• Nature Child | San Juan Islander: “According to family studies professor, Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, there was a 50% decline between 1997 to 2003 in the proportion of children 9 to 12 who spent time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play and gardening).”
• FreeRangeKids: “At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.”
• How far did you roam as a child? | Watershed: Educator John Larkin continues the thoughts about wrapping our kids in cotton wool.
• How children lost the right to roam in four generations | Mail Online: In 1919, an 8yo was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing. Today, an 8yo isn’t allowed past the end of the street without parental escort. This article from 2007 triggered many thoughts, and I’ve glad I found it again.
• Forget the young pretenders, Humans 1.0 can lead the way | The Observer: John Naughton riffs off the idea that teenagers don’t know everything and some parts of cyberspace (ugh!) are teenager-free. Although the article then says that “only” 11% of Twitter’s users are under 17 years old. And what proportion of the literate population is under 17yo? 11%? More? Less?
• Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) | Hivelogic: A nice guide to the tools needed to podcast on a budget. Yes, there’s a reason I’m looking at this. Stay tuned, as they say.
• Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network | Parliament of Australia: Full transcripts of the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network public hearings, which I’m tagging for my own reference later.
• What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Gender, ZIP code and birth date are enough to uniquely identify about 87% of the US population. This has massive implications for publishing data sets, and for privacy policies that claim not to collect “personally identifiable” information.
• Nine News twittered by seagull | TV Tonight: It’s nothing to do with Twitter, but there is a seagull. A very big seagull.
• Apology for singing shop worker | BBC News: Shop assistant Sandra Burt, 56, from Clackmannanshire, was threatened with a fine for singing without a license by the Performing Right Society. However they’ve now apologised and sent flowers.
• Online Ads Not Working for You? Blame the Creative | Advertising Age: A study by Dynamic Logic says that obsession about optimisation and placement is less important.
• We can’t turn back the tide of internet piracy, says TV boss | Herald Scotland: “Internet piracy is merely demand where appropriate supply does not exist,” says the commissioning editor for education at the UK’s Channel 4.
• Court tweets sustained but paper still lurks | ZDNet Australia: Liam Tung, who tweeted from the AFACT v iiNet trial in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, reflects on the gaps in courtroom IT.
• Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era | NPR: Yet another exploration of ethics an journalism. One point in here I really do not like, though: “You must not advocate for political or other polarizing issues online. This extends to joining online groups or using social media in any form (including your Facebook page or a personal blog) to express personal views on a political or other controversial issue that you could not write for the air or post on NPR.org.” Sorry? Work for NPR and you lose your right to participate in democracy?
• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: Another fine if perhaps rambling essay from Mr Fry about the meaning of “influence” and accidentally gaining same. Worth a leisurely read.
• Why journalism's all a-Twitter | The Walkley Foundation: The editorial chief of Sydney’s forthcoming Media140 conference goes beyond the obvious “Is Twitter journalism?” and mechanical how-to issues and explores the ethical issues of journalists using Twitter.
• Twitter in the court: Federal judge gets it | CNET News: Another article about using Twitter in courtrooms, from the US an from March 2009.
• Call For Opinions | Blackbeard Blog: Tom Ewing’s collection of opinions on market research and social media, “quite unsupported by anything other than grumpiness and prejudice”. The first is that “insights” aren’t Zen koans. “If you can express something that briefly, it’s probably banal.”
• The internet doesn’t exist | Business Spectator: Ah, Alan Kohler! I do so love your commentaries! Here’s more of his sensible thoughts on the matter of paying for “content” on the Internet.
• How Safe is the HPV vaccine? | Information Is Beautiful: A brilliantly simple infographic showing the incredibly low risk of associated with the Human Papillomavirus compared with various everyday activities.
• Ultimate Goat Fansite: Do I need to explain? I thought not.

• 50 Years of Space Exploration | Flickr: A brilliant infographic summarising interplanetary exploration. In an excellent demonstration of Chaos, the landing on asteroid 443 Eros is accidentally tagged as “443 Eris”. All hail Discordia!
• They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They: Susannah Breslin’s fascinating and somewhat challenging feature article on the recession-hit US porn industry.
• ISP in file-sharing wi-fi theft | BBC News: UK ISP TalkTalk staged a wireless stunt, illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect illegal file sharers is “naive”. It’s easy to blame others just by hacking WiFi connections.
• Prince Philip tussles with technology | ABC News: This story is a few days old, however I found it curious that a perfectly good story about the design of technology was tagged as “offbeat” and the teaser written to make Prince Phillip look like a silly old man.
• NPR News Staff Social Media Policy: Another example of a good corporate social media policy. There’s plenty of these policies around now, so there’s no excuse for any big organisation not to have caught up.
• Federal Court of Australia Judgements: Some judgements have been recorded on video. “The Court is keen to continue to improve public access with the use of live streaming video/audio. Further live and archived broadcasts of judgement summaries are posted on this page as they become available.”
• Televised Patel trial an Australian first | ABC News: The trial of Dr Jayent Patel for manslaughter to be held in a Brisbane court will be shown in Bundaberg, where the deaths happened, via closed-circuit TV. Given this “local interest”, one wonders why it couldn’t also be available anywhere there were interested parties.
• Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work: Maier was a Chicago street photographer from the 1950s to 1970s who died earlier this year. Some 40,000 negatives have been found, and they’e now being blogged.
• 100 years of Big Content fearing technology — in its own words | Ars Technica: Copyright-holders have objected to pretty much every advance in media technology, it seems.
• Mac Sales Spike When A New Version Of Windows Comes Out | Business Insider: A curious interpretation of the figures, but they reckon that when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows it drives people to buy Macs instead.
• The Federal Trade Commission’s Coming War on Bloggers | Valleywag: While I normally don’t read Valleyway, I caught someone mentioning this article and was caught by one useful new term: conceptual gerrymandering. If the US FTC wants to give tax breaks to “news organisations” they’ll have to define what they are. Could it be old journalists versus bloggers battle writ large?

