Kevin: Zach Seward looks into the cost of a two-year investigation carried out by the foundation-funded investigative journalism group ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine into how patients were euthanised at a New Orleans hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "Gerald Marzorati, editor of the Times Magazine, caused a minor stir this week when he estimated that the article cost $400,000 to produce." It's an interesting post, and the comments are worth reading. As Zach says: "New economics. Indeed."

Kevin: An excellent overview of the use of social media by major newspapers in the United States with interviews with key editors in charge of the efforts.

Kevin: Steve Outing writes about a future of news conference in Aspen. About the the paid content debate: "Will news publishers charge for content online? Almost certainly, yes, for some of it — actually, for a very small part of it. I believe there is consensus among most (not all) news publishers that they can and should charge online users (and mobile, too) for the extra-special, can't-find-it-elsewhere, this-will-make-you-more-money-or-improve-your-life content they produce. And most of the news content that is the traditional fare of newspapers will remain free online, supported by advertising and additional revenue streams." He says that if publishers can get 10% their loyal online readers to pay for something, it would represent a significant source of new income.

Kevin: This is well worth a read, and while some of the problems might be more pronounced in the US, some of the issues are affecting newspapers in most developed countries. He points out: "Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did." His point that newspapers are the product of monopoly thinking might be more relevant to the US than the UK where there is competition in 'national' daily newspapers. But he doesn't just criticise editors and managers, he also challenges journalists. "Journalists like to affect a garrulous Ludditism." It's definitely worth a read.

Kevin: We use Google Docs internally here at the Guardian to share documents and to collaborate. We also use Google Spreadsheets to publish data to our Data Store, where we publish the data that informs our stories. This is a great tutorial on how to get started with Google Docs.

Kevin: "A fascinating interview with Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of TIME.com, who explains why some of the magazine’s best content just doesn’t work online, and how their online journalists and editors tighten and rewrite content in a way that does fit the medium."

Kevin: Paul Grim writes why wireless broadband technology WiMax is losing out to the mobile phone industry standard LTE (Long Term Evolution). It's about economics but also about spectrum.

Kevin: Mike Speiser is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures writes: "Over the past decade I have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of people with whom I stay connected, yet the time I spend on these activities hasn’t increased one bit. It seems like electronic communications and social networks are increasing Dunbar’s Number such that it’s now somewhat divorced from neocortical size."

Kevin: "It seems to me that Apple has a pretty clear story here: “Make the very best products. Business will follow.”

Kevin: I am a huge fan of visualisations, and I see them being a larger part of what we do as journalists. They can often uncover patterns in complex sets of information. Mashable highlights some fascinating visualisations that look at Facebook, the networks, connections and sharing in that vast group of groups.

Kevin: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures talks explores the idea of sharing so much of one's life on the internet. "I also understand that many people will never twitter about their golf exploits or check into restaurants via foursquare. Not everyone wants to "life stream" like I do.

But a lot of people do. Extroversion on the web is a growing phenomenon."

Kevin: Augmented reality is one of the hot topics right now. The iPhone 3GS and some Android phones have what's necessary including a compass, a camera and a GPS system. Benn Parr looks at some of the hottest current apps, and in the future, we'll see "facial recognition, assisted directions, augmented reality tourism."

Kevin: It's a good, lengthy discussion on US public radio interview programme Fresh Air. Alex Jones is the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of government. His family owns newspapers, radio stations and other media properties, and he worries about comment especially on US cable news networks are replacing reporting and news.

Kevin: "National Public Radio (NPR) has just opened another means for developers to access content from NPR.org: a Transcript API. This API provides access to tens of thousands of transcripts from some of the most popular programs on NPR." Other radio orgs (hello BBC) should be looking at this. NPR is really moving forward with a lot of very interesting projects.

Kevin: Alan Mutter asks why newspapers didn't buy Everyblock, Adrian Holovaty's hyperlocal site (or micro-local as the site refers to itself). "The fact that the leading hyperlocal website was snatched up by a multimedia partnership operated by NBC and Microsoft shows a dismaying lack of imagination, foresight and, perhaps, economic resources on the part of the companies operating the nation’s struggling newspapers." And Alan continues, "With Microsoft, NBC and MSNBC feeding Everyblock resources and traffic, the site has the opportunity to take as big bite out of local news and advertising as Craig’s List took out of classified advertising."

Kevin: An interesting Q & A with Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian's Washington bureau chief about the Guardian's operations in the US.

Kevin: "Last Thursday, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals weighed in on what procedural safeguards are necessary to protect the rights of Internet users to engage in anonymous speech. In Solers, Inc. v. Doe, the D.C. high court set out a stringent standard for its lower courts to follow and emphasized that a plaintiff "must do more than simply plead his case" to unmask an anonymous speaker claimed to have violated the law."

Kevin: Rafat Ali reports at paidContent: "as bigger portals continue to buy local sites (Patch, EveryBlock), newspapers continue to close them: latest example is Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), which is closing its only standalone local site LoudonExtra, two years after the hyperlocal site launched. The rationale from the company, as told to Loudoun Independent, by a WaPo spokesperson: 'We found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model.'"

Kevin: Steve Rubel highlights a nice feature that allows you to save articles to read on any mobile device via a service called Instapaper. Google Reader now allows you bookmark any article either on the desktop or via the mobile application and be able to read it using Instapaper. Very useful.

Kevin: This article says that Twitter and other social networks are increasingly the focus on hackers, but the Web Hacking Incidents Database report comes with a pretty significant health warning, it only focuses on 44 hacking incidents. Any change in a dataset that small will seem large in percentage terms.

Kevin: Patrick Smith at paidContent:UK writes: "All you need to know about newspaper circulation is that it’s dropping rapidly, and the decline shows no sign of slowing."

Kevin: John Ridding, chief executive of The Financial Times accuses general news publications who don't consider paid content guilty of fatalism. However, looking at the purchases that Person has made, it's quite clear that they are looking to target lucrative speciality finance verticals. This makes perfect business sense, and you can use this strategy to support journalism, just not by trying to charge for generic news content. Think of how newspapers have supported their businesses in the past and reconstruct premium verticals around it.