Every newsroom I've occupied in the last dozen years has seen a greater (and almost always better) relationship between editorial and advertising departments. In professional and responsible organizations there is a healthy, mutual respect for what each contributes, and I could count on one hand the challenges of managing that relationship out of hundreds of opportunities where it could have gone sideways. Before those discussions took place, there was too much unnecessary acrimony, hypothesizing of motives and plain old misunderstanding of functions and complexities of the roles. Today we all understand better what the other parts of the puzzle contribute.
A number of places still hold sacrosanct an impenetrable wall between the two principal units of media, and Forbes.com is pointing in a new article to the gradual commingling of common interests in news organizations, in some cases with commitment and in others sheer compliance. It's a relatively positive piece on how many newsrooms are working with "the enemy within" and finding the collisions are not nearly as serious as one might expect.

The Center for Media Research has caught up to some BIGResearch data from February on who is blogging, and while the data is getting a little stale (as these things do about every week or two), its analysis is worth examining.
They're younger, more Democrat than Republican, more African-American and Hispanic than not, and more often male than female. They're a little lower-incomed and higher-educated. Even though they're content creators, they lean on articles and other sources for their posts.
What's more to the point is that bloggers seem to be everyone. The data suggests some 26 per cent of adults say they blog. Well, that's a figure I'd be a little suspicious about, but at even half that level, it's a general function and no longer a niche. The center's analysis is here.

A new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) provides a very strong overview for anyone trying to understand the evolving relationship between advertising, marketing and social media.
It encourages risk as advertisers take their messages to digital spaces and it encourages patience and respect as advertisers receive messages from the public. In the same way journalism is being encouraged to converse, so are advertisers. They're also being counselled to simply think of themselves as another participating voice, and not the voice.
As for fears of public comments, the report notes controls and regulations on user-generated content sites that help address concerns about the equivalent of corporate vandalism.
The online committee of IAB comprises many of the largest voices in advertising and marketing, so its report is likely a sign of what's to come.

Embedding links in stories is a years-old practice for many news media, but the problem is that it usually takes a user off the site to never return. It's as if someone reading the sidebar to a main story in the newspaper put the paper down and left the rest of it unread.
The Washington Post is starting to tinker with that. It'll put links on its stories that can display whatever is at the destination when the cursor rolls over the link, and inside or adjacent to that preview box will be a paid ad.
The Post is introducing this through two of its blogs, The Fix and Celebritology, and is using Apture as the technical supplier. But it's an experiment many will watch.

Buzzmachine has, for years, been a provocative but thoughtful source on media change. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist and manager, has been spreading his observations generously through his site and through several columns and outlets.
His latest contribution is one of his most significant, because it proposes a new ecoysystem for news and media. It replaces the press at the centre of the system with an array of contributors. It puts the public at the centre.
It's "more about process than product."
He sees newsrooms organized around tags and topics or stories instead of departments. While reporters and editors can assemble the molecules of the story, so can the audience.

The publishing giant Random House is offering a widget to book lovers in the U.K. to browse hundreds of titles --- up to 5,000 by the end of the year --- in the hopes they'll eventually click to buy something. In essence it'll be like having a library on your personal page, something to flip through at your leisure, then purchase when you decide to take the next step and fully read the book.
Widgets are touted as a major opportunity for content creators. Given the Web's direction toward personal pages, social media maturity and curated content, Random House won't be the last to spread its holdings this way.

Let's start with the bad news: The American Society of Newspaper Editors has released its annual survey of U.S. newspaper newsroom staffing and found a 4.4 per cent decline in the year. That's the largest decline since it began the survey three decades ago and puts the U.S. newspaper editorial staffs back at 1984 levels.
Earlier, of course, the Newspaper Association of America pointed to dramatic revenue declines at the U.S. dailies in the year, so the staffing data should be of no surprise.  While other countries are experiencing different stories, the growth of digital is clearly not enough at the moment for the U.S. papers to avert declines.
The good news: The Newspaper Association of America reported Monday that newspaper Web sites attracted record audiences in the first quarter of 2008. The 66.4 million unique visitors represents a 12.3 per cent increase over the same period a year earlier.

Britain, the world's most developed online advertising market, is on the cusp of making more digital history. Ad spending online will pass print and television next year, says the Internet Advertising Bureau, the World Advertising Research Centre and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The market share was 15.3 per cent in 2007 (revenues of about $5.6 billion), behind print (19.9) and TV (21.8), but the rapid growth is set to eclipse both media next year. The pace of growth in paid search is slowing somewhat, but search, classified and banner advertising all showed strong growth. The Reuters story on the report is here.

A new poll suggests about one-quarter of Canadians believe Facebook plays a more negative than positive role.
Should we be surprised? Social media aren't for everyone, and even among users there are doubters.
The Harris/Decima poll for The Canadian Press found a bit of an age gap in the perception of Facebook --- the older you were, the more likely you were to feel negatively. But, for a service with such rapid growth and such enigmatic qualities (that is, a new wrinkle seemingly each week to its offerings), I thought the poll indicated pretty strong acceptance. About 40 per cent --- and about three-quarters of users --- felt it made a more positive than negative contribution.

Jonathan Zittrain, the Oxford-Harvard Internet governance and cyberlaw scholar, has written a very accessible and provocative book called The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It. It stopped me dead in my tracks today and I had to steal away time to absorb its premise and enter the full-on reading of the book.
Zittrain's assertion is that the Internet's trajectory might be one of lost opportunity because of the rise of "tethered appliances" and technologies that essentially take control out of the users' hands (read: iPhone) and install a form of central command. In other words, tech that tells you to leave it alone --- and you do leave it alone because, after all, it provides security and stability.
He adores so-called generative technologies, in which development is left open to improvement by the users, and he worries the Internet's shift away from these technologies is leading to an inevitable meltdown. He provides a wake-up call for collaboration and hopes users don't stay asleep as more proprietary (and sterile) technologies surface and dominate. He's not suggesting only generative technologies are good, but he wants a healthier hybrid lean to them than the road we're taking.
Zittrain is a spacious writer and generous to varying views, so his book has a general public/not academic feel. Profound weekend reading.