Kevin: Steve Yelvington hits the nail on the head, once again, about AP and the horribly botched announcement about the hNews microformat it's effort to 'protect' its content.

He writes: "Some geeks at the AP got together with some geeks in Europe and came up with a really smart idea. Unfortunately, that smart idea got sucked into the swirling vortex of panic and craziness that reigns at a lot of media companies these days."

Kevin: Charlie Beckett makes an interesting point, one close to home as a Guardian employee. Waitrose is part of the John Lewis group, a co-operative business here in the UK. John Lewis is a chain of department stores, and Waitrose is an upscale, values-led supermarket chain. The Guardian is also a value-led organisation supported by the Scott Trust and also by a wholy commercial wing, the Guardian Media Group. Charlie suggests:

"The idea of the Waitrose model was that the John Lewis’ supermarket shares the same community and values as Guardian readers. North London, liberal, organic, quality, cosmopolitan, over-priced etc. So why shouldn’t Waitrose buy up the Guardian and deliver news as part of the groceries and a series of other services for the Guardianistas such as fringe theatre tickets, French film DVDs, Fairtrade banking etc? I already get a Times newspaper with my Ocado delivery, so why not go the whole (free range) hog?"

Kevin: Mark Glaser writes: "Recently, the "citizen photo agency" Demotix has had reason to celebrate. The site gained fame by selling front-page photos to the New York Times taken by Iranians who captured shots of protests after the disputed presidential election in Iran. Then came another seminal moment when the site got the only shot of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in handcuffs when he was arrested. That photo was featured on CNN, CBS and NBC and in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and other papers, bringing in more than $4,000 for Demotix and the photographer, William B. Carter.

But the money-losing startup, which launched last year, still has a long way to go to prove that a citizen photo agency is a viable business."

Kevin: FeedDemon and NetNewsWire from Newsgator are great piecs of software, and they really show what is possible with standalone RSS readers. Journalists should be using these tools because they help manage huge amounts of information easily. Newsgator announced today that it was discontinuing its online RSS reader and suggesting to their customers that they use Google Reader. They say that they will be focusing on enterprise customers. I really hope that this is a move to focus on their readers and not a sign of distress for the company. They make a great piece of really useful software, and it would be a shame to see them go.

Kevin: An interesting interview with Chris "Long Tail" Anderson at Der Spiegel. Anderson seems a little peeved at times during the interview, but his message does come through. "Yes. It's all about attention. That is the most valuable commodity. If you have attention and reputation, you can figure out how to monetize it. However, money is not the No. 1 factor anymore."

Kevin: This was my read of the whole AP 'DRM' debacle. The hNews microformat allows them to track the news, but it won't 'protect' their content. As Ryan Singel points out: "As a means of improving indexing and search, this approach works just fine. As a shield against unauthorized use of content, however, it is easily thwarted. Indeed, it is designed to detect unauthorized use under conditions a content thief would be unlikely to use: Simply cutting and pasting AP content will remove all underlying code (as an overly ambitious aggregator might). So will re-typing it (as a commenting blogger might)." They would probably better publishing all of their content as PDFs if they really want to lock down their content

What's really sad is that the AP has shown how technically ignorant it is on so many levels with this episode. hNews doesn't provide a 'container' for news, and they can't explain how it 'protects' content because it doesn't.

Kevin: Fair use dead in the EU? Possibly. "The copying and reproduction of just 11 words of a news article can be copyright infringement, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. Europe's highest court has said that a clippings service's copying could be unlawful."

Kevin: A thorough guide to use Flickr's API. APIs are relatively easy ways to use web services. It's not as difficult as it might sound, and guides like this will help even non-programmers, like me.

Suw: I'm going through citation hell at the moment, trying to tidy up all the half-written citations in my report. Looks like Zotero might well help me sort out the mess!

Kevin: Umair Haque writes an open letter to 'newspaper magnates'. It's well worth a read. Just a taster: "20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news.
A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche."

Kevin: My Guardian colleague and journalistic hacker Simon Willison lists a number of tools that non-developers can use to create mash-ups, visualisations and other data-driven web projects. It's a good starting place if you're looking to create a data project but don't know where to start. We'll be using these at the Guardian at our second internal Hack Day.

Kevin: "Total revenue shot up 22% over the year-ago period. Much of the growth came from international expansion of its education publishing, but online revenue at FT Group also contributed."

