Kevin: The New York Times has an interesting project asking readers about their strategies to get by during the recession. They have them grouped by latest, most recommended and editors picks. It's a simple concept, but it definitely falls into the idea of user generated content as a service to users. Registered NY Times users can log in or Twitter users can submit their ideas using a unique tag.

Kevin: Facebook looks to open up status updates to developers akin to Twitter's eco-system, but Pete Cashmore says that differences in Facebook use culture and Twitter's more open user culture will mean that this move probably isn't a Twitter killer.

Kevin: Journalism professor Mindy McAdams asks a few questions as she marvels at the news experience on her iPhone. "If someone has all the videos and quality radio news she could ever find time to listen to (or watch) right in her pocket, how can anything even remotely like the newspaper compete with that?" And she follows it up with this observation: "Will the traditional print news organization come up with programming, instead of random and disconnected stories?"

Kevin: The Wall Street Journal looks at the trials of the last four years for newspapers with some closing, others going online only and many cutting staffs, reducing pensions and putting staff on furlough.

Kevin: The superficiality and artificiality of commentary passing as news with respect to assessing Barack Obama's First 100 Days. The artificial mark dates back to FDR, when he met with Congress every day for the first 100 days of his presidency. It was a similar time of crisis as the US was mired in the Great Depression. But now, Howard Kurtz says: "Forget about FDR. It takes nothing more than a glance at recent history to see how absurdly premature this benchmark is. " And then explains the why it's still done. "So why do we do it? The media love anniversary-type stories."

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent argument for greater efficiency and less repetition in journalism. "Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight – that is, more efficient – times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?"

Kevin: The latest elegy for free web hosting site GeoCities by Fred Wilson, with Flatiron Ventures. He shares his memoires and lessons learned. "I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special."

Kevin: There are a few things worth noting in the Q1 results for US news group McClatchy. Gary Pruitt, chairman and chief executive officer, said: "The impact of the downturn had largely been limited to print advertising in 2008, but in the first quarter of 2009 it began to have a greater effect on digital advertising as well. Still, all categories of digital advertising are outperforming print advertising. In total, digital advertising revenues decreased 4.7% in the first quarter of 2009." But I think even more to note is how digital is increasing as a percentage of revenue. "Excluding employment advertising, digital advertising revenues grew 28.7% in the first quarter of 2009. Also, digital advertising represented 15.3% of total advertising revenues, up from 11.6% of total advertising for all of 2008…"

Kevin: Nancy Friedman writes a wonderful satire of Maureen Dowd's irritating interview with the founders of Twitter. In this pisstake, Friedman gives us a glimpse of what might have happened if Dowd had interviewed Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Here's how it starts:
ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can't wait for a passenger pigeon?

BELL: Possibly the message I'd like to deliver to you right now.
Priceless.

Kevin: Former Rocky Mountain News staffers are still hoping to launch an online news service, but their first effort has faltered. Journalists and their financial backers had hoped to get 50,000 paid subscribers, but they only got 3,000.

Kevin: Ethan Zuckerman, who used to work at free website competitor Tripod, lights a candle for GeoCities, which is the latest casualty in Yahoo's cull of unprofitable parts of its slightly unwieldy web empire. It's a brilliant post that takes a look at the history of the dot.com-era web and projects forward to today, looking at whether UGC properties such as Facebook, even with its wealth of demographic information, can generate sufficient income. Seeing as Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.5bn in 1999, he wonders whether a company will pay a nine-figure sum for Facebook or Twitter, even though it's not clear how to make these sites profitable.

Kevin: Major players in the electronics industry such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Toshiba have criticised the BBC's Project Canvas IPTV initiative. They say it will technologically isolate the UK and that it isn't based on truly open standards.

Kevin: It's like a blog post version of an E! show. Ze Frank. JenniCam. Amanda Congdon of RocketBoom.

Kevin: The American Journalism Review does an unscientific survey and some interviews to find out what life after journalism is for many people who have been laid off over the last decade. "Thousands upon thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in recent years in endless rounds of layoffs and buyouts. What happens in the next act?"

Kevin: A collection of web and tools collected by Erica Smith. It's comprehensive including basic web tools, geo-coding tools and tools for timelines and other visualisations.

