explanatory on this one. Publishers Lunch, a daily paid newsletter, did some reporting and research and found based on numbers from Amazon's Kindle forum that: "over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older". Joshua Benton at Nieman says after seeing these numbers, "It’s older folks — not the gadget crowd, not the young bookloving crowd, and not the mathematical intersect of the two." If Kindle readers are older, this is not going to capture the demographic that newspapers looking for new revenue streams are hoping for.

Kevin: An interesting project from the BBC Audio & Music Interactive team looking to create a Feeds Hub. One thing I like about it is that they appear to be working on an open-source project rather than trying to replicate an existing commercial technology. What they want to do is help the BBC make sense of its own feeds and and also to get usage statistics on those feeds. Other features that I like are feed monitoring to know when something breaks. And they are working on a system that will allow for non-technical staff to set up and manage their feeds.

Kevin: Charlie has a good summary of a speech by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Betholdt Kohler. The "elitist and unashamedly so" newspaper is trying to chart a course, but Herr Kohler makes a good case for maintaining the newspaper's traditions. Much like The Guardian, the newspaper is supported by a foundation and isn't subject to some of the pressures of the market. However, some of the practices seem a bit wasteful. Production and distribution make up 60% of their costs. That seems high. But I think that weekly analysis like The Economist has a market. However, The Economist seems to be taking a more sophisticated approach than FAZ, building up an intelligent web presence and strategy rather than dismissing online news sites as tracking "the nervous twitching of news as it happens". That sounds like simple print prejudice.

Kevin: I'm going home to backup my Flickr photos. Om Malik looks at some of the cuts and departures from the photo sharing site. I'd have to agree with Om on this one. The cuts at Flickr seem those non-strategic cuts, mass headcount culls by a company in crisis. They had some of clearest thinking about building experiences around social objects, namely photos.

Kevin: The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday make their first loss since they were founded in 1817, but that figure masks the fact that this loss was entirely predictable. The titles have lost more than 40% of their circulation in the last decade, and their website has faltered after a redesign. The problems at the titles seem worse than at most papers but not isolated. the Scotsman group editor-in-chief, John McLellan, refused to discuss the groups financial position but dismissed as 'a myth' that parent company Johnston Press insisted on 30% profit.

Those profit demands, even if they were once true, aren't the issue here. This is about a long-time coming loss, not unreasonable profit demands. Journalists still seem to be in a state of denial about the sorry financial state of newspapers.

Kevin: "The rate of decline in print circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, as industry figures released Monday show a more than 7 percent drop compared with the previous year, while another recent analysis showed that newspaper Web site audiences had increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter." Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit organization that owns The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, said, "One shouldn’t be in denial that this represents people quitting newspapers to get news from the Web. But there are many other factors."

Kevin: Former BBC correspondent Nick Jones looks at how British newspapers are working with video and sees great opportunities for them. He expresses concern about the journalistic standards while noting the commercial success. “Newspapers are making money out of video and audio. They are buying up exclusive material obtained in dubious circumstances – but it is getting good ratings,” he said. But he points to the Ian Tomlison video showing police hitting a man without any clear provocation. Tomlinson later died. A member of a the public, a man working for the financial services industry in New York, provided the video to the Guardian (disclosure: My employer). “The Guardian was prepared to take risks the BBC would not have contemplated,” said Jones, who claimed the BBC would have had to apply a ‘whole host’ of tests to the video evidence.

Is social networking living up to the hype for charities? Facebook's Causes app hasn't done as well as hoped. But is this becuase charities don't entirely understand the social web?

Kevin: Stan Schroeder of Mashable takes a critical look at Microsoft's Vine, "a location-aware social networking application focused on being a robust means of local communication that’ll work even in times of emergency." Stan says: "A social network for emergencies seems important, clever and marketable; the problem, however, is that for a social network to thrive, it needs a lot of users. And I’m not sure that Microsoft will be able to get them."

Kevin: Henry Blodget says that Microsoft is late to the game again with the beta launch of Vine, a geo-targeted, social networking and notification service. Microsoft describes the service as this: "“Stay in touch with family and friends, be informed when someone you care about needs help. Get involved to create great neighborhoods, communities or causes. You select the people and places you care about most. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved."

I still am not sure that Microsoft knows what Vine is or what it's for.

Kevin: Brian Dudley looks at the development of Microsoft Vine, which grew out of a sense of the confusion surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The company is pitching this to "emergency management officials, who are intrigued by a new tool that could be used to broadcast and receive information during a disaster or other major event." I'm not entirely sure how this would work in such an instance and not provide mis-information and feed hysteria, which is important in emergencies. But I'll be intrigued by this project if for no other reason, it adds a geographical element to networking and information, which I'm very interested in.

Kevin: Jon Fine, media columnist at BusinessWeek, looks at the death of Conde Nast high concept business title, Portfolio. "Conde Nast made a classic mistake of spotting a consumer magazine 'opportunity' based on advertising and demographic considerations, not actual reader demand." In flusher times, profit-less magazines could limp along for years, but not in the Great Recession of 2009.

Kevin: The New York Times has an interesting project asking readers about their strategies to get by during the recession. They have them grouped by latest, most recommended and editors picks. It's a simple concept, but it definitely falls into the idea of user generated content as a service to users. Registered NY Times users can log in or Twitter users can submit their ideas using a unique tag.