Patrick Goldstein's column in The Los Angeles Times, The Big Picture, has been a fixture for following the film industry. Now he's starting a blog, and his introductory column about the blog indicates how important it is now to be creating content all the time --- not just weekly.
"My guess is that someday our blogs will be the backbone of the paper," he wrote. He's likely not wrong. If the personalities of the newsroom can find their blog voices, there's no reason to doubt they'll be the engine of any digital newsroom.
While blog traffic is relatively small (frightfully so on the surface of it), it is growing and finding communities of interest. Goldstein will be a new fixture in this sphere.

For some time now it was expected Google, the largest ad server, would create a new service to try to be the largest ad measurer.
Today it has rolled out Google Ad Planner. It measures Internet use by largely drawing upon activity from servers, unlike the comScore and Nielsen Media measurement tools, which use panels to determine activity. Ad Planner will permit advertisers to enter their targeted audience and find sites most likely to match up with those targets.
The optimistic prospect for the service would marry it to Google's ad server to ideally place content in front of the right audience. Last week a more generic version of this traffic monitor was released.
Naturally it strikes fear in both the incumbents and the overall industry, which already has a fairly significant connection to Google and may not like the idea of further dependence. Until something more accurate comes along, though, advertisers are bound to want to spend more precisely.

An analysis by AdvertisingAge of the top 100 U.S. advertisers (or about 41 per cent of the market) indicates that about $1 billion of their advertising shifted into the digital space in 2007. The shift came at the expense of newspapers, which lost nearly $650 million, and television, which lost more than $400 million.
The slowing U.S. economy was also reflected in the figures: a mere 1.7-per-cent increase in the year, the most sluggish since 2001.

A recent study from DECODE for the World Association of Newspapers provides some very positive opportunities for newspaper companies.
The Canadian-based company polled young people in three countries (the U.S., Netherlands and Finland) and found a strong level of interest in news among youth. It concludes that parents and teachers (not peers) play a strong role in modeling traits for readership and that there are particular opportunities to reach young people when they leave home. Social networks can be allies in reaching the young reader.
But too often the newspaper content isn't relevant. Young people want more information on music and film. Politics ranks much lower. And TV is still viewed as more credible.
The message from the study is that there are options, but newspaper companies need to find ways to emphasize the strength of content across multiple platforms.

The Internet Advertising Bureau says Internet advertising reached $5.8 billion in the first quarter of 2008, more than 18 per cent ahead of the same quarter in 2007. It's the second-best quarter ever, behind only the previous one, which would have reflected the ad-flurry of Christmas season.

The New York Times summarizes the problems for the U.S. newspaper industry in a fairly succinct, bleak way today.
Ad revenue is down, the economy's overall malaise is compounding the troubles, and many of the more leveraged media firms are facing challenges meeting their financial obligations (although no one is at bankruptcy's door). Online revenue is growing, but not at the rate it was a year ago, and not nearly quickly enough to replace the loss in print revenue.
The speculation is that there will be further takeovers and assimilations to deal with some of the problems.
One analyst tells the Times the bottoming out may not take place for another three to four years, by which time that industry may bear little resemblance to today's.

Just caught up with Jon Fine's latest contribution to Business Week and his look at Daylife, the news aggregator that has been employed by large organizations to create subject-specific sites on just about anything.
Now Daylife plans a more accessible (that is, affordable) version that will permit organizations to build and mount these sites on their own. There isn't a clear plan yet on how to share in the revenue, but the plan has very interesting applications for smaller media looking for a way to harness the Internet's vast supply of content.

Since its earlier warning to Drudge Retort, and since the pushback from the blogging community, little has been heard from The Associated Press about its demands that bloggers not crib its reports for their reports.
The closest anyone seems to be getting to an understanding of the situation in this media blackout is the New York Times, which has interviewed (and been refused interviews by) the interested parties in the dispute.
Essentially it appears The AP wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its reports (these also being significant traffic drivers because Google and other search engines tend to crawl the headlines and the first words more aggressively). The battle is, it seems, not just about fair use, but about the traffic those words can drive in search.
But it's also clear (in The AP's non-comment) that there is much more to come in this dispute. And, as goes The AP, so could go many other media.

The recent European Digital Journalism Survey has some fascinating findings for newsrooms shifting into the multiplatform age.
First off, the surprise of the survey: All of the multi-task work has been perceived as an improvement of overall quality by the journalists themselves.
Another surprise: Most of the skills improvement has been self-generated. Oddly little training has been instituted.
Journalists still feel their traditional bases are most important, but have bought in to digital as the future and are treating it seriously in the present.
There's also a 40/40 factor: about 40 per cent of respondents are producing more than 40 per cent of their content online first.

In the end, everything is local.
It should not surprise anyone that Huffington Post, the most successful pure-play online news entity, would shift its attention to local franchising at some stage. Their/her first stop is Chicago, where HuffPost will aggregate local news, blogs and content, but dozens of U.S. cities are on the horizon.
Meantime, Topix has entered into a handful of content deals in listings, apartments, TV and movie listings, business and (yes) pet directories. It's shifting itself from a mainly news to a broader portal locally.