Kevin: A relatively easy way to batch geocode addresses that you've got in a Google Spreadsheet.

Kevin: "It's a paradox: society can't survive without newspapers, but newspapers can't survive 21st century economics. Is there a solution? Let me step back into my M&A shoes for a second, and humbly suggest: the New York Times should acquire Twitter, instead of just professing love for it. Why? Not just because the New York "Twimes" sounds kind of cool — but because of the economics of news. News is about what's timely. There's nothing more timely than Twitter. Twitter would provide the NYT with four key resources and capabilities."

Kevin: The Washington Post has hired American Prospect's Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy.

Kevin: Wonderful. Useful. Simple. Tony Hirst with the UK's Open University has a great tutorial on how to create a (tag or) word cloud based on a hashtag feed from Twitter. This is how simple APIs are. You can do a lot just from by modifiying URLs.

Kevin: Hat-tip for this link to journalism.co.uk. Federation of Journalist Associations in Spain says "that since June 2008, 2,221 out of a total of 30,000 Spanish journalists have lost their jobs amid a sharp drop in advertising revenues due to the economic crisis".

Kevin: Roy Greenslade writing in The Evening Standard says that free newspapers created by local councils, local government in the UK, are putting pressure on commercial local papers already under threat from the recession and severe downturn in advertising.

Kevin: Dan Gillmor expands on his concerns not about the supply but demand for content. "A key question in this emergent tsunami of information, is this one: What can we trust?" He is working on a book looking at media literacy, which has a companion site Mediactive.com.

Kevin: Suw and I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Bilton, who kindly gave us a tour of the New York Times R&D lab. Our friend Jason Brush at Schematic put us in touch after seeing we were in New York from Twitter. Nick showed us the future thinking of the news at the Times including news that follows users through their day from mobile to desktop or laptop computer and then home to their media centre. It's the kind of user-centred thinking that more newspapers need to adopt. Rather than thinking of how they'd like people to consume their content, they need to find out how people actually use it and dispense with wishful thinking and assumptions. Check out the video.

Kevin: David Weinberger live blogs a lunch talk by We, the Media author Dan Gillmor on journalism supply and demand and media literacy. David quotes Dan as saying that he's no longer worried about the supply of journalism but rather about the demand. "There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. 'The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.'"

Kevin: Harry Jessell of TVNewsday reports that 80 to 90 percent of broadcast companies will have to renegotiate loans this year.

Kevin: Aron Pilhofer explains the importance of Matt Waite's Pulitzer Prize for his PolitiFact project. Aron sums up and attempts to put to rest whether projects like PolitiFact are journalism. He writes: "PolitiFact is simple, scalable and smart. But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.

Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions — or any other you wish to find — PolitiFact more than meets the test."

Kevin: BusinessWeek teases out the New York Times dismal first quarter with results coming in below analysts estimates. The revenue was $22m below consensus estimates. "The disappointing performance was driven by a nearly $124 million decline in the Times Co.'s ad revenue from the same time last year. While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.'s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million."

Kevin: Patricio Robles dissects pollster Mark Penn's numbers in a Wall Street Journal article claiming that there are more professional bloggers in the US than lawyers. I have to say that I was a bit sceptical of the numbers, and Patricio finds them wanting. Penn's biggest problem is mixing statistics and studies, but Penn also writes the piece in such a way that it leads the casual reader to believe that the number of paid up bloggers comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. I will wait to see if Penn or the Wall Street Journal responds.

Kevin: This is an interesting post from 2002 by Tim O'Reilly about piracy. In 2009, I suspect that has got renewed attention in light of The Pirate Bay verdict in Sweden. Tim lists several lessons from the file-sharing wars including: Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. and Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Kevin: Hat Tip to Nieman Labs for tweeting this. Erica Smith, designer and programmer, has an excellent graphic to help editors think about the kind of graphic they should create for a given set of data. It's such a simple but powerful chart.

Kevin: The headline says it all. The New York Times sees continued erosion of advertising in this recession, leading to a $61.6m for Q1 2009. The Business Insider breaks down the numbers.

Kevin: Mathew Ingram calls on newspapers to think more creatively as Google News launches a feature that allows you to navigate news by time. He asks: "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?" This has been done, back in 2007 by El Comercio in Peru. But I still take his point. There is a lot of room in innovation in all parts of the newspaper business, both on the editorial side and the commercial side.