Kevin: A new project in the US 'focused on 'helping newspapers identify a strategy to survive its midlife crisis.'"
Some ideas:
• "Focus on taking market share from existing customers in the local market. Yellow Page directories are particularly vulnerable right now, NP 2015 notes.
• Keep the focus on increasing Internet revenue to push up multiples. Investors value Internet revenue 10 to 20x as much as revenue from print. (Keeping print is an imperative, however)
• Break down ad sales teams by specialists. Sales people should be category experts — like say those who concentrate on consumer packaged goods — who can sell across all channels."

Kevin: Patricia Handschiegel makes an incredibly important distinction in her post looking at website traffic numbers and possibly highlighting why lots of traffic doesn't necessarily mean a successful business: "What a lot of companies are secretly finding out is that traffic does not mean there is an audience, at that at the end of the day, the audience is where the value is. Boasting giant page views and unique visitors means very little when those you are driving to the site are not sticking around, using it or returning."

Kevin: Steve Dennen at comScore Voices writes: "These trends demonstrate the challenge for newspapers to more deeply engage online with the growing number of consumers who do not get any of their news information from the print or online editions of their newspapers. Beyond looking for approaches that will attract these consumers to their own sites, the newspapers must explore alternative ways – including using social media or distributed content as potential distribution models – to reach this audience as the Internet becomes the preferred medium for news consumption. By continuing to evolve their services in a way that aligns with their consumers’ preferences, they may be able to identify alternative ways to offset the revenue lost from their declining print channel."

Kevin: The criticicism of the Associated Press continues to roll in. Scott Rosenberg writes: "“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article."

Kevin: Josh Karp, founder of The Printed Blog, provides this excellent advice about starting a business, content or otherwise: "It's really important to strike a balance between product development, or available functions, and revenue generation. You want to develop the smallest amount of functionality you need to generate the maximum amount of initial revenue. We focused too much on the product, and not enough on proving that we could make money, and that was a big part of our downfall."

Kevin: Paul Bradshaw highlights two posts comparing Associated Press' plans to add content protection to the failing effort of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect content through litigation and fighting music consumers.

Kevin: Hat tip for this to Cyberjournalist.net. Scott Porad, part of the team behind the LOLCat site, I can haz cheezburger writes: "Previously I addressed the misconception that user-generated content is free. To make user-generated content work, Cheezburger expends significant cost to sift through all the user submissions to find the best quality content. However, including this expense, content costs us less to acquire and is undoubtedly of higher quality. This fundamental win-win is the promise of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content."

Kevin: "My answer to the beat reporter was that she should reassess what she does to figure out how she can best serve the audience. It could be that writing two or three stories a day is the answer. Or blogging may provide a way to develop a closer relationship with that audience. The digital revolution is less about adding multimedia tricks than it is about reinventing the role of the journalist."

Kevin: "The New York Times is the latest to report Q2 profits mainly due to cost cutting. And like Gannett, McClatchy and Media General, and Journal Communications executives with the New York Times said the chilling ad revenue losses are starting to subside a teeny-tiny bit."

Kevin: "Certainly, U.S. newspapers are in a mature industry with low growth potential once recovery from the recession occurs. Most companies will performance reasonably well after the recovery, but certainly some companies will have difficulties because of imprudent strategies and choices. Nevertheless, the industry as a whole will still remain in place producing revenue for many years to come."

Kevin: "More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology."

Kevin: Ryan Sholin writes: "What do you call your readers now that they’re participating actively in the creation and curation of unbundled media?

Do you call them a community?

Better yet, what makes an online “community” and how can local news sites foster an environment that makes that more likely?"

Kevin: "Morris and its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, have warned they are uncertain if Morris can continue as a 'going concern.'" That's really all that needs to be said. Another newspaper company failing in the US?

Kevin: There is a bit of contradictory information in this post, but it appears that UK blogging network Shiny Media has gone bust (gone into administration). What is more interesting in this post is the contention that Shiny never got $4.5m in funding and never retracted the information. Something doesn't read right here, but it sounds as if things have been rotten in the state of Shiny for a while.

Kevin: A communications lawyer looks at some of the proposals that have been floated recently in the US in order to keep newspapers afloat including outlawing linnking; allowing newspapers to become non-profits; changing copyright, tax or antitrust laws; or mandating the Automated Content Access Protocol. In the end, Jeffrey Neuburger concludes: "As the debate rages over both the root causes of traditional journalism's economic troubles and possible legal solutions, the online world marches on."

Kevin: ReadWriteWeb has another take on Altimeter Group's study of social media and brands. "A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers."

Kevin: From TechCrunch "Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million."

Kevin: Slate tries to determine whether newspaper or web readers are better informed. Definitely something to watch.

