Nearly half of the top 30 U.S. newspapers experienced declines in the time users spent on the Web sites in the last year.
That has to be harrowing.
NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and USAToday.com experienced some growth, but some of the larger papers in the United States (in Atlanta, Boston, New York, San Francisco, among them) aren't getting a time-spent boost online.
Editor & Publisher has been running some exclusive content from Nielsen Media. They share a common ownership. The story on this data is here.

The screens are becoming one, slowly but surely. The announcement yesterday of The Widget Channel from Intel and Yahoo may not signal the turning point, but it's a significant evolution.
Intel and Yahoo will introduce technology to redesign the HDTV --- combining a processor with a platform --- to deliver widgets of updated content (sports, auction, business) at the bottom of the  screen, somewhat like the original multifaceted Bloomberg TV screen model that now occupies many cable offerings.
The announcement has some powerful endorsements from Comcast, Disney, Sony and a wave of letters of support from the likes of CBS, Motorola, and Samsung.
Now there are several hurdles to this channel: The TV technology is costly and still not widely available, among them. But when large entities begin to collaborate like this, it's only a matter of time before the major applications emerge.

Starting today, American Airlines is the first domestic airline to offer in-flight Internet access on long-haul excursions. Delta will soon offer Internet service across part of its fleet.
Some things we will want to use this service for:
1. To alert your spouse you left the stove on.
2. To tell the office we've left behind that they're still being watched on Webcams.
3. To e-mail your boss in First Class.
4. To watch your son's baseball game on streaming video.
5. To download music that will be much better than what the airline is playing.
6. Ditto, a movie.
7. To Twitter about the impending arrival of the onion-salt-laced bits and bites.
8. To e-mail your seatmate to stop reading your business plan on your laptop.
9. To e-mail the person in front to raise the seat so you can see your e-mail on your laptop to the seatmate.
10. To play Solitaire online instead of offline.

The University of Michigan tracks Web sites for their customer satisfaction. Its quarterly survey indicates Google is on top at 86 out of 100, up 10 points from a year ago. Yahoo has slid a little to 77, while the New York TImes and ABCNews.com are tied at 69.
By the way, Jonathan Dube of CBC has left to help run ABCNews.com as its new vice president.

Jeff Jarvis' column for The Guardian this week points to the evolution of the editor. He notes that the editor needs to become a curator --- a provider of links and a filler of gaps --- more so that the spell-checking, grammar-correcting source.
Given community editing in wikis and blogs, is that displacing the role of the traditional editor? Is the community usurping the assignment and line-editing role?
A related blog today (The Diary of a Wordsmith) at The Editors' Weblog points to the value of the so-called sub editor in the legal sphere, in directing an operation, and in raising the standard of the work.

The new Pew Center study on news indicates the vast majority of Americans consume news every day. That pattern hasn't changed markedly over the years. What's happening, of course, is that traditional media (radio and newspapers in particular) are declining and the online medium is ascending.
TV is the dominant news medium.
But the arrival of the Web is still a fledgling phenomenon: The Web-only audience for news is minor --- the vast majority of Web users are consuming other media, too --- and the overall Web audience hasn't expanded the news-consuming universe.
The consequences are significant in many respects for media as they attempt to create new business models in the digital sphere. If the audience loss in the premium-advertising medium declines at the same rate as the gain in the cheaper-advertising medium (and that isn't even happening), the challenge to pay for content and distribute it will be tougher in years to come.

If there was a silver lining in the cloud for newspapers undergoing severe losses in the U.S. in print advertising, it was the arrival of more online revenue. Not enough to offset the print decline, but a surge nonetheless.
As AdAge points out this week, though, those gains are evaporating mysteriously. Several newspaper companies are reporting year-over-year declines in online revenue, an indication of the arrival of truly difficult economic times.

The choices of old media versus new media among the audience --- and the divide it seemed to be creating --- is giving way to the Integrator. That's one of the key observations of the new study on news consumption from the Pew Research Center for People & The Press.
A "sizable minority" (about 23 per cent) finds itself at the intersection of traditional and emerging sources of news and consumes bits of both in order to satisfy themselves. They are sophisticated and sought-after as a demographic for advertisers. They spend more time with news, they're a bit older, and they enjoy keeping up with developments.
On the other hand, the Net Newsers (13 per cent) eschew many traditional sources and focus on a wide array of new providers of content. The largest group, the Traditionalists (52 per cent), are very much aligned with television (still America's largest source of news) and newspapers. The Disengaged (14 per cent) stand out for their relative non-interest in news.
The biennial report indicates a continued decline in newspaper consumption and a growth that hasn't stopped yet in online news consumption.
Several other findings stand out:
1. The number of young people who say they hadn't consumed news in the last day has grown to roughly one-third from one-quarter a decade ago.
2. The online aggregators like Google News and AOL News are trusted even less than the mistrusted national news sources.
3. Social networking is popular among young people, but not as a news source.

I live 15 time zones away (nine if you want to count it differently) from the Beijing Olympics. The last week has turned me and my friends into night owls in order to keep abreast of the best developments (for Canada, anyway) at the Games. So many of the events take place in the early-morning hours and CBC shows everything live across all time zones on the network.
NBC has shelled out enough rights money to ensure the big finals  coincide with American prime-time viewing in the populous eastern time zone, but it should be noted that the rest of the country sees its work on a time shift. (Which means I can only watch the broadcast from three hours ago on NBC.) At the very least, many events are shown hours later.
That doesn't feel good if you're a computer user attached to Twitter. For days now CNN and others have been relaying results across Twitterand news alert systems to the dismay of users who don't want to spoil their viewing pleasure. Techcrunch has a story on it.

What a question. How accurate is the Internet? The Charlotte News & Observer weighs in today with a long-form feature that examines the basics of ethical issues involving digital journalism --- the challenges of verification, the tension between delivery and design, the prodigious talents and weaknesses of the contributors. Anyone looking for a primer, but not a terribly adventurous piece, will find it helpful (if consciously critical) reading.