Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "Total annual revenue at just five of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups fell from £2.05 billion to £1.54 billion through 2009, according to our calculations now that the results are in. That’s £509.7 million wiped off our local publishers during the downturn year." They responded by cutting their staff by about a fifth, cutting 5,000 jobs.

Kevin: This is interesting. I think a lot of people talk about 'quality' or 'relevance' but their systems are geared for 'popularity', which isn't necessarily the same thing. Zemanta (a very useful blogging tool by the way) canvassed their users about 'What is the most important to you when choosing relevant articles?' Relevancy, popularity, recenty, authority. (A pollster might accuse them of a bit of priming because related primes the responsdent to choose relevancy, but that's a quibble.) The results showed: "It seems that our users don’t care about popularity of the sources, care a bit about authority and recency, but really mostly care a lot about relevancy."

Kevin: 37signals looks at how conversation has changed on the site since they made changes to their sign up procedure to curb anonymity. Things have improved. Looking at what they have done, it doesn't seem that they have verified identity as much as trying to get people to provide a name. Maybe the speedbump was enough to increase the quality of conversation on the site.

Kevin: This is a great summary of Google's economist-in-chief, Hal Varian's presentation on newspapers. There is so much good stuff packed in this presentation. I'll just highlight this one quote in terms of new devices for news consumption. Varian says: "The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a “completely different ergonomics for accessing the news…so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news…So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen"

Kevin: Some great thoughts from Martin Langeveld on what the iPad means for publishers. He identifies lots of opportunitis, but he also identifies this threat that should make the blood run cold of any existing newspaper publisher. He believes that the iPad and mobile devices in general threatens pre-print inserts – these are ads from big retailers that are packaged separately and then blown into newspapers. Langeveld says that this is the last bastion of monopolistic pricing power for publishers. Knock this out from newsapapers, and the business has very few places to hide.

Kevin: Outsell in the US expects digital ad spending to eclipse print for the first time. The problem for publishers is that the digital budget is spread across a much wider range of players.

Kevin: Damon Kiesow writes at Poynter Institute: "The New York Times is planning to offer its Book Review as a separate digital e-reader product, disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on the mobile devices, according to James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times." He made the comments at an afternoon session at the Digital Publishing Alliance and E-Reader Symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Kevin: From the Columbia Journalism Review, Terry McDermot looks at Fox News. "The perceived problem is not that Fox’s straight news is relatively bias-free and its opinion programming overwhelmingly conservative. The problem is that the news portion is very small and the opinion portion very large. It would indeed be like a traditional newspaper opinion-news division if the ratios were reversed."

Kevin: Laura Oliver reports: "Multimedia aggregator Daylife will now sell images from pro-am journalism site Demotix."

Kevin: A blockbuster collection of global social media statistics from February 2010 sourced from Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, Forrester, Royal Pingdom. Facebook is by far and away the most popular social networking site. Social networks and forums rank second in terms of UK internet visits, trailing only visits to search engines. That statistic is interesting in and of itself. At 121.6%, visits to search engines in the UK is almost twice that of visits to news and media sites. Another gem in this list of statistics: "Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online."

Kevin: Joshua Benton has a great blog post on new possibilities in terms of news site interfaces. There has been very little interface innovation in terms of news sites. Most of the work for the last five years on news sites have been about social functionality. I strongly agree with Benton's last point: "The main problem with contemporary news navigation is discovery, not depth."

Kevin: Ivan Sigal of Global Voices writes about their collaboration with the BBC. He says: "Since then, we've seen mainstream media cover major conflicts such as Iran substantially through the eyes of citizen content. The idea that citizen journalism is somehow opposed to or in conflict with traditional journalism is now clearly past; it's evident that both exist in symbiotic relationship to one another, with many opportunities to collaborate on the creation of news, storytelling, and distribution of content.

For two weeks, we will be exploring opportunities to put those collaborations into practice."
Definitely one to watch.

Kevin: The BBC will be partnering with global blog network, Global Voices. During a special series on the internet, they will be linking to relevant posts on Global Voices and asking their regional editors "to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news", says Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News Website (and my former manager who got me into blogging in 2004).

Kevin: The Tindle Newspapers Group in the UK has launched four small-run (3000 copies) newspapers in London. Sir Ray Tindle believes strongly in the future of print. They will be selling affordable advertising to local businesses put off by the high prices in other newspapers. They reached their advertising goal four days ahead of schedule.

Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or blogging, or any marriage of the two.

Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters wades into the discussion about Zachery Kouwe, one of the journalists writing the Dealbook business blog at the New York Times. After complaints from Wall Street Journal and an internal investigation at the Times, Kouwe resigned. The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, said that "Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin".
Salmon has a different take, and one that I agree with. He argues that far from adopting blogging culture, Kouwe didn't go far enough. "The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course."

Kevin: Juditgh Townend at Journalism.co.uk looks at whether the culture at the NYTimes DealBook led to plagiarism and the resignation of Zachery Kouwe. Judith does a great round up of the analysis by Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor, at the New York Times and other analysis from Felix Salmon at Reuters. Felix raises another issue for the NYTimes, and one that I tend to agree with. "The answer, in truth, is not that the NYT has gone too far down the bloggish rabbit hole, but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough." Quoting and linking is part of blogging, but if you take text not as a quote by passing it off as your own work and don't link, that indeed is plagiarism.

Kevin: I've been working on how location can easily be integrated into a journalism workflow since I geo-tagged pictures, Tweets and blog posts during the 2008 US election. While many commercial geo-location services have arrived, including Fire Eagle, Gowalla and Four Square, geo-location lags at news organisations. Juniper Research says that mobile location-based services will generate $12.7b in revenue by 2014. As we've seen with other technologies, location is moving from early adopters quickly to early mass adoption driven by social networking applications. The Next Web looks at some of the revenue streams that will drive location based services. Definitely one to read.

Kevin: Rusty Coats is a giant in terms of digital and US newpapers, and he has steered digital strategy at Media General and EW Scripps as part of his 15 years on the interactive side of newspapers. He's leaving the newspaper industry. "I would like to explore the broader interactive world. There is a lot of innovation happening in the interactive space — some in newspapers, some outside. I want to see what's outside without viewing it through a familiar lens," he says.

Kevin: paidContent reports that B2B publisher Informa's 2009 profits were down by 4%, which isn't bad considering the deep recession. It still managed an operating profit. What is more interesting is that 72% of its publishing revenues now come from digital, and they say that this is driven by customer demand. B2B more than newspaper publishing has made a strong and successful transition to being a digital-based business.

Kevin: Really interesting comments from Alex Barza, a "New York-based mobile ad sales lead at Google. “Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet,” Mr. Barza said. “Mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world.

“Search has been our core business for many years now, and we actually receive many more searches on mobile than we do on desktops in developing markets,” he said.

Kevin: Location awareness is one of those fundamental technologies that is powering a range of new applications and provides many opportunities for forward looking content businesses. Google has now added support the W3C's geolocation API. At the moment, it is available only in developer releases. Apple has this built into OS X and the iPhone OS. Mozilla has a built-in location API, and Windows has 'Geosense' in Windows 7. Very interesting, and the possibilities are huge.

Kevin: Foundation-funded investigative journalism group ProPublica in the US is giving away its 'reporting recipe'. They explain why they are doing this: "Now we are taking this principle a step further, giving away the recipe for what has been one of our most powerful reporting efforts to date. We are doing this because we believe there are many ways to prompt change through journalism."

Kevin: Nathan Yau at the incredibly wonderful visualisation blog, FlowingData, gives some simple tips on how to think like a statistician. It really does depress me the innumeracy shown in a lot of journalism. What's even more galling is when this innumeracy allows journalists to be duped by spin. Nathan has some good tips, but it's probably no substitute for a good grounding in basic maths and statistics.

Kevin: An interesting look by Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, writes about the time spent on Facebook versus the average time spent on news sites. The figures to take away is that the average spends 20 minutes a month on the New York Times and only 8-12 minuts on most local newspaper sites. That's for an entire month. Nielsen said that in January, users spent seven hours a month on Facebook alone.

Kevin: I've had the pleasure of working with Aleks at the Guardian, and she brings a great thoughtfulness to tech coverage that is often obsessed with gadgets and treated like not much more than entertainment. I really like this write up on creating the four part BBC2 documentary The Virtual Revolution. She writes about the tension between creating a traditional, linear television documentary and the online community and conversation that she tried to create. She writes about the "conflict between the linear and multiplatform aspects". Well worth a read.

Kevin: Peter Kafka writes about the Huffington Post's growth and strategy. On the strategic side, their growth in depth, their focus on building tight verticals is a simple startegy that seems to have been lost on most newspapers. The internet rewards depth in content. Kafka also points out another secret to the site's success: "Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs."

Kevin: Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy has written a valuable summary on what the BBC's strategic review says about the British public broadcaster's online vision for the future. Being a former BBC News website employee, I have been reading a lot of this with great interest. In terms of halving the number of BBC websites, that is actually quite easy. At one point time in the early part of the century, there were 1800 different sites under bbc.co.uk. What that means, is quite a bit murkier.

