Litl It's baffling that no one's really overhauling laptop design. They're getting thinner and smaller, while capabilities and processing power swell, but the user interface stays exactly the same. Litl, a brand-new laptop, isn't going to change the world–but it's proof of what a set of excellent designers can do, if given a bit of breathing room.

Kevin: There is a lot to the launch of the Texas Tribune, and there are some impressive web-native aspects of it as Martin Langeveld writes at Nieman Lab. The TribWire and TweetWire bring together some excellent aggregation, something that most mainstream outlets have failed to do. They have a Datablog, much like the Guardian where I work, as well as data and document repositories. They also have Topic pages. Look at the post for all of the features. In terms of revneue, they also have the Texas Weekly political e-newsletter available for an annual subscription of $250.
This is not a replacement for a general purpose newspaper but a rather a statewide version of Politico, a highly focused news service.

Kevin: Mark Sweeney of the Media Guardian writes: "National newspaper groups need to persuade less than 5% of their internet audience to pay for online content to make a success of moving away from relying on digital advertising, according to a private equity financier.

Dharmash Mistry, a former senior Emap executive who is now a partner at private equity firm Balderton Capital, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that getting about 3% to 4% of an online audience of a national newspaper to pay a modest £3 a month would cover the entire annual digital advertising revenue he estimated most groups currently make."

Dharmash Mistry, a former senior Emap executive who is now a partner at private equity firm Balderton Capital"

Kevin: David Armano is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy, makes some predictions for social media and 2010. Mobile. Location. Social media policies at companies that are enforced. Not a whole lot earth shattering here, but it is worth a look.

Kevin: GlobalPost expects to generate $1 million in revenue this year and $3 million next, reported Nieman Lab, from notes taken by Bill Densmore at a seminar organised by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, entitled "How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century."
I'll be looking for a breakdown on how much revenue comes from advertising, syndication and their membership scheme. The site currently only has 500 paying members so I would expect that part of the revenue picture to be relatively small. I'd also be interested to see how it is working out for individual journalists working for the site.

Kevin: GlobalPost expects to generate $1 million in revenue this year and $3 million next, reported Nieman Lab, from notes taken by Bill Densmore at a seminar organised by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, entitled "How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century."
I'll be looking for a breakdown on how much revenue comes from advertising, syndication and their membership scheme. The site currently only has 500 paying members so I would expect that part of the revenue picture to be relatively small. I'd also be interested to see how it is working out for individual journalists working for the site.

Kevin: Chicago is turning into a very interesting laboratory for new news models. The Chicago News Co-operative and reconstituted ChiTown Daily are pursuing different models. ChiTown Daily tried to pursue grant-based online model and has switched to a print tabloid focusing on 'City Hall', Chicago city politics. Both the ChiTown Daily and the Chicago News Co-operative will be focusing on City Hall "and and other big institutions that dominate civic life in Chicago".
I am sure that they can find some success, but unless they connect with readers beyond these institutions (which they seem to have a plan to do), I can't see them being anything but niche players.

Kevin: A graph showing the circulation of major US newspapers over the last two decades. It's an interesting visual, but as people in the comments say (or speculate about), we don't really have a sense of what drove this. Is it the Huffington Post? Google News? Issues of coverage, trust and politics? The graph is grim reading for anyone working at these major US metro newspapers. However, it's a graph that gives rise to more questions than it answers.

Kevin: Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb looks into the details of a report from ChangeWave in the US. I'm assuming that this is for the US market and not the global market. Their research shows a surge in Apple iPhone versus Research in Motion's (RIM) Blackberry in the consumer market. The most important data in this report is really about customer satisfaction. Apple's iPhone is miles ahead of the competition with 74% of customers saying they are very satisfied versus 43% for RIM, 33% for Palm, 32% for Motorola and 29% for Nokia and Samsung.

Kevin: Layar is Dutch augmented reality company whose application runs on Android devices, iPhone and as of last week, Symbian Nokia. Augmented reality layers extra information on top of the view based on information from the GPS, compass and accelerometer in smartphones. The company looks to have closed $1m in funding.

