Jeff Jarvis writes today that the article is no longer the organizing principle of news. It's the topic. The topic is how people are organized in their consumption, so it is how media should be organized in their production.
By that he doesn't mean topic pages on the Web site, but a blog-style page that is curated and refined and discussed.
"It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized."

Add the sage voice of Steve Outing to the list of people with prescriptions for the paper. He's of the view that the audience is redefining news and that newspapers and their sites have been slow in grasping that. His prescription in a lengthy post at Editor & Publisher calls for the creation of a large customized package of wires, staff, freelance and user content. It's an interesting addition to the chorus calling for dramatic change.

We link out in our blogs and other online content at The Vancouver Sun, and while we don't yet view the measure as any sort of rescue manoeuvre, it's clear that building audience loyalty means being that kind of resource for them --- meaning (as the New York Times will often say) we edit the Web.
The age is over of pretending one's organization produced all of the germane information on an issue. In essence, media were long ago caught out by the consumer when the Internet arrived and it was clear that significant content was out there if you just knew how to search. Once the search engines improved and became routine tools for the audience, it found things on rival sites that many media organizations had pretended didn't exist --- they even knew who came first, who was deepest, and therefore who was best. With the semantic Web it doesn't even feel like you have to search --- to use an increasingly cliche phrase, news finds you.
The key now is to aggregate and prove your value as exceptional curators of content. In Jeff Jarvis' words, do what you do best and link to the rest (at least, I hope they're Jarvis' words --- he hasn't linked out to the source if not).
Another essayish piece from SitePoint's Josh Catone argues that the link economy is generating user engagement and trust, crucial ingredients in the drive to secure a strong business model in the digital sphere.

Today the Associated Press announced that some 500 newsrooms are using its Member Marketplace tool to publish to the Web. In having a look at it online at ReadWriteWeb, I'd agree it looks like an RSS feed that helps a newsroom editor understand what's been aggregated (in this instance, AP content) instead of using a batch of tools to compile and publish.
It's a significant step and I suspect other newsrooms and other tools are en route.

The Monday Note has published one of the closest-to-cogent arguments yet on the difficulties facing the economics of the newsroom as it transforms. Essentially the argument goes; The compact newsroom creating print and Web won't pay off because the the revenue won't follow the traffic in amounts significant enough to bear the freight.
"News is no longer able to sustain itself," the authors say. New niche sites to repurpose content and new forms of cross-subsidies will be necessary, including corporate communications work for the newsroom. As for the viability of public trading, Monday Note says it'll be better to take companies private, because any cross-subsidy will be attacked by the market.

Technorati's terrific report this week on the State of the Blogosphere concluded with a look at the commingling of brands and blogs --- specifically, too, how blogs are becoming their own brands and how willing they are to shepherd marketing messages and content from non-traditional sources.
Yes, bloggers are getting full of themselves (one in five don't think newspapers will exist in a decade, while half believe blogs will be a prime source of information in the decade ahead).  But Technorati notes that bloggers are worth watching for another important reason: They adopt new technology earliest and are the sentries for the wider societal adoption of techniques and gear.
The report points to an increased credibility of blogs as sources of content and of legitimate media players. Technorati's package indicates blogs are now part of our lives in 2008 (they need no introduction that they needed, say, two years ago), that bloggers are increasingly making money, that they are adding to the public sphere, and that they are evolving swiftly into a vibrant form of media.

Much belatedly I'm posting our story from Friday on our partnership at The Vancouver Sun with NowPublic of the release of Vancouver's Most Public bloggers. The index calculates a variety of factors on posting, interactivity and community. UBC colleagues Alfred Hermida and David Beers are in the top 20, and the top local blogger is Darren Barefoot.
We'll be staging an event for everyone soon to talk about the future of news.

If new media poses an imminent threat to one medium, it would seem to be television. Without a strategy to move content into an online platform, television networks are threatened by the increased time spent online. A new report chronicles the rise in such viewing in the U.S., where numbers have doubled over the last year alone. The habit change is happening in all media, but in television and online, the change is coming faster.

Business Week's Jon Fine poses a few interesting points in his latest submission. He looks into the future and assesses the media landscape once some local newspapers fail in the United States. He concludes that local TV, but none others, will benefit. He concludes the advertising dollars may not necessarily follow particular media but scatter to the breezes.

His Reflections of a Newsosaur is often some of the wisest musing on the industry, and today Alan Mutter reports that publishers are being told that newspapers have 18 months to demonstrate their cross-platform capabilities or it'll be too late for them. It's a make or break period.
Clearly Mutter was enamored with Deutsche Bank analyst David T. Clark, who told a Newspaper Association of America retail advertising forum that it's unclear if newspapers are doing enough to get their share of local revenue when the economy climbs out of the hole.