Kevin: McKinsey defines that 'Internet of Things' as "sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects […] linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet." The mega-consultancy sees huge opportunities, and I'd agree. This new network of sensors will also provide opportunities to generate a lot of data and information. I would expect government agencies to invest in such sensors, and if the governments are open about their data, I think there are huge opportunities for journalism organisations.

Kevin: Todd Ziegler of The Bivings Group in Washington flagged up this great video by Jess3 with a number of very interesting internet statistics.

Kevin: Suw and I are in a huge transition right now. I'm transitioning from having a stable job in major, world-class journalism institutions to something quite different. Dan Blank has a great post on some friends who have seized this transition. That's what Suw and I are doing. It's great to read other people's stories.

Kevin: A good look at how engagement metrics. The real take away which is something you'll see almost everywhere. "Very few stations define success with concrete metrics. Most examples are anecdotal. ("I just have a sense.") What they consider to be "successful" is very subjective. Those that do have an idea of what success means to them include metrics such as page views, unique users, and calls into station when online offerings fail to work."

Kevin: Paul Bradshaw flags up a University of Chicago study looking at bias in newspapers. "Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for." What they did find was journalists probably aren't aware of the reinforcing effect on their coverage based on the similiarity in information and beliefs from their sources. "The result is social networks that don’t recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.” As Paul points out, this is the echo chamber effect in traditional news coverage.

Kevin: Read this post by Ty Ahmad-Taylor. "The rise of prestige as a new form of currency has ramifications for businesses facing decline like print or broadcast." News and journalism are difficult places to apply this model. "But associated verticals such as finance and sports are, by their nature, inclined to offer game dynamics around outcomes."

Kevin: Caroline McCarthy at CNET writes: "The demise of Streamy is one more sign of something that was already evident: Facebook–and to a lesser extent, Twitter–has completely won this game."

Kevin: Martin Langeveld at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent roundup of US newspaper group quarterly filings and dives into what the figures means.

Kevin: Karl Schneider, the head of editorial development at B2B publisher RBI, has some excellent comments to make about "conversational journalism" and UGC. In terms of UGC, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. In terms of "conversational journalism", he said that "that journalists need to move away from producing and distributing content to engaging in conversations with users and working off the back of their ideas/thoughts to create content that is useful and interesting to that ’community’ around a subject". Excellent points.

Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent.co.uk gives an excellent quick breakdown of the proposed cuts at the BBC websites. I used to work at the BBC News website, and it's unclear whether the 25% cuts will affect it or if this is just a cull of the wide ranging web properties that the BBC has. About the only specific change I can find for the News website is "BBC News Online focusing its specialist analysis and interpretation on a generalist, not specialist, audience".

Kevin: An excellent post by Joel Spolsky about blogging at businesses. He talks about one of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they blog, which is talking solely about their business. Instead of blogging about the minutiae of your business, he suggests that you follow the advice of Kathy Sierra. "To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company."

Kevin: There has recently been a lot of quite heated discussion about smartphone market share. Nokia still holds the lead by far in terms of handset volume when compared to Apple's iPhone. However, as this graphic shows, in terms of the mobile browser market share, handset volume only tells part of that story. The iPhone dominates in North America, grabbing an 86% mobile browser share in Canada home to RIM of Blackberry fame. Another surprise for me is how the iPhone dominates mobile browsing in Japan. This is the home of NTT Docomo which was miles ahead in terms of mobile data. The iPhone/iPod touch has 75% of the mobile browser market with Docomo trailing with only 6%. In the developing world, Opera and Nokia dominate. Fascinating bit of research.

Kevin: This is the question that all news sites are asking in 2010: Will people pay? And if so, what will they pay for? You can see the strategy of my soon-to-be former day job, The Guardian. Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger says that he believes that as some news sites charge for content that readers will flock to free sites. He's not ready to "risk damaging his paper's "journalistic potential'" .

Kevin: The Pew Research Center in the US did a study of the different generations and found: "Millennials' technological exceptionalism is chronicled throughout the survey. It's not just their gadgets — it's the way they've fused their social lives into them. For example, three-quarters of Millennials have created a profile on a social networking site, compared with half of Xers, 30% of Boomers and 6% of Silents."

Kevin: A very useful listing of World of Warcraft statistics including the demographics of the players, the cost of the operation and the rate of sales. "It sold 1933 copies a minute".

Kevin: Several editors are returning to reporting positions at the New York Times. This is a trend that is happending elsewhere as budgets come under pressure.