Kevin: Staci Kramer reports: "One of the longest-running guessing games for New York Times insiders and observers may be nearing an end: will the paper charge again for content online and what form would a pay program take? Now after months of deliberation, Executive Editor Bill Keller tells Public Editor Clark Hoyt he guesses a decision is coming “within a matter of weeks.” And yet it doesn’t sound like he sees a straight path to that decision: 'It’s a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go.'"

Kevin: "Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. "

Kevin: Simon Collister has a truly fascinating and rigorous look at how political parties in the UK track online influencers and engage with key political bloggers and with the public at large through digital networks. Simon "also tried to fit these findings into a critical framework based on the work Manuel Castells has completed in mapping and analysing the Network Society". Castells categorises actors as programmers or switchers. In the UK, Simon believes that Conservatives are programmers and Labour are switchers. Well worth a read.

Kevin: The New York Times' David Carr stole the show at last night's Intelligence Squared debate on the merits of the mainstream media, when he pulled out a print out of fellow debater Michael Wolff's Web site Newser all full of holes. Carr had cut out every story on Newser that came from the main stream media to prove his point: new media couldn't exist without venerable mainstream pubs like the Times.

Kevin: Another step from outsider political blog to member of the political establishment: "The White House released November's intown pool schedule for media outlets that cover the president this morning, and for the first time, Talking Points Memo is on the list. "

Kevin: Gannett's daily newspapers are being urged to improve watchdog journalism, reposition web sites for breaking news, and better engage young readers and Sunday readers, according to a list of priorities issued last month during a meeting of some 40 newspaper editors."

Kevin: From INMA and Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe’s annual conference Outlook 2010, former ContentNext research director and media analyst Lauren Rich Fine opened her conference presentation with a potentially ‘heretical’ question: “Is it possible that there’s too much news?”

Kevin: Starsuckers was a documentary showing how easy it was to plant celebrity stories in the British tabloids. "Atkins and his team called up British tabloids with made-up frivolous celebrity stories, and they 'just printed anything', he says." Director Chris Atkins decries the media's "toxic effect on society".

Kevin: German publishers have accused Google and other internet companies of exploiting their content to build lucrative businesses and have failed to share the rewards. The new ruling coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the business-friendly, liberal Free Democratic Party have "pledged to create a new kind of copyright to protect online journalism". "Details of how the proposal would work have not been spelled out, but publishing executives say one possibility would be to require a license for any commercial use of published material online." Private, noncommercial use of news articles would remain unrestricted. Good luck determining private, noncommercial use. I'm a professional journalist. Would posting content on my personal blog be considered noncommercial or as an extension of my work?
There is something troubling about this article in that it starts to muddle a proposal for licencing for online journalism and 'piracy' of films and music.

Kevin: Very significant ruling in the UK. British regional press publisher Newsquest (a division of US-based Gannett) has obtained a potentially significant court ruling on the issue of how far they are protected from legal action over user-generated web content. "Newsquest says the High Court judgement clarifies for the first time that newspaper websites hosting user-generated content are, subject to certain conditions, protected from liability. The ruling suggests that publishers cannot be held responsible for potentially libellous material posted by website users so long as it is removed as soon as possible."

Kevin: Mary Turck works with training citizen journalists for the Twin Cities Daily Planet. She gives five tips and directs you to other resources they have developed in the training process. "We have created twenty very short lessons on topics ranging from focusing a story to transparency to best practices for quotations and paraphrases."

Kevin: An off the record meeting at the New York Times leaked to Nieman Journalism Lab provides a look at how the New York Times is struggling with losses, staff cuts and 'spreading the gospel of integration' in the newsroom. It's really worth reading, and one has to be admire the honesty that they are dealing with these difficult times. It's nice to hear people admit what they don't know.

Kevin: Jeff Nolan writes: "By creating a pricing plan that defends rather than attacks a market the company is conceding defeat in print and this strategy will have the effect of slowing audience growth online in the one segment that the paper requires, young people. I am willing to give Newsday and Cablevision some credit for being creative with a multichannel strategy that covers TV, print and online, but this pricing plan is a throwback to a subscription model that simply doesn’t work anymore."

