Kevin: The UK National Union of Journalists general secretary Jeremy Dear suggested at the Oxford Media Conference that content aggregators should be subject to levies. Laura Oliver of Journalism.co.uk reports: "Dear said the union is opposed to state aid for local media and the relaxation of local media regulation rules, but would consider introducing a levy for those who ‘do not produce content, but live off the back of those who do’."

I collect media stories here on Strange Attractor. Would I be subject to such a levy?

Kevin: Daniel X. O'Neil of Everyblock.com says: "Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level. Those leading municipal government in this country– mayors, commissioners, and department heads– would do well to read closely. Change is coming."

Kevin: Some explosive allegations that the US National Security Agency spied on journalists.

Kevin: Stunning visualisation of Twitter activity around Barack Obama's inauguration.

Kevin: A PR social media expert at Ketchum makes unflattering remarks about the Memphis, key hub for large client FedEx, on Twitter. The company gets slapped.

Kevin: A very interesting look at some of the social media elements in Barack Obama's campaign. Lots of good figures showing the difference in use and also of uptake by Obama and McCain supporters. I do believe that Obama's outreach helped ensure that his young supporters went to the polls. And in North Carolina and Indiana, voters under 30 were decisive in the result.

Kevin: H/T to my Guardian colleague Jack Schofield, who says: "Would like to see some UK examples of twitmapping.)" Some really interesting trends in this map showing network of Twitters in US Congress. There are more Republicans than Democrats, which is surprising seeing the attention that Obama and the Dems got for their digital efforts in the last election.

Kevin: h/t to markemedia on Delicious. "Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months. Almost 10% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after Twitter. A further 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6% goes to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers. As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day. A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."

Kevin: Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet breaks down the economics of 'great journalism' and comes up with the figure of $180,000 to support a great journalist, a journalist who is doing original reporting. It's an interesting read. When I read posts like this, I'd like to see a breakdown of staffing positions and roles in journalism organisations. He also looks at other ways to support these journalists including fees from readers. There will be a lot of talk about this in 2009 as more news organisations fail.

Kevin: The Washington Post puts all of their inauguration coverage – including photos, videos and text -on a timeline.

Kevin: Fascinating way to compare and contrast presidential speeches.

Kevin: Mathew Ingram, who has been the communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, has a new job with the Nieman Journalism Lab. He writes: "To many people, this may seem like a terrible time to be a newspaper journalist. After all, newspapers are closing up shop, shutting down their print editions, filing for bankruptcy, and generally sliding deeper and deeper into irrelevance, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. Yes, a major newspaper — the Christian Science Monitor — recently decided to stop printing a daily edition, and yes, Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy, saddled by billions of dollars in debt. Other papers are struggling financially as well, including the venerable New York Times. Does all of this fill me with gloom? Not at all." Congratulations Mathew.

Kevin: Tip of the Hat to crew at The Bivings Report for passing this along. The New York Times policy on Facebook and social networking, whether using them for personal use or reporting, is interesting. The reality is that personal and professional lines are less clear cut than they once were.

Kevin: Sarah Granger writes: "Whitehouse.gov did actually receive a facelift near the end of the Bush administration; no longer was the blog neglected and the site flat. Although it had held videos and audio feeds for a while, finally it seemed like a website worthy of 2008. But when the switch was flipped to by the Obama administration, it took on a whole new look. Welcome to open source government and a new era of government engagement online."

Kevin: Barack Obama's Technology, Innovation and Government Reform team talk about how they were working to remake government and governance using technology. It's worth watching regardless of the business you're in.

Kevin: You can have a bit of play with the GeoEye inauguration satellite image. "This satellite image of the National Mall was taken on Inauguration Day at 11:19 a.m. Click and drag to pan around the image. Use the buttons below the image or the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out."

Kevin: Matt Waite writes: "PolitiFact may not look like tradional journalism, but it very much is. It's a story type that's been around for decades, a type of accountability journalism that's been around much longer than that. The difference is that we aren't just creating a field for a headline and a field for a story and calling it quits. The difference is that we view content as data and the database as an act of journalism in itself. Each promise in the database is a piece of journalism and a piece of data. And all the acts of journalism that combine to make up the database form one meta act of journalism."

