It's 2009, right? "Online advertising is a 'digital fad' that will pass and there is 'still no substitute' for a colourful local newspaper ad, according to the managing director of an independent local newspaper in Wigan."

"From January 2009, organisations with an FT licence will have the ability to create RSS feeds customised to their specific needs."

"The local news business may have laid off 500 in just three months, but maybe some of those out-of-work reporters will help define the new business model that’s so badly needed after all. ... [W]e’re seeing more local reporters becoming entrepreneurial after taking redundancy…"

"A stream of tech consciousness from reporters in the Financial Times San Francisco bureau. All comment and conversation welcome - BETA"

Patrick Smith: "2009 will mark a shift from seasonal, sensible belt-tightening to the long-term shrinking of the newspaper industry in Britain. Here’s why"

Anna Pickard: "[T]he internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we're lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. ... Whenever this crops up in surveys and conversation, though it's treated with an air of disdain. It's the sense of shock that surprises me, as if people on the internet were not 'real' at all."

"I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem. ... It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience that’s breaking the newspaper business model. That points the arrow back at the people who create the content. The 20th century content model isn’t working any more, regardless of whether it’s in print or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex by a modified laser beam."

"News credit uses microformats with some specific enhancements to allow journalists, and those producing journalism, to embed basic information to their news articles online which can help the public establish an article’s authorship and provenance. This information is not pejorative or judgmental, rather the basic who, what, when and where of a news article. The equivalent, if you like, of ingredients of the side of a food packet - giving people the information they need to enable them to make informed choices."

"If our content is truly open, it will enable users to mash it up, keep it relevant to them, and share it with new audiences in places where those people are. Although NPR.org is still critical to our strategy, we can no longer rely exclusively on the site as a way to reach people. " (November 2008)

"Where do these meandering, senseless rants [in online comment threads] come from? Trolls, people who say just about anything to get a rise out of others. ... So, here's a new community rule: Do not 'feed' the trolls. We encourage community members to report abuse by trolls. But we also ask that you not engage with trolls in the comment threads. Reacting to their provocations is exactly what they want. If we see you feeding a troll, we will remove both the troll's comments and your responses. "

Daniel Lathrop, an investigative reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is running a year-long course, teaching basic computer science to newsroom colleagues.

A nice collection of links to news apps for the iPhone...

"[D]efense attorney David Shapiro argued that media coverage of the trial has been unprecedented, including not only news stories and editorials, but "things like a blog, where the reporter sits in the back of the courtroom every day and in real time gives his spin of what is happening.' The Inquirer has maintained a blog of testimony most days on Philly.com."

"Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, planned to announce on Wednesday that it had acquired Consumerist.com, a popular blog formerly owned by Gawker Media. ... It will become part of a new division of Consumers Union, and the current editors will remain. No plans are under way to change the coverage or to begin charging for the site. ... Unlike most magazines, Consumer Reports makes its money from subscriptions, which cost $26 for the Web site or print edition."