Chris O’Brien at the Next Newsroom Project: Sustainability: Reporting back from the New Business Models for News Summit.

Chris O’Brien at the IdeaLab blog: What Newsrooms Can Learn from Obama Campaign.

what do videogames and Obama have to do with newsrooms? It’s clear that over the past year, Obama’s campaign has developed a profound understanding of how its community finds and consumes information across a number of platforms. And Obama has embraced them all, and adapted his message to fit the way people use those platforms.

That’s an important lesson that every newsroom should learn. During the past year of research for The Next Newsroom Project, we identified six principles that newsrooms should adopt. One of those calls for newsrooms to embrace all platforms. It’s not enough to simply say, “Hey, we want to be online first.” Instead, think about how to use all platforms equally: mobile, the Web, print, broadcast (radio and TV). And be ready to experiment with any new ones that come along, including video games.

It’s critical that a newsroom understand its community, where they are, the different ways the get news and information, and how they consume it in those different ways. …

UK educator Paul Bradshaw writes:

I’ve created a social network for anyone researching news and journalism. It’s at http://onlinejournalismresearch.ning.com/

It’s an attempt to provide a way for journalism students and academics to get in touch with others researching the same area, exchange ideas and tips, and ask for help on everything from finding relevant literature to sourcing contacts and the best research methods.

There are forums, you can use it to blog your progress, organise events, upload video and photos, form groups, and more.

Research is traditionally a solitary, frustrating endeavour. It doesn’t need to be. If you work with journalism students, please encourage them to join the network and contribute a question or an answer.

Let’s get news research networked.

David Carr in today’s NY Times: Mourning Old Media’s Decline. Excerpt:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor
announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday
paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People
and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and
reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in
the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10
percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

It goes on. The day before, the Tribune Co. had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times
by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just
seven years ago.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest
paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will
apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial
staff would be reduced by 40 percent.

And two weeks ago, TV
Guide, one of the famous brand names in magazines, was sold for one
dollar, less than the price of a single copy.

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one
of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that
landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in
the minority. This same information is available to many more millions
on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked
and summarized all over the Web. …

So who can still afford to pay for the phone calls that reporters have to make?

So, no one has to pay for those phone calls. They’re free now, with Skype. But few in the online medium are going to take up the traditional trade of journalism. Because it’s hard work.

Great coverage in today’s San Jose Mercury News about this:

Troy Wolverton: Authors, publishers settle copyright suit against Google.

Chris O’Brien: Virtual librarians seek a way to loan copyrighted books for free.

The settlement is a big
win for publishers and authors, who will now get a bigger share of
revenue when folks come across their copyrighted works. Google wins
because it gets to display more of the books’ contents. Institutions
such as libraries will have to pay a subscription to allow patrons to
view the contents of Book Search on special terminals.

But Kahle
and the Open Content Alliance have a better vision. The problem is that
they haven’t figured out how to make it work. That was part of the
reason for the gathering in San Francisco. The alliance is trying to
determine how to create digital copies of in-copyright works that you
can "borrow" for a limited time for free, in the same way you check out
a book from the library today.

To make that work, first the
alliance has to create digital copies of works that are clearly
designated as temporary loans, rather than permanent purchases.

"How would you make it clear you’re reading a copy, and not a book from Barnes & Noble?" Kahle said. …

This has been a fascinating conundrum since the Web came of age in 1993: How do you "loan" a work — a book, a song, an image — if it’s in digital form without disabling it with DRM (digital rights management)? Hoping the Open Content Alliance comes up with a feasible solution.

San Jose Mercury News: This was an important step to protect human rights and personal privacy: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft team up to protect users’ privacy worldwide.