Kevin: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu is nearing a deal to invest about $250m (£171m) in the New York Times Company, according to overnight reports. It's being charaterised as a loan with no representation on the board. He would not get special voting rights as the Sulzberger family has.

Kevin: H/T to Journalism.co.uk for this. As newsrooms integrate, editorial positions are being eliminated as print and online editing tasks are being combined. Danny Sanchez writes: "Back in 2006, I wrote about the dangers of simply being a “cut-and-paste expert” who doesn’t learn to use new digital media tools. That warning is now doubly true."

Kevin: "A month into its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, Chicago-based Tribune Co. is beginning to form a strategy for holding the company's major assets together, not tearing them apart, sources close to the situation said. But shaping up to be a central challenge is how to restructure the media conglomerate's $13 billion in debt while preserving its complex, tax-advantaged employee-ownership structure."

Kevin: A great list of web design resources. Must book mark.

Kevin: Robin Hamman looks at how Twitter has changed how he filters information. "I realised yesterday that I haven't looked at my RSS reader since Christmas or earlier, and that my number of delicious links has gone from maybe 10 a day to just a trickle. That's because I'm using twitter as a sort of human filtered RSS reader: most of the people I used to subscribe to I now follow and the people I follow tend to tweet about the best things they post or read. " The network is the filter.

Kevin: Lisa Williams proposes and interesting concept based on the analogy of Amazon's EC2, a cloud computing service. It's another way to look at the changing business model of journalism. Business model discussions tend to focus on revenue streams, but I think it's also important to reconsider working methods and work flows. Are there more efficient ways to do what we've traditionally done in journalism? I think so.

Kevin: This is a very academic but interesting post looking at changing models of information dissemination and influence. The author comes at this not from a professional journalistic point of view but from a military background. It's worth a read. The author concludes: "I really like Jay Rosen's post, but I see it as a dieing 2D linear model of information control giving way to an emerging 3D, networked, hierarchical, content distribution model with journalists higher in the hierarchy than bloggers, but part of the same network. There is strength in networks, which is why I believe the internet will ultimately strengthen, not weaken as Jay suggests, the authority of professional journalism because building networks will become part of the job. That isn't a bad thing for journalism, larger networks translates to larger audiences."

Kevin: Jay Rosen writes: 'In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.'

Kevin: The manager of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer chronicles a busy time and possibly the last 60 days of his newspaper in print. Reading this is like following candidates who knews their losing but still muster the energy and self-confidence to campaign another day.

Kevin: Fons Tuinstra, a former foreign correspondent, views the GlobalPost model with scepticism. The compensation is too low ($1000), and an interest in the site won't pay the bills. He also says the business model looks 'scary'. They will put content behind a paywall, and he says that "only drives away potential traffic".

Kevin: From Howard Weaver on Twitter. Great post on SnarkMarket by Tim Carmody about Nate Silver and 538.com: "I say 538 wasn’t great in this election season (just) because Silver’s formula worked; it was great because it so consistently tempered the insanity of polling fluctuations (including at Pollster.com) by identifying erratic data, bad sampling, house effects, and other quantitative noise. In other words, Silver’s formula (and his explanatory rationale for it), instead of just being an aggregate output, actually helped its readers to make sense of the broader universe of polling, from process to results. As a result, the blog wound up being one of the best political reporting sites on the web." Agreed.

Kevin: Digg, Facebook and Twitter are not necessarily the best examples of lean, low-cost startups, and this is a good contrarian view of Web 2.0. There are a lot of stories right now asking digital start-ups to show the money in part because the recession will force the weak and poorly managed to do just that. It will make the dot.com crash look positively like a walk in the park. The days of easy money and easy funding are over.

Kevin: "iTunes is a business model for distributed content, a way of monetising the fragment itself. Until every news article, every photo, every headline costs something (even a fraction of a fraction of a penny) to read or includes a paid-for ad we do not and will not have an iTunes for news."

Kevin: (Newspaper Death Watch) sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re

Kevin: The world's newspaper editors sound off on integrated newsrooms – Editors Weblog article (09.01.09)

Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. and Global Equity Investors

Kevin: Chris Amico has a list of excellent tools for digital journalists.

Kevin: Absolutely essential for any journalist looking to filter social media on your beat. Bookmark this post now. Keep it handy.