There’s so many of these links this time that I’ll publish them over the fold. I think I need to get over my fear of the link being published automatically without my checking them first, and my concern that my website won’t look nice if the first post is just a list of links.

Maybe I should just stick these Delicious-generated links in a sidebar? Or do you like having them in the main stream and RSS feed?

• INFOWAR vs. CORPORATIONS | Global Guerrillas: John Robb’s essay outlines a potential strategy for conducting infowar against corporations — most of which looks to me like it’d be illegal. I suppose that’s what war is about, eh? The comments stream is somewhat amusing.
• “Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work” | QuestionCopyright.org: Nina Paley’s controversial-looking essay which posits that artists are not entitled to be paid for their art, only for their work. She’s using these and other terms in quite specific ways, so it’s worth reading carefully before passing judgement.
• Post-Medium Publishing | Paul Graham: In amongst the various current discussions of charging for news content online, Paul Graham makes an important point. “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?”
• Americans on Tailored Advertising: DO NOT WANT | denialism blog: No, Americans do not want tailored advertising on the Internet, even less so when told how their activities are monitored to make it work.
• A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare | Central Intelligence Agency: This eminently readable CIA monograph puts the Stanislav Petrov incident into perspective, explaining how and why the Soviet leadership feared a US first strike.
• The Man Who Prevented WWIII | DivineCaroline: In 1983, Stanislav Petrov was in charge of Soviet monitoring systems watching the US for signs of a nuclear first strike. One night he chose not to react to an alert, suspecting it was a false alarm. He was right, and a potential global nuclear exchange was avoided.
• The Fiction Generator | Wondermark: The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000 makes writers’ chores a breeze!
• Against Transparency | The New Republic: This essay on the perils of some “open government” initiatives is a pleasantly nuanced read.
• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com: Wolff wrote a biography of Murdoch, and presumably knows the man. My take on this fascinating article is that the old guy simply doesn't understand what’s happening online, perhaps because you can inoly understand the online world if you participate in it.
• The News Manual: A free resource for journalists, would-be journalists, educators and people interested in the media. It was developed from a three-volume book The News Manual, published with the help of UNESCO as a practical guide to people entering the profession and to support mid-career journalists wanting to improve their skills.
• Televising Court Proceedings | SSRN: A 1993 paper by Ian Ramsay, then of the University of Melbourne Law School, setting out the main arguments for and against televising the proceedings of courts, and suggests an experimental program to evaluate the arguments in practice.
• The Law of Defamation | Arts Law Centre of Australia: A good introductory overview of how Australia’s tough anti-defamation laws work.
• chiropractic – The Skeptic’s Dictionary: When I was pointed to this article critical of chiropractic, I noted that it used some fallacious arguments which Science itself would not permit. I’m tagging it as an example of the hypocrisy of some perhaps only a few?) bold defenders of Science because it may form the basis of a future post.
• 55 Twitter tips | SmartCompany: While many of these tips for business aren’t entirely new, it’s a reasonable-enough compilation.
• Captain Kirk has taken too much fucking LSD | DoseNation: A nice bit o’music editing by Fall On Your Sword.
• How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half | Derek Powazek: Powazek published a photomag of images from Sydney’s dust storm, sourced from Flickr, without leaving his California base. This is a great step-by-step how-to.
• A history of the English marriage | Telegraph: It seems many of our current “norms” about marriage were invented by the Victorians.
• MoD “How to stop leaks” guide leaks | The Register: In a supreme act of irony, the UK’s Ministry of Defence document Defence Manual of Security has been leaked into Wikileaks. All 2300 pages.
• Twitter and the norm police | Woolly Days: Derek Barry sums up a recent discussion on Twitter, defamation and what constitutes “publication”. I’m tagging it because I want to respond at some point.
• Mash-up: A Short History of the Media Future | The Monthly: While perhaps not completely groundbreaking, this essay by John Birmingham is an excellent backgrounder on the issues facing traditional media companies.
• AUSTLANG: A new database of Australian indigenous languages, cross-linked to Google Maps.
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding | myliblog: An American library was asked to remove or restrict access to a children’s book about gay relationships. The librarian wrote a detailed and well-reasoned response explaining why it stays.
• Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies | Chief Information Officers Council: What it says. The first version of new rules for US federal agencies.
• Hyperconnectivity | Wikipedia: The term “hyperconnectivity” now has its own Wikipedia entry. Where’s mine?
• 99 Led Balloons: Social Media Blunders | digitalOZ: A nice list of classic social media traps for young players. A shame 90% of businesses entering the world of social media will end up making quite a few of them.
• The Moguls’ New Clothes | The Atlantic: There is much sense in this analysis of Big Media and how that Internet thing is changing everything.
• Eureka moments | The Economist: How the mobile phone became a key tool for third-world development.
• jQuery Carousel: This is the code that Jeff Waugh used for the rotating carousel of featured stories on the Crikey home page. He reckons he wouldn’t necessarily use it again. But this is my bookmark.

