Kevin: Forget the banks. Old media is paying for failure. Johnston Press CEO John Fry took home almost £1m in compensation last year as the group saw pre-tax profits decline by 56%. Granted he was in a new position and entered in the middle of the terrible recession and the ongoing decline of the print sector. However, compensation at this level is indefensible especially considering the lack of living wages in local journalism.

Kevin: Jon Slattery writes: "Former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, now launch editor of online business news service TheBusinessDesk West Midlands has good insights into old and new media."
Reeves writes about the pension commitmens and high capital costs of established media. It reminds me of speaking to a former Xerox executive talking about how expensive it would have been for them to bring a GUI-based computer like the Mac to market, even though they had developed most of the technology at PARC. Established media companies have resources that no small digital entrant can match, but most of those resources are already committed to ongoing costs. Meanwhile, the costs of entry for digital start-ups has radically declined over the last decade. Disruption will continue.

Kevin: Interesting move by Google. They acquired the VP8 video codec with their acquistion of On2 Technologies in February, and now they plan to release it as open-source. Good post looking at new video codec issues around HTML5 and H.264 versus completely open-source Ogg Theora.

Kevin: Great to see Sheri Fink of new investigative news organisation ProPublica winning a Pulitzer for their work with the Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine. Collaboration will be key on big projects like this as individual news budgets won't support the costs of expensive investigations.

Kevin: Craig Newmark of Craig's List has been talking about trust for a while now, including trust in how it relates to news and journalism. He recently spoke at the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri. His basic thesis is this: "By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power."
I think we will see a shift, but I think that money and nominal power will still play a huge role in our societies and in our politics, sadly.

Kevin: On Techdirt, some more critical comments about the iPad and the hopes and dreams of media companies. This one really struck me, and it's a question that I've had as well. "A few months back, I tried to ask a simple question that we still haven't received a good answer to: all of these media companies, thinking that iPad apps are somehow revolutionary, don't explain why they never put that same functionality online. They could. But didn't." The one issue I would say is that the iPad's gestural interface does change what's possible, both in new opportunities and new limits. I definitely agree that many in the media look at the iPad as yet another way to create artificial scarcity. I doubt that it will work, especially because the media in its apps madness seem to forget that the iPad has a web browser.

no business plan survives first contact with customers http://bit.ly/abnZZ1 #sa #startups #entrepreneurship

TalkTalk pushes back against the #debill, tells rightsholder "See you in court" http://bit.ly/bWRRh0 #sa #talktalk

Kevin: Interesting numbers from Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia. They have again increased their forecast for 2010. TV and online spend will be up. "But newspapers and magazines are each forecast to lose about four percent of their ad income this year." However, dig deeper into the online numbers, and the big driver is paid search. It accounts for half of all online ad spend now and will increase its share. How will content companies respond?

Kevin: The Spokesman-Review in Spokane Washington has always been a forward thinking newspaper, and now they are one of the first smaller newspapers that I know of starting to develop topic pages. Ryan Pitts, The Spokesman-Review's senior editor for digital media, described them as a local Wikipedia. It is hoped that the topic pages have a longer life than typical episodic news stories and that they would gain audience and inbound links and provide the opportunity for revenue.

Kevin: Salon CEO Richard Gingras talks traffic and subscriptions on the iPhone and Android. They expect to charge for the apps but not for subscriptions. Regarding the iPad, he says: "I think the iPad is a fatal distraction for publishers. They have this view that it will save them and help bring back the old model. That’s not going to happen." I couldn't agree more.

RT @Reynolds: http://bit.ly/cxiJPv Pretty much everything I'd liked to have said about iPad snobbery. >> spot on! #ipad #sa #technology

Kevin: Via Adam Tinworth. A brief but excellent post on paywallss at 37signals. "The easiest way to get people to pay you money is when they think they’re getting something in return that will help them make more money."

now using http://Packrati.us to save selected links from Twitter to Delicious. #sa #socialmedia #packratius

interesting post on change and planning from Neil Perkin http://bit.ly/bWZB84 #sa

Kevin: Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NPR Digital Media, explains why NPR chose to develop an app for Apple's iPad. "If you happen to be among the hard-core enthusiasts who plan to purchase Apple's new iPad — as much as 5 percent of the NPR audience — we'll be there for you day one with a fully redesigned app and a Web site that's optimized for the platform."
That's strategic thinking, thinking that is sadly lacking at many content companies and news organisations. Before you invest time and money (both finite) what is the market? What is the possible return? The development for the iPad also had other strategic goals. Wilson says, "we wanted to make sure that those who found us through search engines or social media links got a robust NPR experience."
Again, the thinking allowed them not only to create a site that was applicable for a single platform but had other benefits. Smart.

