The introduction of yet another Google application Monday indicates there are new ways to read the news. FastFlip organizes a batch of splash pages in horizontal scrolls.

It's one more method in aggregating choices and displaying them, with large enough frames for the home pages to provide an inkling of top content.

Google plans to display advertising around the pages and share revenue with publishers. About three dozen publishers have so far joined the initiative, including some of the larger organizations.

David Klein believes two things will happen to newspapers: They'll survive and diminish. No need to assign blame --- mostly, no one could predict the technological forces that would shift consumer habits --- but there is a need for a swift cultural change.

Klein, writing for AdAge, says newspapers will be staffed at a lower level by people earning less and doing more. Those who want to keep doing what they've been doing will be doing it somewhere else.

The old monopoly money is gone. The real dollars in the future are hard to identify.

"No one is to blame. What's important now is figuring out the best way to publish good newspapers with less," he writes.

The Pew Research Center for People & The Press has released data indicating public trust in media has declined to its lowest level since records have been kept.

The survey found 63 per cent felt media content was often off-base. That was 10 points higher than the response in 2007. It found that television, Internet, newspapers and radio were ranked first through fourth in terms of media.

That said, respondents also said they'd feel a great loss of a local television station or newspaper.

The least attractive element of the Internet's culture of conversation has been the all-too-frequent disregard for basic accountability in the commentary attached to stories, topics, images and discussions.

For some reason, anonymity is acceptable --- not as the justifiable shield for those who fear retribution if identified, but as a shield for those with other kinds of fears, motives or tendencies. Somewhere early in the game it became a rule instead of an exception to adopt a nickname and speak through it.

The result breaks what we were all taught rightly in school: That part of the bargain in speaking freely is the responsibility to stand up and be counted, and that part of the bargain in being criticized is to at least know who is attacking.

It's heartening, then, to read J.R. Johnson, the CEO of the social sharing service Lunch.com, observe in the San Jose Mercury News a shift to more accountability in comments online. He believes, and I agree, that more transparency among contributors and commenters will spur more participation; at the moment, many are keeping out of the fray because the unattributed cohort is given a long leash.

Ultimately the benefit will outweigh the detriment in making visible all but a handful --- those who truly need the protection.

The New York Times' recent examination of the Harvard Medical School was an extensively researched investigation involving a big media outlet asking big questions and producing a big conclusion on inherent conflicts.

Eric Alterman suggests the story is a good example of why it's important to try to preserve journalism's existing format. The Harvard school is large, a recipient of government grants, and not subject to Freedom of Information law.

"Do you think it will cooperate with some blogger?"

Almost everyone in the Twitterverse has been waiting for the day the microblogging service drops the other shoe and indicates how it intends to monetize what is now one of the most generous aspects of the Internet.


While it's not exactly a business manifesto, Twitter's new terms of service open the door to advertising and close the door on anyone but individual Tweeters owning their content.


The 15 new terms of service extend widely into privacy and other aspects, but the most significant involve the notion that ads are coming. Twitter has hinted at a premium service in recent weeks to help businesses comprehend their impact within the social network, but this is the clearest sense yet of a vision with ads and content commingling.


"We're leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don't have anything to announce," the terms of service say.


But not so fast. It also says: "The services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. . . In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content of information from the Services whether submitted by you or others."

Somehow, that sounds like a plan.

The micropayment initiative from the experienced news media executives running Journalism Online has been relatively cloaked since the company was launched earlier this year. But in a filing to the Newspaper Association of America, it reveals more of its business plans.

Esssentially it would assume 10 per cent of existing users would participate in a paywall model and subscribe to a possible variety of options, ranging from a per-article micropayment to a fee for the fullest possible service. Journalism Online would share revenue and take about 20 per cent as a commission.

News companies would continue to offer a lot of content free under this model and continue to earn advertising revenue from that.

In its model for a large newspaper of one million circulation and 20 million unique visitors, Journalism Online believes it could generate about $33 million in the first year and $86 million in the second year, based on behavioural and other models it has generated. Obviously this would be a supplement to print revenue.

Google has indicated it is preparing a micropayment plan newspaper publishers could use in the coming year.

It would charge anything from a penny to several dollars for access to content across several merchants and over time. It would share revenue in what it calls a "premium content ecosystem" of syndication, third-party arrangements and feeds and fees. Google's Checkout service appears to be part of the platform.

Google suggests micropayment plans are not going to solve economic challenges, but that they could be part of the solution. While it is not the panacea, it is a significant gesture of possible assistance. The move is a surprise, considering the testy relationship newspapers have recently had with the search engine giant.

Google submitted the document, available below (the Nieman Journalism Lab obtained it), in response to the Newspaper Association of America's call for online business model proposals from industry.

The executive director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association is opening up with his blog to share some strong insights into the business of media.

Earl Wilkinson's latest post discounts the imminence of paywalls, but he does point to an emerging hybrid of business models for media in the years ahead.

In broad outline, among them:

1. Direct funds from consumers for their niche passions.
2. Direct funds from businesses for databases and directories.
3. Foundations to help finance investigative work and memberships for extra access to content.
4. Contextualized content to alert people.
5. Advertising, with a print element, to finance the balance.

What he clearly worries about, though, is the way in which media aren't establishing value on content or thoroughly segmenting their audiences of strong and weak users. Those issues need reconciliation and at the moment companies are dancing around the issues.

The findings recently have been unambiguous: Spending on traditional media advertising is down and on digital media is up. But it took a solid MediaPost analysis to quantify the change in the U.S. market.

There are many findings in its review, but the principal one examines the three-year shift in Internet advertising and its more than doubling to exceed 19 per cent of the total. Overall, traditional media has declined about 30 per cent while the Internet grew 37.5 per cent.

"While it's hard to know precisely how spending has been reallocated, the percentages suggest that newspapers have been the main victim of Internet competition, since the decrease in the former is roughly equal to the increase in the latter," MediaPost says.