Kevin: AOL News is adopting the Knigh Foundation funded hNews microformat. Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust in the Uk gives an overview of the microformat and a bit about its background. He adds: "hNews, for those unfamiliar with it, makes some basic, factual information about the provenance of an online news article machine-readable. In other words, it makes distinguishable a lot of information that is currently indistinguishable on the web (e.g. to search engines). hNews is not the same as "beacon," the controversial data tag that Associated Press is attaching to its content to help track its use around the web, and allow it, as I understand it, to create a "News Registry" of its users. AP is layering beacon on top of hNews."
That is good to hear. AP really muddied the waters by not being clear about the differences between 'beacon' and hNews.

Kevin: Tom Grubisich writes a critical review of "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" report by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson. He says: "The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking." The post is worth reading, but Robert Niles (also of OJR) comment below is also worth reading. Robert is even more scatching. "A generation of news managers and scholars has had more than a decade to confront the what should have been an obvious impending erosion of newspaper revenue due to online competition. That generation instead chose to look for ways to reinforce newspapers' monopoly power over the access to and publication of the news, or to find new ways to fund existing news operations and procedures. (And, often, both.)"

Kevin: Anthony Moor writes: "Jeff Jarvis and others have already documented the fact that the 'story' is no longer the endpoint in the journalistic process, as it used to be. Stories are just points in a continuum that now includes instant feedback, commentary, mashing up of new information, updates, rebuttals and the like. It's outdated almost as fast as it's published. That's why traffic to it lives and dies on the Web in a matter of hours.

Now we're seeing the rise of the topical page as the atomic unit of content. Journalists will no longer write stories, persay. They're going to write topics, which will have story-like elements, but won't look anything like the articles they focus on today."

Kevin: Margaret Simons gives this advice to journalists: "Do not allow your employer to prevent you from having access to Twitter, Facebook and the like. Be very cautious indeed about signing anything that restricts your ability to network online." Couldn't agree more.

Kevin: One to watch. Managing news "is a robust news + data aggregation engine with pluggable visualization + workflow tools".

Kevin: Bill Mitchell of Poynter provides lots of good details from the newspaper experiment in Detroit. One key paragraph: "By the end of 2010, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News expect readers to provide 40 percent of their revenue, a dramatic increase from the traditional newspaper revenue split of 80 percent advertising and 20 percent circulation." The US newspaper industry's exposure to the fluctuations in advertising has been one of the factors in its struggle during this recession.

Kevin: Tweetminster tracks the Twitter updates of British politicians and political figures. Last night as Nick Griffin, leader of the far right British National Party, appeared on BBC panel programme Question Time, they analysed the tweets from a group of politicians, political figures, journalists and bloggers. " The aim of the experiement was mainly to test various tools and technologies (that we will be releasing in the near future) around a confined timeframe/event and population (those viewing and commenting on the event).

The goal is to shake and open up the way analysis is done, to measure the pulse of stuff now, not tomorrow, and most importantly to eventually empower anyone to contribute to an analytical process." They talk about the initial results of the experiment.

Kevin: CNN.com is to relaunch on Monday. The design is a big change from the text-heavy, link-heavy front page it replaces. The page is much more visual, with an emphasis on photography and video. It will also add more opinion and entertainment. In addition to highlighting more of its own video content, it has announced a partnership with tech and design conference TED. The site will continue with existing social media partnerships of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Kevin: Charlie Becket, director of the Polis journalism and society think tank at the London School of Economics, looks forward to the general election in the UK next year. "Political bloggers like to think that they will swing the next election. Big platforms like ConservativeHome and individual muck-rakers such as Guido Fawkes are billed as the websites that might win it.

But when I talk to MPs it is video that really scares them. Could this be the election when a punter with a Flip camera changes the course of a campaign?"

Suw: Put this together with proxies for productivity and we have a bit of a problem brewing about traditional models of what work is.