Kevin: Excellent brief piece on developing for the iPad. Christopher Mims at MIT's Technology Review interviews several developers including Craig Kemper from Little White Bear Studios, making of the iPhone game TanZen. "|His team was able to reuse 90 percent of the original code to make the iPad version of the game. But they had to reconsider how users would control on-screen game elements. The iPad interface encourages developers to use popovers and split views in order to keep the application's main screen visible at all times.'

Kevin: Oliver Luft at the Press Gazette gives more details about the just 'halted' paywall experiment at Johnson Press, a regional (local) newspaper publisher in the UK. Oliver writes, "The scheme saw the publisher trial different access methods across the six papers; reader registration, uploading "teaser" stories which referred readers back to full versions in the print edition, and paid-for access."

Kevin: UK local (regional) newspaper group Johnson Press has 'quietly' dropped its local paywall experiment. "The apparently dismal level of uptake for the JP trial is bound to cast doubt on whether paywalls are a viable business model for the regional press." I think it's important to keep the lessons focused on the regional press and not extrapolate those to other paywall experiments, most notably at the Murdoch's Times (London).

Kevin: It's often difficult to come by hard numbers and agreed upon metrics when it comes to the impact of social media on traditional media so it's great that NPR in the US is sharing numbers publicly about how social media engagement strategies are reaping benefits. Ben Robins and Sandra Lozano write: "The results (of research) provided us with a first look at how social media is not only changing the way that news organizations report the news, but how some listeners are learning to engage in new and different ways."

Kevin: It's often difficult to come by hard numbers and agreed upon metrics when it comes to the impact of social media on traditional media so it's great that NPR in the US is sharing numbers publicly about how social media engagement strategies are reaping benefits. Ben Robins and Sandra Lozano write: "The results (of research) provided us with a first look at how social media is not only changing the way that news organizations report the news, but how some listeners are learning to engage in new and different ways."

Kevin: From the summary of an excellent guide written by Michael Galpin, a software architect for eBay: "For years Web developers have salivated over some of the features promised in the next generation of Web browsers as outlined by the HTML 5 specification. You might be surprised to learn just how many of the features are already available in today's browsers. In this article, learn how to detect which capabilities are present and how to take advantage of those features in your application. Explore powerful HTML 5 features such as multi-threading, geolocation, embedded databases, and embedded video."

Kevin: Peter Kirwan looks at the possible reaction by The Guardian (my employer for one more day) if Murdoch's paywall strategy works. First of all, I think one has to define 'work'. However, that doesn't detract from the article's main point. He asks some very important questions. "What if the combination of digital advertising revenue and subscription charges generated by Times Newspapers Ltd exceeds the £25m a year that guardian.co.uk brings in from advertising? What if the ad spend diverted from Times Online doesn’t benefit the Guardian or the Telegraph as much as everyone expects?"

Kevin: Alexandra Jaffe looks at the plans and pricing for iPad apps from the FT and the Wall Street Journal. Good quote from News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller, who believes that the iPad isn't a a communication device but a media consumption device. I'd agree to a point, but there is also a bit of a content publisher's bias in that comment.

Kevin: Jon Udell writes about a project from the team that work on MIT's Project Simile and now working at Metaweb. Jon writes: "As the open data juggernaut picks up steam, a lot of folks are going to discover what some of us have known all along. Much of the data that’s lying around is a mess." They are building a system that will clean up the data, especially the metadata on datasets. This will be a godsend for anyone using messy datasets and speed merge functions and also help with the creation of new 'facets' ( eg a year column from a data column).

Kevin: Mahendra Palsule, Editor at TechMeme writes at the Skeptic Geek about a shift in social media from a numbers game to a relevance model. Very interesting post with lots of succinct detail and thinking. "Social media and Businesses on the web today are driven by the numbers game – of traffic, page views, and follower numbers. But the trend I foresee is:

The web is evolving from a numbers model to a relevance model."