Carat, one of the world's largest media agencies, asserts that online is becoming the third-largest advertising medium this year. It is pulling ahead of radio, even if it remains quite behind television and print media.
Online will hold about 8.6 per cent of world spending, up from 7.3 per cent a year ago. Radio is off only slightly, to 7.4 per cent from 7.5 per cent.
Television has about  a 41-per-cent share, while print weighs in at about 36 per cent.

Aggregators abound, but the newish site Fwix.com has found a formula that translates content into local streams. It's yet another challenger in a crowded field, but its algorithm appears to have a strong scraping capability that yields a relevant result. Until now, though, it hadn't developed a commenting capability.
The business model seems predicated on display advertising, but the site plans sponsored links to more broadly support content.
It's not necessarily in line for any design elegance awards, but its utility is more valuable than its look and feel.

I've been following Steve Outing's noble online exercise to reinvigorate the challenged classified section in the newspaper. It's a genuinely positive attempt to lend a community's assistance to a widespread problem.
His ReinventingClassifieds.com site has been bringing a lot of voices into the discussion. One of the most recent posts concerns how to redesign the section in order to accommodate an aging readership. He gets Jim Parkinson to help start a package that will culminate in a white paper of sorts on the matter. The interesting point: Better design for failing eyes isn't necessarily a matter of using larger typeface.

If it's possible to create a community of interest, what about a community of principal and interest?
That's the principle behind crowdfunding: Put some money in the pot to pay for the stories you'd like covered.
The Sunday New York Times has a look at spot.us and its plan later this year in San Francisco to finance journalism. The assignment is posted and the work seeks money. It's the latest in a group of unconventional business models in an era of challenged conventional business models.
Taken to extremes, of course, it's not a viable concept; journalism covers all sorts of things people might not support in the interest of providing an array of things people need to know.
But as the challenges mount to financing high-quality work, any form of a new business model is bound to be of appeal to struggling organizations.

The Star-Tribune from Minneapolis-St. Paul took a different approach to its editorial board online starting today.
It is producing a far more dynamic, interactive and collaborative package that starts with blogs and ends with reverse-published user comments in its OpinionExchange package. Editor Scott Gillespie says that the online content will be updated throughout the day and that the paper will effectively be a snapshot of what the site generates.
This is in keeping with a number of other print-as-last-edition approaches, but the Star-Tribune appears also committed to reworking its content as users chime in --- an opportunity "to hear from you while we work" instead of after the work is done.
The challenge, though, is to involve users on editorials and commentary driven by late-breaking news.

While Google has always professed no interest in becoming a content creator, there is no such reluctance at Yahoo, which has its own corps of reporters and has been leveraging its clout to gain the sort of exclusive access once preserved for the so-called old media.
In an interview with Agence France Presse, editorial director Jessica Barron talks about developing content partnerships with agencies and organizations, but also using Yahoo News' own team to break news.
Yahoo's approach has been to try to develop advertising networks to help conventional media in the digital space and help advertisers find the appropriate space for their conventional media advertising. But it's clear, too, that the organization has ambitions to become a major source of content.

Vin Crosbie, one of the most successful media commentators and analysts, has returned to the fray after a year off and fired off a compelling essay on the decline of U.S. newspapers. He predicts that fully half will expire by the end of the next decade, starting with regional dailies and then progressing into the smaller local ones.
He diagnoses two major problems: the failure by newspapers to understand how the laws of supply and demand affected their publications decades ago, and the digression from local mandates.
Interestingly, he doesn't see either the accommodation of digital or the reluctance to enter the digital age as meaningful factors in either the salvation or diminution. His essay here is the first of a series.

The quite entertaining Valleywag site steps into the newspaper fray with a five-point diagnosis of what ails newspapers. In a word: Deadlines.
But it's an instructive, if somewhat ranting, look at how newspapers missed out on technology, hauled themselves into the wrong relationships, and made several moves that denied them opportunities. It channels much of the basic criticism of the medium as it finds its way into the digital sphere.

Sir Martin Sorrell, the head of the international WPP advertising agency, suggests 2009 will be a difficult year for advertising in the U.S. because a new president will have some challenging economic issues to tackle. The U.S. and Europe are also going to be hit by the economic slowdown, a post-Beijing Games spending slowdown by advertisers, and commodity price increases that will stretch corporate budgets and reduce the advertising spend.
On the other hand, Sorrell predicts the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver (next door to our office, basically) and the World Cup in South Africa will offer an opportunity to rebound.

Editor & Publisher has created a special report on the challenges in the U.S. newspaper industry. While there is nothing particularly new in its piece, the magazine does a very good job in summarizing the combination of fear, confusion, stubbornness and confidence that spans the industry.