Kevin: Juan Antonio Giner writes: "When you see thinks like this you recover the faith in creative and innovative story-telling as one of the main assets to deliver the news to a new generation of readers."

Kevin: My colleague Martin Belam writes about how the media in the UK are burying their own bad news. It's a post well worth reading. Martin writes: "With the impact of digital distribution, and the effect of the economic downturn, we have more than enough reasons to think that the news industry is dying. Treating our remaining paying customers like children who haven't learnt to use Google yet makes us look like we have a collective death wish."

Kevin: Washington Post news magazine Newsweek has a paid newsstand circulation of just 67,000 copies a week. That's in a nation with 300m people (the US). Mark Potts writes, "It's a little hard to see why—especially in an age of real-time online news—The Washington Post Co. is keeping Newsweek alive. Readers (and advertisers) just don't seem to care."

Kevin: Condé Nast has hired McKinsey to help it "develop new perspectives" on how to generate money. The New York Observer has a memo from Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend on the "considerable and complicated task, forcing us to rethink the way we do business in many instances and incorporate efficiencies in every step of our process".

Kevin: News monitoring service VMS estimates that the value of the TV news, daytime talk show, magazine and newspaper coverage of Twitter was worth $48m. Twitter received 2.73bn impressions bersus 63m for Microsoft's Bing search engine. For comparison, the value of the media coverage for Bing came in at just $573,834. Fascinating and a bit scary.

Kevin: The Federal Communications Commission in the US has been charged to draft a National Broadband Plan, something akin to the Digital Britain plan in the UK. "The FCC collects broadband deployment statistics from industry. But, the statistics are gross. If one site in a zip code has broadband, the whole area is considered high-speed." There are gaps and serious deficiences with the industry reporting of broadband deployment. We've heard this before. For these reasons, they are thinking of trying to crowdsource the data. Watch this project for interesting ideas on how to crowdsource information.

Kevin: I'm a big fan of open-source, and as this post says, many small and medium newspapers have had great success with Drupal. The Newspapers on Drupal group is assembling a list of modules commonly used by newspapers

Kevin: Brian Reynolds says: "A common problem with current social games, Reynolds said, is that they don’t make players’ choices interesting over time, instead “burying the player in tedious repetitive clicking.” The challenge is improving the games’ progression curve, so players get steadily increasing rewards (points, virtual money and items) to encourage continued play. He believes simply refining this would instantly make social games more fun to play."

Kevin: An excellent post looking at how journalists have worked to build their own personal brands alongside the work that they do at publications. It's an important thing that will help journalists break out of their institutions and develop career opportunities broader than the papers or broadcasters that they work for.

Kevin: BBC World Service Director Peter Horrocks writes about how 'Fortress Journalism' is crumbling and how journalists main job is not longer to fight journalists in other fortresses.

Kevin: Jack Lail writes … "the McCormick Foundation funded three proposals from new media women entrepreneurs at $10,000 each so they can launch within a year."

Kevin: Alan Mutter writes about the passing of Walter Cronkite. He was the anchor that I remember (barely) from my childhood, but even those very early memories were of someone trustworthy and honest. Alan believes that we will never see another anchor like him in this age of multi-channel television. There are some great comments on this post, well worth reading if you are familiar with Cronkite's work.

I'm not certain that we won't see someone like him again, but it will be much more difficult to see someone who has that position in the US journalistic landscape. It was a much simpler world back then in terms of that people had fiewer choices. There were three major broadcast networks. No cable. No internet. People had fewer choices. It's a good post. It will get you thinking.

Kevin: Kim Krause Berg writes on Search Engline Land: "Success in search engines was never quantity of pages vs. quality. It still is not. Rather, search engine market success is keenly tied to understanding user behavior and this is becoming more and more obvious every day."

And I'd have to say that understanding user behaviour is what we need when it comes to building news sites and building new journalism businesses. We need to understand how users behave and also what they want. It's not about pandering to users' needs as much as finding out what their informational needs are and how journalism might go about meeting those needs.

Kevin: Derek Willis (who works at the New York Times) writes: "The folks at Sunlight today announced an effort to build a catalog for national and state datasets, going beyond what Data.gov is doing at the federal level."

There is a great opportunity here for journalists, academics, civically minded programmers and government transparency advocates in the UK to join forces on a project like this. It's about sifting through the masses of data to find the sources that are most relevant. It's not about replicating the data as much as it is about sifting through it and highlighting it. It's a fascinating idea, and I hope that we can work not only in the US and UK but elsewhere.