Kevin: "In a long memo that's part manifesto and farewell letter, departing Chief Digital Officer Chris Saridakis slams the leading pay wall strategy as wrongheaded, an attack on a nascent newspaper business model that hints at a possible reason he's leaving Gannett." Jim Hopkins, a former USA Today editor and reporter (Gannett owned), has the full parting letter on the blog. Gannett has not named a successor.

Judith Towend at journalism.co.uk talks about Ruby in the Pub, a meeting of developers and journalists. "The evening was also a meeting of cultures; as journalists explained their various work brick walls and developers explained the differences between various coding languages and platforms." It's really important for journalists and developers to work together. I've spent a lot of my career with feet in both camps, being a working journalist while testing new technology on the fly. It has been a rare position. There are misunderstandings in both camps, but hopefully, this type of cultural exchange can change that.

Most useful for me was hearing about the projects developers are implementing in their respective organisations and the tools they are using.

Kevin: As a journalist, I found that engaging users around journalism was as much of an art as a science. It took an understanding on how online communities operate that isn't always intuitive or easily explained, especially to those not familiar with online community dynamics. I'm not sure that I agree with all of these points, especially the issue about being effective and having 95% of people hating you. I think that it confuses and inadequately explains what it means to be effective and what it means to have impact. However, there is a lot of good food for thought.

Kevin: The Huffington Post takes another step in its journey to become a social media site by adding badges. It's really a recognition of the different roles that users play on the site, and it adds yet another bit of social functionality that if common on social networking sites. However, the focus of the HuffPo's social functionality is definitely around the concept of interaction around media as the social objects.

Kevin: A good brief overview from my former colleague Alf Hermida about whether some of the new foundation-funded journalism institutions in the US need new ethics. I think this is more about new institutions than the traditional definition of new media. However, it's a good look at whether new rules should apply in terms of transparency for these foundation-funded organisations and other new kinds of journalism organisations as they are launched.

Kevin: Apart from The Wall Street Journal which managed to eke out a small 0.5% increase in circulation in the last six months. The decline, for some titles precipitous, in newspaper circulation continues. LA Times, -14.74%; Washington Post -13.06%; Dallas Morning News -21.47%; and the San Diego Union-Tribune -22.68%. Ouch. Some newspaper groups are returning to profitability. The deep cuts have reduced their cost base, but without a stop to these circulation losses, they will need to do something else.

Kevin: Roy gives a good overview of the newly formed Bureau of Investigative Journalism here in the UK. "(Editor Iain) Overton stressed that there would be no political agenda. The bureau's main focus would be on scrutinising government and big business. So it's a high-minded exercise that emulates the pioneering ProPublica initiative in the US."

Kevin: While I think there are parallels between how the music and the news industry have responded to the disruptive affect of the internet on their businesses, I think there are important differences in terms of how to support their businesses going forward. One simple difference is that I listen to a song over and over if I like it. Breaking news has a very, very short shelf life. That being said, I do agree whole heartedly with one of the central tenets of this post that the news industry needs to sort its metadata out. This is a fundamental platform issue in terms of digital journalism and should be seen as an important area where the industry can and is cooperating on. The major agencies support NewsML for instance. However, too much of the news and information produced by news organisations is still unstructured and of less use than it should be for the digital age.

Kevin: "(Clay) Shirky say find filters – or else." Skip down to the lower third and look at the issues around curation, frustration about search and algorithms.

Kevin: The Guardian (my former employer) is trialling hyperlocal advertising system Addiply on its local beatblogs, launched in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff earlier this year. Journalism.co.uk reports: "The system, which offers low cost adverts that can be sold on a weekly or monthly basis with different rates for different sized customers."

Kevin: PARC researcher Ed Chi has piped Twitter streams through Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) to extract meaning from tweets much as search engines extract meaning from search queries. This gets around the issue of extracting meaning from a limited message, such as a 140 character tweet. He is using this method to create a service called Eddi to help users find relevant information based on their Twitter stream.

Kevin: Alan Mutter dispenses some free advice for how newspapers could charge for content. He looks at the current ideas for paywalls but challenges publishers on their paid strategy. He says: "Pick a system, any system. Or make up your own. It won’t matter what pay model publishers choose, unless they produce unique and compelling content, tools or applications that readers can’t find anywhere else."

Kevin: One of the issues that comes up time and again in discussions about online community is the issue of anonymity. Some believe that verified identity would automatically improve behaviour. I personally think that anonymity is only part of the problem and often used as a scapegoat for other problems including a lack of editorial vision for social media and editorial content that has little reason to be beyond 'let's start a fight'. However, there is another way beyond verified, real identity. Anonymous identity. This post looks at how such a system could work.