• Teens Don’t Tweet… Or Do They? | apophenia: Mashable reported some new statistics on Twitter usage with the headline “Teens Don’t Tweet”;. This article debunks that idiocy.
• Why I believe in the link economy | MediaFile: Chris Ahearn, who’s President, Media at Thomson Reuters, provides an interesting counterpoint to Associated Press’ aggressive anti-linking views.
• What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper? | NYTimes.com: This feature starts off with a long nostalgic waffle about newspapers, but towards the end it has some excellent points about how journalism may adapt to the new world.
• Hunter S Thompson Motivational Posters | Sloshspot Blog: Yes, the world needs Hunter S Thompson motivational posters. It truly does.
• The Communications Market 2009 (August) | Ofcom: The UK communications regulatory authority’s latest industry statistics.
• TVS – Television Sydney: Community TV station TVS has a website — which is nothing new, except that I just discovered that their program are streamed live as well as being broadcast on UHF analog.
• eCrime Symposium panel discussion | Risky Business: One of the panel discussions from last week’s eCrime Symposium in Sydney, featuring: Rachel Dixon, who’s a technology executive for online media group Viocorp, as well as being the deputy chair of consumer group CHOICE; Phil Argy, head of the Technology Dispute Centre, and Sean Richmond from Sophos. The panel was hosted by Nigel Phair, and there’s a question from me.
• Mission control | SomaFM: Apollo mission radio feeds from NASA mixed with ambient electronica. Suitably excellent listening.
• Rupert and the death of hubris – Alan Kohler | Business Spectator: A solid analysis of Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that News Corporation will pull its content behind paywalls.
• Watch the Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains | FlowingData: From Australian data visualisation team Flink Labs, a fascinating overview of Melbourne’s railway network in action.
• Internet Filter Plan From Stephen Conroy Won’t Work: DPP | theage.com.au: Earlier this week, the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery QC, was rather sceptical of the Rudd government’s plans to “filter” the Internet.
• Canberra Players League’s All Star Game 2009 | Dnosauria: Not bookmarked because I’m interested in basketball, but because Dean trialled using Livestream.com to put the video online. Live. Seems it’s a batter choice than Ustream, which is what I’d been using until now. I may check it out.

• How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live | TIME: Yes, TIME magazine’s cover story is about Twitter. It starts extremely badly: that clichéd, lazy trope about people tweeting what they had for breakfast. Despite that inexcusable slackness, it’s a useful addition to the cornucopia of Twitter-based articles.
• 10 Things I would do differently | Still A Newspaperman: Written with the benefit of hindsight, a former newspaper journalist considers how he’d have handled running a metropolitan newspaper. He’s spot on in many ways.
• Can the EU play Battleships? | Global Dashboard: Is it time for Europe, as a united entity, to develop a naval strategy? The article’s illustration is also a remarkable example of period gender stereotyping.
• How IT Can Save Africa | SAP Network Blogs: While clunkily-written, this piece outlines why getting decent IT to Africa isn’t a “waste”, but in fact a core element of getting rid of poverty.
• How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems) | ReadWriteWeb: It turns out that the staff of Twitter don’t use it like “power users” like me use it. Could this affect the tool’s development?
• The oldest sculpture ever discovered is a 36,000 year old woman with really big breasts. Is anyone surprised? | 3quarksdaily: Dubbed the “Venus of Hohle Fels”, this 6cm tall sculpture us about 36,000 years old. And it has large breasts.
• Live Streaming Video From Livestream.com: The live video streaming service Mogulus has re-branded as Livestream. That should Hoover them into some generic wordspace, yeah. (Google it!)
• Spootnik: A tool to automatically synchronise information between 37signals’ Basecamp (which use extensively) and OmniFocus (which intend to use).
• Tom’splanner: Another software as a service start-up, this time about “creating and sharing project schedules”. Their website’s menu bar is the clichéd list of Home, tour, product Info, Pricing and — of course! — “Buzz”, so it must be good. Sigh.
• How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia | PBS: Julie Posetti’s rather reasonable article which responds to “the views of resistors and detractors” who argue that “Twitter isn’t journalism”. “Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs journalism debate?” she asks. “Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.”
• Light Rail to Summer Hill | Metro Transport: The other Monday, yet another proposal for a new transport line in Sydney went to NSW state cabinet. This one involves extending the existing light rail line by 3.7km from Lilyfield to Summer Hill by converting the Rozelle freight line. It also has the advantage of running through the state seat of Balmain, where sitting Labour member Verity Firth runs the risk of losing to The Greens in the 2011 election.