Kevin: Michael Wolff makes the hyperbolic prediction that 80% of newspapers (in the US although he doesn't qualify it as being specific to the US) will be gone in 18 months. He doesn't provide much support or evidence for his prediction. He also blames CraigsList for the collapse of newspapers, which founder Craig Newmark took exception to saying that newspapers failed the public trust on several high profile subjects such as the weapons of mass destruction justification for the war in Iraq and the financial crisis. I think they are both wrong. CraigsList is only one online service that undercut newspapers' traditional sources of revenue, and the decline of newspapers is as much about relevance as it is about trust. One prediction Wolff made that is much more likely is that New York Times will be owned by another company in 18 months.

Kevin: Guardian Information Architect Martin Belam talks about his role and also some of the core principles of the Guardian's web development. "These are that URLs should be PERMANENT, that all content should be uniquely ADDRESSABLE, that multiple routes to content make everything DISCOVERABLE, and that everything should be as OPEN as possible."

Kevin: Steve Yelvington looks at the idea of the Boston Globe moving to a paid content model based on Amazon's Kindle. Rolling out a Kindle will require a lot of upfront capital, something hard to come by during the credit crunch. He suggests looking at the mobile phone industry for the kind of costs you'd need to amortise over six years. Moreover, he looks at the loss of revenue from classifieds, display advertising and banner advertising on a device like the Kindle. He also worries about Amazon as a middleman who will take a slice of an already lower margin business than newspapers.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis looks the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, which he is conducting with his students. This is worth watching, especially because they will be "doing this in the open, so we can get as much help as possible". They will begin looking at hyperlocal from a local perspective, 'a news ecosystem that comes after a metro paper," and paid content models. This is one to watch and possibly help with.

Kevin: "Newsroom employment at U.S. dailies plunged 11 percent last year, the most in at least 31 years, to levels unseen since the early 1980s, the American Society of News Editors said. Newsrooms lost 5,900 workers to 46,700 in 2008, after shedding 2,400 jobs a year earlier, the Reston, Virginia-based newspaper organization said in a report today."

Kevin: Charlie succinctly describes changes in journalism in this post when he writes: “I have already written at length about how journalism is no longer a product but a process. It is not a manufacturing industry anymore, it is a service. And as I have said, it must now find ways to be part of other networks rather than simply create online spaces of its own. This is truly Networked Journalism.”n

Kevin: This is a comprehensive list of not only how to increase the number of followers for your news organisation but also a good overview of services that journalists can use for Twitter such as BackTweets, which allows you to see who is linking to your stories on Twitter.

Kevin: ”
OverviewSome 74% of internet users–representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year.”

Kevin: Seven great examples of how data can be used to help tell stories and show trends, in other words to do great journalism. The examples show how Twitter can be used to chart the spread of flu in New York City, how data shows the frequency of fatal traffic accidents across the US and how a map helps show the areas of Toronto with the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease.

Kevin: “Researchers from City University London have published a report showing one European newspaper’s steep drop in revenue as well as unsteady Web traffic after it became an online-only publication.”

Kevin: Dante Chinni at the Christian Science Monitor looks at the closing of the Ann Arbor Daily News. The reaction he reports by people in Ann Arbor: ‘unfazed’. (I used to work at MLive.com, which published the website of the Ann Arbor News.)

Kevin: Kos of the Daily Kos responds to this common comment: ‘Whenever we debate the future of newspapers, inevitably someone asks, “if they go out of business, where will blogs get their stories?'” He lists the sources for stories on the Daily Kos over the last week. Newspapers counted for 20%. He says: “It’s always sad to lose a good source of journalism. But we live in a rich media environment, easily the richest in world history, and the demise of the newspaper industry will simply shift much of the journalistic work they did to other media.”

Kevin: The Next Web blog has an interesting analysis about what they see as Google’s social network play – building a network of apps with sociality cooked into them – for instance, Gmail with GTalk, Maps with Latitude and Google Reader with sharing and commenting features. They also have some suggestions on how the social experience could be better such as easier ways to add friends, add a friend stream and improve the design and how all of the apps work together.