I recently presented at the Future Trends conference in Miami. My presentation was called ‘Good Ideas in 2010′ and it is the first part of a project to deliver a book later this month with the same title.

theblogpaper is a user-generated blog-newspaper hybrid that has recently appeared in London.

With a new Russian owner, London’s evening daily publication has decided to fight the free sheets that have ravaged its market share by dropping its price to zero.

Image credit: Getty Images, Michael Bodge/Flickr
Writing in the Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins argues that publishers should learn from the lessons made by the music business rather than return to paywall media. He says that he viewed the evolution of the newspaper when he went to the Glastonbury music festival recently, and witnessed how people will still pay for the live experience:
The key must be to learn the lesson of the most tightly competitive medium of all: popular music. It has cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live [...]

Only a few days after our discussion about the negative effect that might be caused if the newspaper industry decides to return to paywall media, PSFK notices a number of articles that point to continued confusion about what the industry should do in the new (and free) media economy.

Perhaps the most ironic newspaper death in recent memory, the business-cum-media experiment Printed Blog will go the way of so many of its peers after sixteen issues, shuttering permanently. The Printed Blog’s founder, Joshua Karp, hoped that tightly-localized content provided by neighborhood bloggers would draw advertisers hoping to reach specific demographics—mimicking the (relative) success of smaller papers in the wake of the general death throes of print journalism. In the end, the hope that people would turn out to pay for a physical copy of the same content they could get online for free failed to materialize, as did any [...]

“Paper is dying, but it’s just a device.” So says Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Bilton talked with Wired about what he sees as the future of news delivery, and paper, in his view,  is not going to go away, but it will play a smaller role in how we take in news. One way paper may survive, is as output from “newspaper boxes” that print out a personalized paper with embedded QR and sms codes for each article, that will lead to more in-depth digital coverage.
Beyond hard copies, Bilton is working on  [...]

Interesting bit of news that exposes the kind of archaic thinking that’s helping contribute to the downfall of “traditional” media. A federal judge ruled that the Associated Press can sue All Headline News for stealing “hot news”. The AP claims that AHN is copying the AP’s headlines and news verbatim, without paying a syndication fee, and then reselling the news without any notice of where it came from. Which is wrong, of course. But what’s notable is that the Associated Press is basing its case on a 90 year old precedent that defines scoops as property, which is absolutely laughable [...]

The NY Times has managed to break its own story, noting that today – Monday, January 5th – marks the first time that the paper will sell significant advertising space on its front page.  The horizontal color ad, consuming 2 1/2 inches of space at the bottom of the page, has been purchased by CBS and marks a growing trend among print newspapers struggling with lower readership and advertising dollars to find new ways to generate revenue in tough economic times.
Most major American papers sell front-page display ads, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, [...]

Even though newspapers are arguably more popular than ever before, instead of seeing higher profits, the reality is they’re earning less – a fact that is leading to industry wide buyouts, reductions in staff and in some cases, permanent closures.  The current model of how newspapers operate is clearly broken and the biggest contributing factor, might be us.
During the ongoing transition from print to online, we’ve come to expect the same amount and quality of content we’re accustomed to, only now we want it for free.  A bitter pill that traditional media outlets have been able to swallow in the [...]