Kevin: Jeff Jarvis referred to this as the 'heavy metal' rendition of Clay Shirky's post on the death of newspapers. Syracuse University communications photography and political science student Joey Baker has some pretty blunt comments for newspaper journalists. Charging for 'basic content' is just asinine. (And I'd say that most journalists are rather expansive in their definition of exclusive content.) He believes that news sites could actually use a great user experience or great UI to differentiate in a market where the content is rarely that different. Discuss.

Kevin: The Guardian Media Group has asked the British government to investigate Google News and other content aggregators as it prepares its Digital Britain report. From the submission: "We welcome the interim report's focus on respect for IP and copyright, but believe there is a glaring omission from its examination of such issues: the negative effects of aggregators and search engines on the ability of and incentives for UK content providers to invest in quality content."

Kevin: Dave Chase highlights something very important in terms of securing the future of professional journalism. No business can cut its way to success. While most discussions of new business models talk about ways to cut production costs or new ways to fund journalism. "While those items help, it's clear the only path to long-term economic viability is to directly address the revenue piece of the equation." Dave outlines 10 mistakes newspapers going all digital must avoid.

Kevin: Matthew Ingram has uploaded his presentation on Twitter that he gave to his colleagues at the Globe and Mail. He took out some slides on traffic data but otherwise its all there. Twitter is becoming a big traffic driver, especially to specialist areas with engaged journalists (think the Guardian Technology section for a not so random example).

Kevin: How to embed high definition YouTube videos.

Kevin: At least 121 members of Congress (out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) are using Twitter.

Kevin: Tony Hirst of Open University shows how to do an easy map-based mashup using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Maps. Tony is worth adding to your RSS feeds. He has some great, simple guides for representing data.

Kevin: The New York Times seems to pissed away a lot of its Google Juice as it shuts down the International Herald Tribune site. Instead of redirecting people from the original IHT story to the same story on the New York Times, they have redirected all of the old IHT stories to a single landing page.

Kevin: John Dvorak says: "For too long newspapers have taken on the role of cultural arbiter and distribution channel for popular culture ideas. That is all over and can never return." He criticises The New York Times for considering a pay-wall for their content. "The problem with the subscription model for today's big newspapers is the fact that there is very little exclusive information of any real value." He adds: "The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?

Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story."

Kevin: Robert Picard looks at the problems with proposed legislation to allow newspapers to operate as non-profits. It's a fundamentally flawed bill in its current form that would help few newpapers and creates opportunities for abuse.

Kevin: Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, guest blogging on TechCrunch says his "basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it". He says that consumers don't trust, want or even need advertising. I think one of the important elements of this post is thinking about other revenue streams beyond advertising.

Kevin: Fitz & Jen of Editor & Publisher write about the three factors that they believe killed "The Ann Arbor News". They say: "In the case of The Ann Arbor News, which is closing in July to be replaced by a mostly Web business with a TMC and a twice-weekly print paper, three factors conspired in its doom – its state market, its home market, and its family owners."

Kevin: Social media strategist Woody Lewis gives five ways that he believes newspapers can avoid extinction. The thing I see most in this is that newspapers will have t become more collaborative, especially when it comes to technology. Most newspaper companies simply do not have the resources or the culture for rapid technological development. And I agree with Lewis, "Doing nothing is not an option."

Kevin: "The new Obama administration’s emphasis on transparency and the recent economic crisis has focused a great deal of attention on the value of online APIs for accessing government data. One of the latest examples comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis who have recently released a new API to access their FRED database, a comprehensive collection of U.S. economic trends. The API also provides online access to ALFRED, an archive of historic economic data, which features information dating all the way back to the 1920s."

Totally agree with Charles about how broken email is, but we need a way to ween people off email, otherwise the problem's just going to get worse.

Kevin: As the New York Time announces pay cuts to deal with the advertising recession. Jon Friedman at MarketWatch says that bad news from newspaper businesses will be accepted as routine. Jeff Jarvis says that he expected an orderly transfer of the traditional newspaper to the digital model. "Instead, we have great confusion." I think that we reached a tipping point in audience behaviour beginning in 2004-05 in the US, even while most newspaper execs still believed that the dot.com crash had dispensed with the threat from the internet to their businesses. Once, conservative advertisers make the digital transition the 'confusion', as Jeff calls it, will become even greater.