• The Age of the Essay | Paul Graham: This essay dates from 2004, but it’s still valid. The essay, the kind that’s about exploring an issue, is a natural form of writing online. Plus I like his comments about disobedience and creativity.
• GLAM | Wikimedia Australia: One for your diaries! A little conference called “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground” at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 6-7 August 2009. Hosted by Wikimedia Australia, with discussions on four themes: Education, Technology, Business, Law. To be opened by Senator Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT.
• That 180ms is the bane of my life: Network engineer Glen Turner explains why the 180 milliseconds it takes for Internet data to cross the Pacific causes problems. “You’ve got to realise that Australia is almost unique in being a long way from the centre of gravity of its language. Broadly, almost all German-speakers live in Germany, whereas a tiny proportion of English-speakers live in Australia. That has an effect on Internet traffic. Most Internet traffic in Germany stays within Germany. Most Internet traffic in Australia goes offshore.”
• One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…: Crude but effective.
• Media and Brand Supremacy: Why the New Media Brand Could Be Nike | The Huffington Post: Heidi Sinclair notes that individual journalists and commentators are sometimes bigger news brands than the outlets they work for. There’s plenty here which meshes with my complains that some folks don’t separate the content (“news”) from the container (“newspapers”).
• texts from last night: A scarily funny collection of people’s (allegedly) drunken text messages. Don’t click through unless you’ve got plenty of time to spare.
• Death in Birth – Where Life’s Start Is a Deadly Risk | NYTimes.com: The first of three articles on efforts to lower the death rate in Tanzania. Excellent timing, given Project TOTO. Challenging to read, however
• The Angelina Factor | Bitchy Jones’ Diary: A ranty article which, in language which may be confronting for some, explores the social and psycho-sexual issues around the idea that Angelina Jolie is universally sexually attractive. Just for the record, I do not find her the least bit attractive.
• Rethinking the Global Money Supply: Scientific American: China has proposed that the world move to a more symmetrical monetary system, in which nations peg their currencies to a representative basket of others rather than to the US dollar alone. The article includes a little history, too.
• “We did not know that child abuse was a crime,”says retired Catholic archbishop | the freethinker: The retired Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G Weakland, says “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature… [I] Accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’.” WTF?
• Comedy Thrives in Times of Despair | Spiegel Online: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on what the financial crisis is a boon for comics, and the perils of political correctness.
• Hello Africa | Vimeo: A 42-minute documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa.
• Shell On Trial | newmatilda.com: Next week, Shell will appear before a US federal court on charges of torture, extra-judicial killing and crimes against humanity for incidents which took place in the Niger Delta. Will it be the first multinational found guilty of human rights abuses?
• Genital warts take Shoaib out of Twenty20 World Cup | ABC News: There was a time when someone’s medical history was considered private, even if they played sports professionally. Personally, I reckon the specific of Shoaib’s medical problem are none of anyone else’s business.
• PlugComputer Community: The developer community for Marvell’s Plug Computer.
• Plugging In $40 Computers | NYTimes.com: Marvell Technology Group has created a “plug computer”. A tiny plastic box you plug into an electric outlet. No display, but Gigabit Ethernet and a USB. Inside is a 1.2GHz processor running Linux, 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash memory. US$99 today, probably under US$40 in two years.
• Misguided middle-class moaners | BusinessDay: Ross Gittins explodes a few myths about Australia, class, taxation and social welfare.

Newspapers are folding in the United States at an astonishing rate. According to Paper Cuts, a website tracking the newspaper industry, more than 120 have folded since January, 2008. While Australian broadsheets have not succumbed just yet, there is a real possibility that they may not survive in the long-term. But is that such a bad thing? Tom Connell reports.

Mark Scott’s recent comments about the Australian newspaper industry would have sent chills through journalists and editors across the country.

“It does strike me that much of the bold and creative thinking about the future of print seems to be happening outside the major publishers — probably because the talented people within are too busy simply attending to the fire in the building,” Scott said, in and article in The Age on 9 April.

This was hardly the first doomsday article on newspapers, but what set this apart is that Scott, current head of the ABC, was until 2006 a newspaper executive at Fairfax Media –- the second largest newspaper owner in Australia.

Scott’s startling admission is a perspective from the inside, and speaks volumes for how dire the predictions have become for the broadsheet –- even more so given such articles are appearing regularly in the very newspapers they are talking about.

The fire Scott was talking about has been raging for some time; faced with the competition of the internet, broadsheet newspapers are struggling to come up with a way to keep making money.

Yet it’s not so long ago that newspapers were making so much money that the names of some of our most successful businessmen are synonymous with them. Titans such as Murdoch, Fairfax and Packer commanded institutions that had been making money for nearly two centuries, with no end in sight.

The origins of this money-making can be traced back to 1825. Until this time the government owned entirely what was known as the convict press. When two British lawyers, William Wentworth and Robert Wardell, began printing an independent newspaper, nobody stopped them, and by default the free printing press in Australia was born. The byproduct, of course, was that papers now had to be run on commercial imperatives.

There has been, in theory at least, a balance between popular entertainment, in order to sell advertising and fulfil the commercial imperative, and exposing the truth, in order to adhere to the notion of “protecting the public sphere”: to defend the defenceless and criticise those in power.

While newspapers were made viable with standard display advertising, they became big business on the back of one major advent: classified advertising.

Deputy editor of The Age, Andrew Rule, started working as a broadsheet journalist at a time when the newspaper was still king — when the classifieds, known colloquially as “rivers of gold”, were of such importance to Melburnians that leaking an ad before publication was a lucrative business, and in turn a sack-able offence.

“I can recall walking out of The Age on a Friday night in the late evening and seeing a queue of cars three deep, spread for four blocks, with police there trying to keep order, because people were so desperate to get Saturday’s copy of the paper, all because of the classifieds,” Rule said.

“Within a decade, that scene was gone. The classifieds lost their superiority and ad revenue started to go to other sources.”

