Nieman Journalism Lab: The newsonomics of the long goodbye: Kodak’s, Sears’, and newspapers’

Ken Doctor: on digitally disrupted companies' "long goodbye": "data shows 44 percent less newsprint usage (and about 75-80 percent of all newsprint usage is attributed to newspapers) over the past four years, according to The Reel Time Report. ... I’m tracking revenues from Kodak, Sears, and all U.S. dailies through 2010 ... U.S. newspapers’ ad revenue decline is worse, percentage wise, than either Kodak’s or Sears’. Yes, although Kodak and Sears are now poster children of legacy businesses gone wrong, newspapers — as counted through their main revenue source — are doing worse."

Economist: Online newspapers in India: Papering over the cracks

"The strength of India's print press is, however, in part down to the weakness of its online offerings. This is hardly surprising. For all the country's vaunted IT prowess, only 6.9% of Indians regularly surf the web. Apart from a smattering of web-exclusive news, newspaper websites tend to be a photocopy of print editions."

TheMediaBriefing: The new wave of digital media CEOs taking over old media companies

Peter Kirwan: "We’re now starting to witness a long overdue exit for [media industry] chief executives of the Baby Boom generation. ... We’re also witnessing the rise of a new generation of managers who got their big breaks in the online world from the late 1990s onward. What’s different about these bosses is their hard-won understanding of digital platforms, online sales and the power of data. They might not be digital natives. But as digital immigrants go, they’ve adapted extraordinarily well to changed circumstances."

New York Times: 2 Long Island Weeklies Wonder About Spike in Sales

"[The Suffolk Times and The Riverhead News-Review], which originally printed a combined 8,620 copies for newsstand sales, had to print 5,500 more to keep up with the demand, which seemed to come almost entirely from two customers buying up every available copy at $1.50 each from 7-Eleven stores and bagel shops from Calverton to Shelter Island."

AP Enterprise: UK tabloid paid spies for scoops

"Interviews with three more former journalists and published accounts suggest that [the News of the World] engaged in a pattern of payoffs aimed at rival newspaper employees. ... Although accusations that the paper hacked into phones and corrupted police officers to win scoops have been widely aired, the paper's efforts to subvert rival newspaper employees have seen less attention."

Press Gazette: ‘UK media receives more state aid than France and Italy’

"A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) claimed that in 2008 the UK press received £594m of indirect support in the form of VAT-exemptions for copy and subscription sales in the UK. And it also suggests that the government should look at extending VAT-exempt status to digital news outlets. And it also suggests that the government should look at extending VAT-exempt status to digital news outlets."

Monday Note: Read, Share and Destroy

Frédéric Filloux: "In recent months, we’ve seen a flurry of innovative tools for reading and sharing contents. Or, even better, for basing one’s readings on other people’s shared contents. In Web 2.5 parlance, this is called Social Reading. ... All of theses apps start with the same raw material. They collect and rearrange RSS feeds, they crawl Twitter or Facebook streams. Unfortunately, from a news publisher vantage point, all these aggregating apps kill value by removing ads from the articles they assemble for our reading pleasure."

Currybet: News innovation isn’t just about writing code, it is about how we use that code to tell stories

Martin Belam: "on the web you can find newspapers being accused of failing to invent all manner of digital services, including Google, Facebook, Quora, Craigslist and The Huffington Post. Personally, I’m unconvinced that this isn’t akin to asking why the Great Western Railway didn’t invent the automobile. ... What news organisations did do with tools like photography though, was incorporate it into their product at a time when it became economical to do so - the same with colour printing."

Telegraph Blogs: Apple announces App Store subscription service

Shane Richmond: "To put [Apple's subscriptions policy] into perspective, here’s what a newspaper pays to a newsagent to sell its papers: about 28 per cent. You can argue all you like about whether or not it’s fair that Apple takes a similar cut – and American papers, who traditionally rely a lot more on subscriptions might be more concerned. What does it mean for a service like Spotify, however? They will now have to offer the ability to subscribe within the app at the same price as – or less than – the £9.99 that its subscribers currently pay. Will they raise prices or take the hit themselves?"

The Economist: Bold newspapers: The crucible of print

"The strategies being pursued by News Corporation, the Daily Mail and General Trust and Lebedev Holdings rest on distinct assumptions about what readers want, what they will pay for, and the future of advertising. It is highly unlikely that all three experiments will work. It may well be that none of them does. But none can be faulted for lack of boldness."

Mail Online: Google called ‘deeply unethical and tax avoiding’ by ex C4 boss

Luke Johnson: "Effectively, Google invests negligible amounts in Britain, pays negligible amounts of tax on its underlying surplus to contribute to civil society, and yet extracts vast sums in advertising revenues. The tragedy is that those advertising revenues siphoned off to California should be
used to help fund high-quality content – TV programmes, radio shows, newspaper and magazine articles."