Industry veteran Bill Wyman summarizes the challenges of the newspapers in five easy pieces. His two-part essay on Splice Today (one here and two here) distill the business woes as so:

1. Consumers don't pay for news and never have.
2. Newspapers are the product of monopoly thinking.
3. Timidity of newspapers won't work on the Web.
4. Staffs and managers deserve blame.
5. Newspaper Web sites suck.

If that sounds simplistic, it's because it's a very precise version of his extensive argument. He provides perspective at length.

A central dilemma in legacy media's efforts in digital journalism is how to deal with differing cultures of the platforms. Paid versus free, for instance. One-to-many versus many-to-many.

And transparent versus anonymous. The ability for people to shield their identities in posting and commenting online poses a challenge for many media organizations steeped on the discipline of verification and the discretion of concealment.

The Daily Telegraph's Paul Carr, always a thoughtful writer, weighs in with a blog/essay that outlines many of the core issues in the debate still coursing through newsrooms of what to do about the anonymous.

Is anonymity an abuse of privilege or a basic right of privacy? From what I can tell, few newsrooms have settled the matter and left an incongruence in their operations. Namely, letter-writers are identified and checked and commenters could be anyone.

It seems, as Carr suggests, that the time has come for a greater focus on this issue --- not to curtail the liveliness of the Internet but to strengthen its credibility. Indeed, Carr believes that recommendation algorithms are needed to help the situation --- trust-building gauges of our reputations and records as contributors, in essence.

What do you think? Comments welcome, particularly from those who will stand and be counted.

Fast Company delivers a sobering piece on the economic promise and delivery of hyperlocal news --- the term for information about your street, district and community at a very granular level.

It is, as Fast Company suggests, a $100-billion potential in the United States. But the consumer demand isn't being met by sites, and sites aren't meeting the demands of advertisers. The result is the absence of a business model.

What Fast Company concludes is that the idea itself is excellent. It just needs to marry its potential audience with its potential revenue, and that may be some time away.

Gartner Research produces an annual report on so-called "hype cycles" for about 1,650 technologies and media to identify when something is nascent, when it's maturing and when it's peaked or on the wane.

The report looks specifically at how such terms are making their way into corporate parlance --- as a measure of their salience with the public.

This year's suggests the hype on microblogging --- as in Twitter --- is reaching its peak and is bound to decline. Soon, the report's principal author predicts, its spread will create user "disillusionment."

The report itself is sold, but the table of contents reveals what's on the rise and what's on the decline.

On the rise: Socialcasting, Media Discovery and Recommendation Engines, Rich-Media Search Technologies, Social Media Marketing Platforms and Over-the-Top Set-Top Boxes.

At the peak: Internet TV, Portable Flash Media for Content Distribution, Videoblogging, Social Media, E-Book Readers, Online Video Publishing Platform Providers, Web 2.0 Distribution, Digital Warehousing for Publishers and Microblogging.

Sliding into the trough: Mobile Advertising, Network DVR, Online Video, Blu-ray, Mobile Ticketing, Consumer-Generated Media, Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software, IPTV, Legitimate P2P, Mobile TV Broadcasting, Mobile Search, Consumer Content Creation Tools, Game Consoles as Media Hubs
 and Consumer Digital Rights Management.

The conventional wisdom that the blogosphere is the publishing equivalent of the Wild West --- anything goes, no sheriff in town, and the like --- is overblown. But the criticism is often apt that there is little consumer protection from veiled self-serving content posing as legitimate information.


Today the U.S. National Advertising Council indicated it intends to require disclosure when blogs are sponsored or product reviews are paid for on sites. It's a venture into regulation that suggests the community isn't fully capable of policing itself but needs some protection to ensure consumer integrity.


The principle is simple: Advertising needs to be identified as such. The problem is that the ruling will impose voluntary guidelines, although complaints about the program can be referred to the Federal Trade Commission.


The New York Times explores the issue today. The release by the council is expected later Tuesday.

Michelle McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center outlines a series of questions for publishers as they consider charging for some or all of their content.

In short, her questions:

1. Is the content unique?
2. Is there competition?
3. Is it possible to put a lid on the content anyway?
4. How many users might you lose?
5. What is your plan behind the firewall to find the community and get it to pay?

It's a soundly argued, sensible series of questions that ought to be part of the discussion as publishers approach the firewall after years of free.

Google announced today its impending development of "next-generation architecture" for its world-leading search engine.

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions," two Google engineers write on the development blog.

It is inviting people to test-drive the engine and provide feedback on the results. To do so requires comparing results here on the new version and there on the existing version in crawling, indexing and ranking.

The implications are significant in Google's efforts to continue to pave the way in linking content to advertising.

The New York Times' David Carr has a take --- and a relatively negative one at that --- on Rupert Murdoch's plan to create a firewall and charge for online content at his newspaper Web sites.

Carr said he's personally unlikely to pay for something he now consumes free and expects other consumers are in the same place and space. But he does ask if Murdoch has one more revolution left in him.

While no expects a full firewall around all of the News Corp. content, Carr believes Murdoch will have difficulty generalizing the narrower successes now experienced at his Wall Street Journal and the rival Financial Times.

"The deeper problem for Mr. Murdoch and every other newspaper owner is that although the revenue picture for newspapers has changed considerably in the last two years, the consumer is still stuck on zero when it comes to what he or she will pay for the vast majority of content," he writes.

Internet veteran Dave Winer, the developer of RSS among other things, has a new term he wants to discuss: Narrate Your Work.

It's a term that involves peeking inside the reporting process, something that journalists culturally aren't usually much willing to do. But it's a concept that suggests technology now makes it possible to share the effort and not just the results of journalism.

It makes people feel part of the process --- indeed, it uses non-journalists in the process through Twitter (something Winer believes is at least a dress rehearsal for the future) --- and still protects the journalist from criticism for premature distribution.

In essence, it says, here's what we are trying to know and here's what we know. And we're saying everything.

The newspaper is being "blown apart," says respected social media developer and commentator Stowe Boyd.

The larger quote: "We are seeing the vertical supply chain of newspapers being blown apart into horizontal focus areas. That's why the most interesting journalism start-ups are focused on one area, like politics, sports, or social change."

He posts in his /Message blog that the paper's attempts to erect a paywall will "simply precipitate a faster migration away from newspapers, online. It's the last gasp of a failing system."

He implies that the blur of non-local content in local papers will need to be unblurred. He isn't sure what will emerge, but has a novel description: "They may jettison a lot of what is taken for granted, as well as inventing something that will attract people's attention in this 21st century. It may be television bended with the web in some addictive way, like the Twitter mashups we are seeing on network news shows. But it won't come from newspapers fighting rear guard actions like paywalls."