The scene Rule described is so far out of date it’s unimaginable to later generations — the concept of having to physically queue for information because it can’t be accessed online.

The result, Rule explained, is that for the first time The Age, and similar papers, is trying to make a profit without the cushion of the classifieds, which may necessitate radical change for the newspaper industry.

“I suspect, if we have a future, that it is as a smaller circulation paper, with better material in it, at a higher cover price.”

If Rule sounds guarded about the broadsheet’s survival, it’s understandable given the steady decline in circulation in recent years.

According to the Australian Press Council, from December 2007 to December 2008, The Age‘s Monday to Friday circulation was down nearly 8 per cent.

The Sydney Morning Herald (15.1 per cent) and The Australian (10.1 per cent) also decreased in circulation during this time, and these figures only continue a long established trend of negative growth for Australia’s broadsheets.

But there is some hope in the statistics of the weekend editions.

The Age and The Australian recorded small rises in weekend circulation during this time, and the Sydney Morning Herald a much smaller drop than their weekday edition suffered. What, then, is the ongoing appeal of the weekend paper?

The answer could lie in ritual, according to Stilgherrian (a mononym he adopted in his 20s, Stil for short). Stil is a new-media figure whose output includes radio, magazines, blogging and podcasts.

“There is still an aesthetic thing about the big weekend broadsheet in particular — I can see that people will be willing to pay for it, if for no other reason than spreading the news out on the table on a Saturday morning over a cup of coffee,” he said.

Having started out working for ABC and community radio in Adelaide, Stil is now a regular online contributor for Crikey, with several of his articles focusing on the plight of newspapers in Australia.

He thinks that newspapers are “probably doomed”, but said this may not necessarily be a bad thing, depending upon what replaces them.

“It just so happens that the way history unfolded, newspapers filled the role of spreading information, but increasingly there are other ways of reaching people, other ways of distributing journalism. The problem is that newspapers, and experienced journalists are guilty of this, are thinking only within the box of what they’ve got to work with, and I think that’s really holding them back.”

This echoes the words of Rupert Murdoch, who in giving one of the Boyer Lectures in 2008 said “some journalists are misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity of the internet.”

Murdoch, Stilgherrian and Rule seem to be roughly on the same page — the future revolves, somehow, around the internet. Perhaps not astonishing news, but stark revelations by two of the men, considering their vested interest in the printing press.

An online future represents a two-fold problem for the broadsheets.

First, online advertising is not capable of generating the amount of income to which newspapers are accustomed. According to the Newspaper Association of America, since 2005 in the United States the annual print advertising revenue dropped by $A17.65 billion, while over the same time online advertising revenue was up just $A1.53 billion.

Second, newspapers have not utilised the internet as best they could, and have lost ground to a proliferation of news websites both national and international.

According to the latest AC Nielsen figures, NineMSN gets nearly half a million hits per day, well ahead of both the leading sites of Fairfax Media (smh.com.au at 390,456 hits) and News Limited (news.com.au at 264,257 hits).

Sites such as NineMSN, though, could not be said to be in the business of in-depth news; their role is breaking the bare facts of news, with an obvious emphasis on entertainment.

Independent sites such as Crikey are proving popular for users who want more than just news. Crikey‘s motto is “telling you what they won’t”, with their focus on the story behind what they call the so-called facts.

The main criticism of Crikey, and similar sites such as New Matilda, is levelled at the people writing the content.

Freelance journalists contribute to these sites, but their type is nothing new. The new media figure is the blogger, or so-called citizen journalist.

This is, essentially, an individual who reports from the ground up; an ordinary person’s experiences of or opinions on the news. It is a much-derided form of journalism, though some believe it has real merit in today’s world.

One such person is John Pilger, who said that if journalism is the fourth estate, these individuals might just be the fifth — truly independent reporters at a time when public relations is said to have infiltrated news rooms.

“Corporatism and consumerism are laying to waste the breeding grounds of free, inquiring journalism when it has never been needed more,” he said.

“In these days of corporate ‘multimedia’ in thrall to profit, many journalists have become absorbed into a propaganda apparatus without consciously realising their true role.”

For Pilger, citizen reporters, or non-journalists, not only represent the future of good quality journalism, but they can also produce a superior product to that of the existing custodians; unaccountable to media organisations, citizen journalists report with neither fear nor favour.

But herein lies the problem — the lack of accountability of these so-called “citizen reporters” brings into question their credibility.

Stilgherrian believes this assertion is misguided, and that a shift from cultural acceptance of newspapers as the trustworthiest source is inevitable.

“We trust the story on page three of The Australian, not because we trust the journalist — in many cases they don’t even have a by-line — but because of the big masthead on the front of the newspaper which says ‘The Australian‘,” Stil said.

“The journalist is dressed up in the authority of the masthead. New trustworthy sources will emerge online, and have already.”

This seems a valid point. Stil’s own employer, Crikey, has over 10,000 paying subscribers, which might pale in comparison to current newspaper circulations, but the trend is in favour of sites such as Crikey and New Matilda.

While these sites are an excellent source of news comment and news opinion, and sites such as NineMSN are more up to date on events than newspapers could ever hope to be, there is one aspect conspicuous by its absence — investigative journalism. Which begs the question; will investigative journalism be lost with the last broadsheet?

As newspapers are killed off in the United States, the country from which Australia catches its colds, a new solution has emerged: not-for-profit organisations.