Kevin: As an up and coming internet commentator, are you Dave Winer, Mark Cuban, Michael Arrington, Seth Goden, Chris Anderson, Nichalas Carr or Jeff Jarvis? Use this simple flowchart to determine "Which Blowhard am I?"

Kevin: In case you missed this at the time, Kevin Marks has written a wonderful parody of the newspaper columnists writing about Twitter, mostly out of ignorance. As he writes: "Feel the need to tell everyone everything what to think all of the time? Then a newspaper column is for you." Bit rich newspaper columnists tweaking people on Twitter for compulsive self-revelation.

Kevin: Steve Yelvington challenges the idea that making newspapers in the US non-profits is a way out of the current newspaper crisis. Investors waiting to buy up and under-invest in newspapers is also no solution. "Newspapers got where they are today by underinvesting in R&D, not overinvesting. The debt load didn't come from building websites. Newspaper companies borrowed to buy more of the past, not to build a future."

Kevin: Robert Picard looks at the figures behind the worries about a decline in journalism jobs. "Even granting employment losses of 2,000-4,000 since the last census, employment is still about 18 to 20 percent higher than it was in the 1970s." But Picard doesn't see an increase in the quality of journalism. "If you look at newsrooms you can see the problem. Most journalists in newspapers do everything BUT covering significant news."

Kevin: Some details on the advertising climate for newspapers in the US. Newspaper advertising has been in decline since 2005. Since peaking that year at $47.4B, ad revenue has now dropped 40.5% over three years to $28.4B. Ron Shuttleworth writes, "This industry has missed so much opportunity to transform. Here is the laundry list of already missed billion dollar opportunities: search, RSS, ad networks, video, blogsphere, social networking, social broadcasting…uh…the point is made." Is it too late? For some newspapers, obviously it is.

Kevin: "Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services." With the number of services and information sources, aggregation services will become more important. At some point, we'll see consolidation in the social networks and services, but until that point, aggregators will become increasingly important.

Kevin: Foreign science and engineering graduates are studying in the US but then leaving to return home. This is a huge issue for the US where foreign graduates have made up for declines in US students gaining science and engineering degrees, especially advanced degrees. A report says that graduates should be provided a fast track to US citizenship if they set up companies in the US.

Kevin: The Sunlight Foundation, which as Marshall Kirkpatrick says in one of the coolest geek organisations on the internet, announced that it has received $4m from the Omidyar Foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's grouop. Sunlight is the MySociety of the US, both brilliant groups that take public information and actually make useful websites and services out of it.

Kevin: The Washington Post announces its Obama Appointment tracker. It quickly shows how many positions still need to be filled as of mid-March. From other delicious.com users, it looks like this is built in Django.

Kevin: The Nieman Journalism Lab looks at micro-sponsorships for beat-blogging at the MinnPost. It's very much like day sponsors for NPR stations, where they ask supporters for a small donation for their names to be read out on-air during the day. However, the idea is sound. Allow local fans and local businesses to make small payments of support. It does requirre beat bloggers to build up a sufficient audience, but it's not difficult. And the size of the audience isn't as important as the relevance, which is what we've seen with niche blogging in other areas. Relevance and other qualitative factors are possibly more important than the size of the audience for niche blogs, such as beat blogs.

Kevin: As Alf Hermida writes, the State of the (US) Media report for 2009 is 'bleakest' ever. Alf pulls out this quote from the report: "Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder." The shift of audience to the internet has accelerated, which has resulted in a negative financial impact on news organisations, and the collapsing economy is decimating ad revenues, which is cutting into resources that could be used to develop new revenue sources.

Kevin: As newspapers look to change to finally face the disruptive innovation that is the internet, managers might want to look at ways that corporations change and deal with change. "Stanford professor Behnam Tabrizi, who spent 10 years studying corporations that have carried out reorganizations big and small." Among his conclusions: Effective change requires "fast and ruthless execution." But he also recommends creating multi-disciplinary teams that pull from an entire company. He says that it's better than hiring outside consultants and gives employees a stake in the outcome.