Fortune.com managing editor Andy Serwer is blogging less and Tweeting and Facebooking more. He concludes that social media is scraping his best ideas and that he has less time for the clunky blog format.

Twitter and Facebook are making the blog obsolete, he asserts. While he's reading and absorbing a lot of interesting culture, he's expressing himself in smaller pieces in the social media space.  He had to draw a line and compartmentalize, but through social media he's taking in more media than ever.

He worries the next step is some Vulcan mind-meld-like, few-character service.

Steve Yelvington, one of the Web's sage voices on new and legacy media, offers good advice in his latest post on two new forms of journalism to attract audiences.

The beat blog helps a small but loyal audience keep in touch with its issues and the reporters in touch with the source material. We've got a few of them at the Vancouver Sun and they're highly beneficial to creator and consumer alike.

The topic page helps another dedicated audience stay abreast and attracts a new audience with contextualized content of importance. They provide links to content, particularly audio and video, and an understanding of all of the assets in the mix. We've got a few of them at the Sun, too, and we want to create more of them.

It is next to impossible not to be impressed with Lens, the new photojournalism blog from The New York Times, which made its debut in recent days.

Even though the computer screen doesn't adequately replicate what ink on paper can do for photography, it can be a huge virtual warehouse of diverse artistry, and the Times has leveraged its vast resources of staff to be just that.

There is a full screen option, which in my view ought to be the default position, but even in a screen frame it's still a gorgeous resource. It's fairly close to The Big Picture, the Boston.com project (the Times owns Boston.com and the Boston Globe).

Guest contributors Edward Wasserman writes in The Miami Herald about the challenges of financing journalism and the realization that journalism may no longer be the preserve of those paid to do it.

He sees the emergence of the op-ed model, crowdsources, contribution-fed opinionated aggregators. There are several problems to the model, not the least of which is coherence and commitment.

"In the economic crisis that's shaking journalists out of the conventional news business, we may have no choice but to trust to the zeal and generosity of volunteers to keep journalism alive -- and retain some semblance of the scrutiny and accountability that keeps public life honest," he writes.

In his latest post for The Independent, Andrew Keen asks the question he says was unthinkable a year ago: Is the blog dead?

Keen notes the arrival of Twitter and the crowd of other social media tools have turned the blog into a bit of a retro entity. He's particularly enamoured of the new Wordpress tools that permit users to create their own social networks. In essence, the blog becomes an aggregator of all of your personal files.

His conclusion: "The blog is dead, long live the blog!"

What is your conclusion?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes his model ought to be the newspaper's model in a certain way: Fans should take over some areas.

Wales told an advertising conference this week that newspapers haven't been strong in corralling user-generated content and that bloggers in particular have expertise that could be exploited freely.

He has a specific recommendation: Let the fans take over the sports section. Save the newsroom money for sending reporters to major assignments overseas.

My personal take on this: Close, but not quite. While it's true (very true, in fact) there's more to be done in integrating user-generated content, a news organization's audience has a different expectation of timeliness than users of, say, Wikipedia. If you're simply leaving your time-sensitive demands to the fans, you may get a lot less than you want. That said, more expertise from the community across topics is highly welcome.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 452,000 Americans now consider blogging their main source of income --- more than firefighters, bartenders or computer programmers and not far removed from lawyers.

The paper reports there are about 20 million bloggers in the U.S., with 1.7 million reporting income. One per cent of bloggers making money make more than $200,000 annually and work 50 to 60 hours to do it.

E Kinney Zalesne, a political pollster, writes that eventually this Wild West will settle down. Meantime, there seems to be gold in them thar hills.

Paul Carr starts his lengthy Guardian post with a rather cruel party analogy, but once you get past that, you get on to a much more interesting sense of his ideas for newspapers.

His advice: Stop updating and worrying about speed, start reflecting and worrying more about accuracy and quality. Embrace the bloggers and provide incentives for them to find you subscribers, then they'll stop swiping your content.

The approach: Get reporters to focus on producing quality and not 'vomiting words at a screen.'

Techcrunch is reporting today the launch of Tinker, a service from Glam Media that will provide micropayments for Facebook and Twitter microbloggers.

The aim is to aggregate content from particular themes or events in associated widgets and support it with advertising (Tinker intends to make sure obscenities don't creep into the mix to alienate those advertisers, when they wish). It will split revenue with the creators in its new Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network.

It's an interesting development in the micropayment/link economy. Undoubtedly others will arrive in the time ahead as the blogosphere/Twitterverse looks for models to sustain content creation.

There are some methodological holes in it, but a new study suggests some consumers (actually, some bloggers) might be willing to pay for content through a subscription (as opposed to a micropayment) system.

The J.D. Power and Associates survey of bloggers and bulletin boards found about 40 per cent of bloggers already pay, or would pay, for content they use. They prefer the subscription approach because it permits them to tag material for future reference and because they don't see an easy way to develop a per-story fee system.