The Huffington Post has launched what is now one of several public funds for investigative journalism, the idea being that the fund is overseen by an editor who decides which stories need to be told, and freelance reporters are paid out of the fund to write the stories.

This seems a viable solution in the US, with a population of over 300 million and a philanthropic culture. But it’s hard to imagine enough funding for regular investigative journalism being forthcoming from our comparatively small nation.

Individual benefactors, suggested Stil, could be the solution.

“Bill and Melinda Gates are putting billions of dollars into African health, but I can see that there will be people that will want to put their money into things we call journalism now.”

But this would seem to throw up a major problem: having investigative journalism funded by billionaire businesspeople will inherently create conflicts of interest too large to overcome.

An investigative report into Crown Casino funded by James Packer, anyone?

Perhaps, then, it’s too early to call the demise of the newspaper — maybe it does still have a role to play, albeit in a far different form.

There may be hope for The Age, for Rule is far from the old hack, rigid in his ways, which Murdoch alluded to. He is willing to concede the reality that broadsheets cannot survive as they are.

“You can’t afford to carry all the forms of journalism that those classifieds paid for. We now have cost-cutting, and central to that everybody has to pay their way.

“In the past, there were people who weren’t the best at what they did — they were second- or third-raters — but they were cushioned by those classified ads.”

Time for some tough decisions, then. The Age is moving to new offices in September of this year, offices that are smaller and that occupy cheaper land in the CBD. The prestige of newspapers, one feels, has taken a whack with this withdrawal — perhaps a necessary one.

But newspapers, and in particular broadsheets, should tread very carefully when trying to reduce their bottom lines, lest they defeat their purpose for survival.

An article in the online edition of The Economist in August of last year pointed out that newspapers were like many industries, in that “it is those in the middle — neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist, that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.”

There would two seem to be two ways for a newspaper to survive, then.

The Herald Sun has so far done a remarkable job of being entertainingly populist; the highest-selling paper in Australia continues to increase its readership with uniformly tabloid content and format. Just don’t expect investigative journalism.

In contrast, Rule concedes that at the forefront of every decision made by broadsheets must be the need to maintain quality and depth of journalism. In doing so, they can hope to appeal to what to what he said will be a smaller but more discerning share of the market.

“You can’t really maintain quality when you are using cheap or amateurish material. Photographs and words are still as difficult to do well as they ever were. And I think, going forward, we’re going to have to compete to pay for the best talent.

“Ultimately there will be high price attached to the best talent. Because whether you’re running a newspaper, or a radio station, or a boxing gym, you need the best talent there to attract people.”

So is Rule saying that cost-cutting can only go so far, that the quality of the broadsheet must be maintained if it is to stand any chance?

“In my view that’s true. The only chance we have for survival is to go for quality and hope that people will want to pay for it.”

And herein lies the crux of the issue that is the broadsheet’s future in Australia — paying for it.

The online monster that threatens to consume newspapers has many advantages, not least of all that, generally speaking, it’s free. Calls for newspapers to go online ignore the fact that papers would simply become another online news site — and in doing so lose their inherent value.

While admitting the internet might be the future for newspapers, Rule is sceptical about it as a source of news, describing it as a “trash and treasure market”, full of misinformation.

“When it comes to something deeper, what we need in this cacophony of noise is to sit down and pay for expert people, the best of their generation, to analyse what’s going on around them and to write about it.”

There have been threats to newspapers before: television has saved a few trees in its time, as has radio.

But while these two media have in many ways complemented newspapers, the internet threatens to supersede them.

How is a broadsheet supposed to compete with words (without space limitations), pictures and videos?

The best chance seems to be with good quality, accountable investigate journalism. Online news sites are perfectly suited for what they are, but ill-equipped to cover stories beyond the reporting of facts and opinions; to “protect the public sphere”.

The masthead of credibility needs to be clung onto ferociously, whatever the cost, if newspapers are to survive and serve their purpose.

Without the rivers of gold, resources need to be used more efficiently. That may mean less focus on news telling, no more weekday papers and a raft of other cost-cutting.

Rule, for his part, is no optimist regarding the plight of the broadsheet.

“It took a while for surf boards and blonde hair to get to Australia and possibly, it’s just taking a little bit of lag time before we too start executing newspapers, putting them down like old Labrador dogs.”

Let’s hope Rule, and his broadsheet cohorts, are up for the fight.

For perhaps not all of us would miss getting up on a Saturday morning and spreading the world over our tables over a cup of coffee.

But if the old Labrador dogs of this country do get the green dream, investigative journalism will be the poorer.