Kevin: Robert G. Picard fires a shot across the bow of publishers looking to stabilise their businesses by erecting paywalls. "Publishers keep asserting that things will be fine if they can erect pay walls and charge for news online and they argue that governments should provide legal protections for online news so they can make news a viable digital business product.

Their approach is wrong and ignores the fundamental reality that news has never been a commercially viable product because most of the public has been, and remains, unwilling to pay for news. Consequently, news has always been funded with income based on its value for other things."

Kevin: Rick Martin is setting up a local news site, and he looks at potential revenue streams for the site including geo-targeted advertising (could be easier on mobile with more devices knowing where they are), selling ads against specific tags or categories, content as a way to sell other services such as social media consulting or highlighting sponsors as community supporters. Some good ideas here for people looking to pay for local news coverage.

Kevin: From the annual State of the (US) News Media report: "The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 41%.

Local television ad revenue fell 24% in 2009, triple the decline the year before. Radio was off 18%. Magazine ad pages dropped 19%, network TV 7% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse.

Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year."

Kevin: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looks at how the mobile phones and the internet have affected news consumption. For me the key take-away and one which I've known for several years: "The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone." Print circulation continues to decline in this environment, and a minotirty of a news websites unique users (about 20% usually) account for 80% of a traffic to a site. "Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day. "

Kevin: Vadim Lavrusik, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, looks at 12 things newspapers could do to change their fortune. I definitely agree with his calls to go niche. The internet rewards depth, and while it would be difficult to justify a print product on a narrowly defined subject, the cost of production and distribution of digital content makes the economics work. There are some interesting ideas in the post to differentiate print. I think just as digital should be used more effectively by leveraging its unique strengths, there needs to be more thought about areas where print has unique selling points. There also needs to be thought about the time frames in which digital and print are relevant. Digital can be fast, but it can also be deep in ways that print isn't. Print can provide good medium term analysis or summary information (like The Economist or the The Week.)

Kevin: The New York Times reports how social media is actually driving TV ratings. It's a good look at the 'dual-screen' experience where people watch TV with either a laptop or a mobile phone. "Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV."

Kevin: An interesting contrarian view about innovation from Andy Budd. It's actually as much about taking innovative ideas and transferring that thinking to effective product design and marketing. I think probably the most important point by Andy is that people point to innovation rather than changing their own behaviour. As Suw and I often say, you can have clever technology that is still hampered by cultural resistance to change. It's been my experience that most people don't want to change. They want to master a task because they believe that will ensure job security.

Kevin: A good list of Google's tools for web developers including things similar to Firebug for Firefox and other tools to tune your site.

Kevin: Joshua Benton looks at the impact of a new, stricter commenting system on Gawker Media, the blogs empire run by Nick Denton. Trusted commenters got preferred access to the site, and while that caused an initial dip in commenting, it's now leading to an increase in comment at a higher rate than before.

Kevin: Kara Swisher on All Things D write: "“The ‘right-time’ Web is more valuable in some cases than the real-time web."

Kevin: Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times just mentioned this on Twitter, and it's an interesting site where developers and journalists (hackers and hacks) can help each other out.

Kevin: Pearson, part of which is the FT Group, has both an "internal and external" startup strategy. There are huge opportunities for startups to develop digital services to sell back to media organisations. The startup costs can be relatively small, and many news groups simply don't have the resources (or culture) for such development.

Kevin: "A grim month for quality daily newspapers saw large across-the-board year-on-year circulation falls in March, although the comparisons with February were less dramatic." This is one of the major problems with the print business. Circulation is down, and at some point, the economics of the print business will shift, probably irreversibly. At the moment, the legacy of a monopoly has allowed major newspapers to set ad pricing to support the high capital costs of print. That is changing. The biggest problem is that the it's not just about jumping the chasm, it's that the chasm to transition from the current business to the business they need is growing bigger.

Kevin: Mindy McAdams, a journalism educator in the US who has done a lot of work with Flash, looks at HTML5, video and the Canvas javascript library. It's a good post looking at the how soon we can expect HTML5 to be fully implemented in mainstream browsers. I think that we'll see HTML5 move a bit more quickly seeing as it's implemented to some extent already in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. The implementation of video and friction not just over Flash versus H.264 but also with Ogg Theora will mean that agreement on video will take a little longer. Mindy's got a good, clear-headed post here especially from the standpoint of educators.