[A a study by the British Library and researchers at University College London concluded that] 'It is clear', says the study, 'that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts, going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.' These findings apply to online information seekers of all ages... The study confirms what many are beginning to suspect: that the web is having a profound impact on how we conceptualise, seek, evaluate and use information. What Marshall McLuhan called 'the Gutenberg galaxy' - that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study - is imploding, and we don't know if what will replace it.

[Note on strategy for French newspaper Libération. 'DIS' is Daily Information System.] Dump the idea of a daily paper... Equally allocate journalistic resources to two products, a website and a weekly paper... [In the newsroom] [Note] the number of news junkies (look around you, not at me) who give up physical newspapers without any visible withdrawal symptom. [Considers what would a modern newspaper designed from scratch look like.] a DIS must allocate resources flexibly between electronic and paper versions... the advertising market no longer supports daily printing... who cares if an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Georgia has to wait a couple of days?... a sophisticated free newspaper can have a distribution system as targeted and precise as a paid one [though should charge] a very low price... [Move to dynamic pricing for advertising.] [Increase quality of product.] Time to switch to iPods, folks. Contemporary recipes are: small format, no more than forty pages, paper that doesn’t bleed ink, pages glued or stapled, good quality printing to justify premium pricing to advertisers... Outsource non-core competencies. Including journalistic ones... Outsourcing includes the recourse to outside experts. [Key] journalist should be allowed to moonlight for other media outlets... [Adopt] the concept of “release” (v.1.0, 1.1, etc.).

Includes interview with Andy Bower from the BBC about changes at the Kingswood Warren facility, part of the Research and Innovation department, which is moving location. Bobbie Johnson: 11h15m: on research models and the BBC's approach to immediate vs long term and the license fee: "the BBC have got to be better at arguing for the long term".

The loudest voices at the BBC belong to people who work in TV, but there are many more we don't hear - the pioneering engineers, scientists and mathematicians. The rest of the media industry, and the web 2.0 world in particular, are preoccupied with keeping up and spinning the new - but Kingswood is a thing apart, imagining our future 20 years from now. [Includes video interview with Andy Bower.]

Ever since Sony lost the battle between its Walkman music player and Apple’s iPod, it has been trying to strike back... In one small corner of Sony’s empire, however, it has just made the same mistake all over again... The Sony product is the Reader... This time Sony’s competitor is Amazon, which has swept past Sony with the Kindle. [Describes benefits of Kindle linkst to Amazon store and built in 3G networking.] The fact that the Kindle is smoothly connected in this way is deliberate... Sony talks about making devices networked and easy to use, but Amazon did so.

CNN's parent company Turner has a team of ten people in its R&D broadcasting systems department, most based in the Atlanta headquarters with one in Hong Kong and one in the UK... [Bob Schukai, vice president of wireless and broadband technologies for R&D] says the department has autonomy when it comes to concepts and projects rather than having to think about business models form the outset... R&D also work with editorial teams.

In-depth analysis of new American and British online television shows – scripted comedy and drama. Includes sample material.

Veteran journalist Sir Charles Wheeler, the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent, has died at the age of 85 after suffering from lung cancer. [Very moving excerpts from Wheeler's journalism. Includes interesting comment on why UK media report what happens elsewhere in the world.]

A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption, A Research Report from The Associated Press and the Context-Based Research Group. Conducted by the Associated Press and Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research firm with a global network of cultural anthropologists. Research conducted in six major metropolitan areas around the globe. Study published at the World Editors Forum. Findings noted in press release: Among the key findings was that the young subjects of the study experienced news fatigue, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates and had trouble connecting to more in-depth stories. Participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content... Several participants viewed news as a form of social currency.

The New York Times is working on an API that will make the whole website "programmable, organisable", adding layer of mash-ups to NYTimes content.

Set up as a means for readers to publish their opinions, sites such as My Telegraph raise questions at the heart of the online debate... a year on from launch, the Telegraph's experiment has put it in the front line of a sensitive but important issue for online newspapers - how to manage and develop user-generated content... Some publishers "post-moderate" - in reaction to readers' or editors' complaints or monitoring... some "pre-moderate"... Ilana Fox, editor of My Sun, says: "About a year ago BNP members started posting on our message boards. What we found was that our community rallied round and took the BNP to task."... Meg Pickard, the Guardian's head of communities, says: "We're all facing the same challenges with developing and managing user-generated content, although we're approaching it in different ways ... While it's easy to dwell on the negative aspects of managing user-generated content, in general most interaction on newspaper sites is civil, and we feel privileged to host and inspire such an interesting range of vibrant conversations."

Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news... Unusually, though, this week's [UK] Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal... [B]y no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in [the Austrian] underground dungeon... The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on... The risk is that... future nations struck by flood [or other horror] become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment. [Cites Marshall McCluhan.] [W]hen it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.

8m: We took ourselves and our responsibilities very seriously. We thought our schedules ought to be very varied and cover as wide a range of interests as possible... We thought too that we could play a key role in modern democracy by enabling a stockbroker in Surrey to understand what a fisherman in the north of Scotland might be feeling – and vice versa. We would be able to broaden horizons, introducing people to subjects that they might have never encountered and bringing them new pleasures and delights. 32m: Today, there are increasing numbers of technical advances that allow viewers to repeat programmes at their leisure and view them when the mood takes them... But broadcasting is something else. It is that miraculous advance, still not a century old, that allows a whole society, a whole nation, to see itself and to talk to itself. It enables people, no matter who they are and where they are, to share insights and illuminations, to become aware of problems and collectively consider solutions... [The broadcast medium] should be a place where all kinds of people, with all kinds of interests and insights, can share them with society as a whole... It can only be done by a coherent network, one that measures its success not only by the size of the audience it manages to gain for an individual programme but – very importantly – by the width of the spectrum of interests it manages to represent.

As mobile phones become more sophisticated, they are bidding to replace laptops as the business traveler's tool of choice. But trying to view and navigate documents on a phone's small screen remains frustrating. A new research project [the Seamless Documents project] at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL) aims to solve that problem, while making it easier to transfer scanned documents to a phone in the first place. [Quotes Ben Bederson, University of Maryland.]

To preserve its vast empire, [the BBC] needs a high licence fee. To retain public support for this increasingly resented impost, it must maximise its audience. Hence, populism must be pursued ever more frenetically, and seriousness must be sacrificed to pay for it. ¶ In the past, it was creative competition from rival suppliers of public service programmes that drove the BBC to conform to Sir David's requirements. The arrival of ITN woke up BBC News, World in Action put a bomb under Panorama, Five showed up the corporation's arts coverage and Channel 4 taught it how to be bolder... Only continued creative competition of this kind will prevent public service broadcasting from lapsing into cosy mediocrity... Ofcom's chief executive, Ed Richards, has spoken of "a public service trust or agency" that might channel money to organisations other than the BBC if they're prepared to fulfil public obligations. Some people argue that the current proliferation of distribution platforms might enable not just existing broadcasters but universities, museums and other such bodies to participate in such a process... [But as money for the PSP would come from the BBC's funds] a radical rethink of the way it functions is therefore needed... Currently, much of the potential income which the corporation could extract from the enthusiasts in its audience is probably going untapped. It ought to be enabled to get its hands on this revenue... The BBC's popular services should be turned over to subscription funding, something that will become technologically straightforward once digital switchover is completed... To pay for its public service programming, it could apply to the distributing authority along with other broadcasters.