• Noteboek | Vimeo: Evelien Lohbeck’s short film creates a notebook computer out of a paper notebook.
• Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit (8-Bit Remix)” | DoseNation: Somehow, this hugely-successful rock song still sounds good played on cheesey 8-bit synthesisers.
• Towards a Taxonomy of blogs | Creative Economy Online: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons reckons that before we descend into the loggers versus journalists debate then we should define our terms. She proposes a classification of blog types.
• Rooftop STUB | Flickr: Will Hughes’ stills photography of Saturday’s party.
• What is wrong with Strawberry Amyl Nitrate? | Vimeo: Will Hughes took this video at Saturday’s rooftop party in Surry Hills. It contains rather too much of me, and certainly too much of my tongue.
• slow down london: Running from 24 April through to 4 May, this festival about “living life in real time” is striking a chord.
• Is Social Media Too Fast? | Convince & Convert: Jason Baer kicks off a discussion about the incredible pace of social media. “This of course requires me to jump from task to message to task to message like a Russian dancing bear on crack,” he says. Perhaps it’s time to choose to slow down? I’ll definitely have more to say about this anon.
• “One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is A Girl Who Is Not Probably Groomed On All Parts Of Her Body” – Arthur Kade | Jezebel: There is just so much wrong with this man’s worldview that I don’t know where to begin.
• a warning from the newspaper biz | overland literary journal: Can the book industry learn from what’s happening to newspapers? Amongst the great questions asked is: “Will an author’s share of revenue on e-books be a traditional fixed percentage, or a variable, we’re-not-going-to-tell-you-what-we-received-from-your-work-but-here’s-a-quarter-go-buy-yourself-something-nice percentage of advertising revenue that Google might deign to dole out (as it does with ad revenue to site/blog owners)?”

• A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US | FT.com: Clive Crook pulls no punches, calling the US “War on Drugs” immoral, brainless and, yes, “criminally stupid”.
• Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets | Wired.com: What's interesting about this is not that a message was generated from a person’s brain via EEG, ‘cos that’s been in use for a while, but that the researchers linked that to a remote messaging system. Using Twitter is a bit of a gimmick IMHO, since any text system would work similarly, but then it did get them the media attention.
• How the 3Rs empower Telstra staff online — Social Media Guardrails | nowwearetalking: Released this week: Telstra’s 6-page social media policy. Billed as the first by a major Australian company (which I doubt), I daresay it’ll be analysed to death.
• Blogging from a Corporate Perspective | www.nickhodge.com: Microsoft’s blogging policy, on the other hand, it just nine brief bullet points. If only governments could get to the point so quickly.
• Circular 2008/8: Interim protocols for online media participation | Australian Public Service Commission: The Australian government’s guidelines for public servants using social media. Of course it’s written in bureaucratic language, but it covers some good territory.
• World’s Biggest Submarine [with pics] | English Russia: The Typhoon was the biggest submarine in the world, and one of Russian’s deepest Cold War secrets. Now it’s a minor tourist attraction, and very rusty.
• Five menu items at Silver Spoon Thai that could also be the name of an unsuccessful sex worker | 5ives: What it says.
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable | Clay Shirky: A must-read article. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”
• NEO Living: The website for a new apartment block to be built on Enmore Road, Newtown. Some wonderfully creative PR bullshit about how wonderful the area is. For some reason, the website completely fails to mention that the development is sited on a busy and rather noisy Enmore Road, and is directly under the flight path leading to Sydney Airport’s runway 16L.
• Debate: Hugh White and Australian defence policy | The Interpreter: Rory Medcalf kicks of a debate of Hugh White’s paper at the Lowy Institute’s blog.
• A focused force: Australia’s defence priorities in the Asian Century | Lowy Institute: Professor Hugh White calls for Australia to abandon the “Balanced Force’ concept and refocus its military on managing strategic risks related to the rise of China. Professor White argues that Chinese power will challenge US primacy, undercutting the basic assumptions of Australian defence policy. This paper, with its controversial force-structure recommendations, is a major contribution to the Australian security debate on the eve of the 2009 Defence White Paper.
• NavyNorthernTrident (navytrident09) on Twitter: An innovative use of Twitter? Tweets from two Royal Australian Navy ships embarking on a 6-month deployment taking them to 13 countries.
• Ashton Kutcher Punks Twitter: A Giant Million Follower PR Stunt | NowPublic News Coverage: I wasn’t going to write anything about the supposed race to a million Twitter followers, and now I don’t have to because this article says it all: “This is not a story of the ‘little man’ beating out ‘big media’ — this is the story of a major Hollywood celebrity orchestrating a massive, social media publicity campaign that was specifically designed to promote himself, Twitter and, by extension, Ted Turner and CNN.” Once more, this will have triggered thousands into joining Twitter, and once more they’ll imagine its main purpose is for them to passively absorb the message of the “famous”. Such a wasted opportunity. P.S. Who’s Ashton Kutcher?
• Disturbing Strokes | YouTube: MontyPropps takes the opening credits from the TV series Diff’rent Strokes and, by replacing the original jaunty music, creates something far more sinister. A demonstration of the power of music to set the mood.