Kevin: What is the future for not only enterprise RSS but standalone RSS readers for enterprise. I agree with otherw reading this article, Google Reader, while good, is no substitute for NetNewsWire. I see RSS as a fundamental enabling technology, and I think that any journalist who isn't using a reader like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon is missing a huge opportunity to much more efficiently process information. However, adoption remains weak. I need to talk to Suw about this because she's the adoption guru in the Charman-Anderson household. How do I jedi mind trick journalists into using RSS?

Kevin: This wraps a lot of the recent discussion, much of which isn't new, about the death of newspapers in print form and what comes next. The discussion still seems to be two camps talking past each other with parallel points of reference. The print folks argue about the necessity of the print without considering print as a delivery mechanism for information that may not be suited for all information or for all audiences, and the newest online folks are coming from an all digital culture that is only a few years old. Right now, the discussion isn't all that productive, but it's good to read this summary, even if I don't agree with all of the conclusions.

Kevin: Tom Scott at the BBC says: "If you run a website you’re going to want to manage your content. You might use an Enterprise CMS, an open source CMS, a blogging platform or a bespoke app, and as you might expect at the BBC the same rules apply. Except some of us have been trying out something a bit different — using the web as a content management system."
There is something simple and yet very, very powerful here.

Kevin: Tip of the hat to New York Times' blogging-ball-of-energy Sewell Chan for the link via Facebook for this interesting inside look at the changes the New York Times. As the article says, a lot of the changes at the Times' site have been evolutionary and quiet. It's the slow march of experimentation that this article heralds. I've noticed a decided change in focus and attention at the Times in the last two years. This is a good article that looks at the what and the who behind these changes.

Kevin: Fred Wilson writes: "So to me, avoiding the Big Yellow Taxi moment comes down to solving the business model question for microjournalism. Is there a way beyond ads to compensate microjournalists? Subscription seems like one approach but what can you charge for online? Participating in expert networks might be another approach. Speaking and writing books could be a third. My gut tells me that microjournalists are going to have to do more than just post to their blog to earn a living. In fact the blog will probably be the loss leader that keeps them in the game."

Kevin: Alan Mutter writes: "With the worst economy in decades compounding a fierce secular contraction of the newspaper industry, the challenge for No. 2 papers will be stiff for standalone papers in places like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco."

Kevin: Doc Searls talks about how people are still writing about the Cluetrain Manifesto now nine years after it was published.

Kevin: It's not the internet that is killing newspapers at the moment, it's the economy and some badly timed financial bets, says Steve Yelvington. "But that doesn't mean print is coming back. Happy days will not be here again. Because as the economic cycle knocks down the newspaper, secular change rushes in to the empty seat at the table. Secular change includes the effects of the Internet, but also market fragmentation, restructuring of the retail landscape, and other changes."

Kevin: Mark Glaser writes about a new American-based, and some say, Amerian-focused, international journalism project, GlobalPost. "(The) business model includes site sponsors, who pay for long-term association with the website, as well as syndication deals with newspapers and a $199-per-year premium offering called Passport with more inside information."

Kevin: There is no sugarcoating it. The outlook for newspaper publishers in the US is dismal. eMarketer estimates that newspaper advertising revenues declined 16.4% in 2008 to $37.9 billion.

Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC.

Kevin: Mindy McAdams, cutting edge multimedia journalism professor. has these observations about video based on a recent study:
1. A shorter, extremely tight and fascinating video has more chance of being watched; it is more likely to succeed in communicating its message, because more people would finish watching it.
2. News sites need to put more effort into facilitation of this sampling behavior, and production of long items (videos or text) is counterproductive to that effort.

Kevin: This is one of those things that will take a little lateral thinking from journalists, but I hope that computer-assisted reporting vets will see, or possibly even be using something like R. When we're talking about ever increasing amounts of data, helping journalists help our readers make sense of it becomes even more important, and with this open-source language and the myriad of packages to developed by the community, it deserves further investigation by journalists.

Kevin: TV is still in a mass media, big money mode, and here is why it's ripe for disruption. "That's the problem with current web programming. On the one hand, you have old-school TV thinking: throw buckets of money at a slick production with huge names and then hope for millions of viewers so you can earn that money back. On the other, you have crazy shut-ins with access to video equipment. Neither, so far, is a very effective money-making scheme. (Leo) Laporte, I think, is the happy medium between "slick production" and "crazy shut-in." "