• “Storm” by Tim Minchin | 3quarksdaily: I’m perhaps well behind the pace in being exposed to this wonderful 9-minute Beat poem, but I still think it’s worth sharing.
• Free speech? Only if you’re a charity | Memex 1.1: Science Fiction author Harlan Ellison explains why he doesn’t speak for free. A gloriously eloquent rant.
• Back to the Future at Tenenbaum Copyright Trial | TechLaw: In 1993, Prof Pamela Samuelson’s The Copyright Grab warned that large copyright owners were planning a "maximalist agenda" for the digital age. Most of their eight action items made it into the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. Yet as this recent copyright cases shows, many of the issues are also still raw and open to discussion.
• Thailand’s royal sub-plot | Inside Story: Increasingly, discussions of Thailand's chronic political schisms are mentioning the monarchy. Here’s one such excellent backgrounder.
• The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim | Times Online: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived not one but two atomic bombs. And he’s not the only one.
• Goodbye dolly, hello Nintendo | smh.com.au: Apparently little girls are giving up playing with dolls at an earlier age to use more “structured” playthings and interact with their peers. This article pitches that as a moral panic, with quotes from two psychologists who, presumably, make their living from kids who are developing “abnormally”.
• Finding Utility in the Jumble of Twittered Thoughts | NYTimes.com: Despite starting off with this hackneyed pair of sentences — “The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?” — this is another good article covering the possibilities for Twitter. Mind you, I wouldn’t want my urgent medical alerts sent by a low-reliability system like Twitter!
• Newspapers Begin to Push Back on the Web | NYTimes.com: A nice backgrounder on the current moves by Associated Press to prevent people linking to its content. It doesn’t cover everything — it’s a complicated issue! — but it’s part of the picture.
• Super-fast trip to a world full of surprises | smh.com.au: Mark Pesce’s op-ed piece for Fairfax on the National Broadband Network.
• Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check | SafeKids.com: “Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million ‘cases’ of teen-to-teen cyberbullying in 2006.” Indeed, let’s focus on where the real risks are, not the imaginary or extremely rare ones.
• WDM-PON blurs the boundary between metro and last mile | ibresystems.org: WDM-PON (wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical network) could provide broadband operators with an elegant way to simplify and futureproof their access network architecture. Here’s a summary of recent developments.

• Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Reuters Blogs: Reuters News editor David Schlesinger tweets from Davos, beats his own news wires, and then blogs about the experience. If Twitter is changing journalism, his response is “Bring it on!”
• The LEGO Turing Machine | YouTube: The Turing Machine was a hypothetical computing device created by Alan Turing in 1936 to explain basic theoretical concepts in computing. While very simple, a Turing Machine is mathematically equivalent to any other general purpose computer, if slower. So, these guys have built one using LEGO Mindstorms components. The video has a bonus soundtrack via The A-Team.
• A radical idea: Charge people for your product | 37signals: The blog post is from November 2008, but the message is current given all the media flutter about Twitter — which has yet to earn a single dollar of revenue. Need income? Um, charge for your product!
• FORA.tv: “Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues.” I haven’t checked them out properly yet, so this is really a reminder to self.
• GoodBarry: These guys provide an integrated “Software as a Service” (SaaS) system for small business, covering eCommerce, content management (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing and analytics. All hooked together, and all at good prices. I’m checking them out for a client.
• Life Matters’ Mandatory Internet Filter Transcript | Off Topic with Ashley: An unofficial transcript of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program with network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
• Mandatory internet filter | ABC Life Matters: On Thursday, ABC Radio National’s Life Matters interviewed network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Audio available for download.
• The Economy According To Mint | TechCrunch: Mint is an online accounting system for consumers. Tracing their 900,000 customers through 2008 shows how their spending patterns have changed as the Global Financial Crisis worsens.
• Labor’s “deafening silence” as web censorship trials delayed | theage.com.au:
• Newspapers Saw the Digital Train A-Coming | Advertising Age: Bradley Johnson points out that the newspapers themselves were exploring digital delivery of news in the 1980s, but failed to do anything about it in terms of reviewing their business models.
• OpenNet Initiative: “ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.”
• The Unmistakable Smell Of Decay | newmatilda.com: With the NSW Labor zombie army smelling worse all the time, party hacks are considering swapping their front-line cadaver, writes Bob Dumpling.

• Study challenges AGs on predator danger | CNET News: A new study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU) challenges recent assertions by several state attorneys general that young people are at significant risk from online predators on social-networking sites.
• Co-generation Cyber-Cafe Internet coffee appliance | Link: The Link Institute today announced a breakthrough in energy saving to combat global warming: the “Cyber-Cafe”. This unit provides web services for a home or small business and uses the waste heat to keep coffee warm.
• What is so costly to Telstra about 38GB? | Core Economics: Joshua Gans asks the age-old question: if the first 60GB of a broadband plan costs $130, why does an additional 38GB cost $6000?
• ACMA rolls out cybersafety professional development program for educators | ACMA: ACMA’s Cybersafety Outreach — Professional Development for Educators is the national cyber-safety program designed for primary and secondary level educators. It's part of a wider education initiative which will, I contend, be money better spent than on Internet filters.
• Going private | Inside Story: The evidence suggests that publicly-listed media companies are digging their own graves. Does this mean a return to the age of moguls, asks Jonathan Este.
• Australia’s Holy Man likes a Good War | sydwalker.info: Syd Walker profiles Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former head of Australia’s elite SAS Regiment and now stormtrooper in the fight for Internet censorship.
• More of London from above, at night | The Big Picture: Boston.com’s The Big Picture is almost always beyond excellent. This set of aerial images of London at night is stunning. Photographer: Jason Hawkes.
• The next P-I might be electronic, and on a plastic sheet | Crosscut: The Hearst empire has been experimenting with epaper versions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
• http://walterhiggins.net/projects/follower_mosaic.pl: A straightforward tool to create a mosaic of your Twitter followers’ avatar images. Produces HTML for pasting into a blog post or whatever.
• Australian Journalists on Twitter | Laurel Papworth – Social Network Strategy: Ms @SilkCharm has been compiling a list as indicated, with a very wide interpretation of “journalist”. Useful.
• TinEye Reverse Image Search: “TinEye a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.”
• The Phenomenon of Retweeting: A Deep Analysis | Pistachio: A numerical analysis of how people retweet — that is, pass on others’ tweets — on Twitter.