When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few [...]

[A little over one year ago, our friend Martin Langeveld made a series of predictions about what 2009 would bring for the news business — in particular the newspaper business. I even wrote about them at the time and offered up a few counter-predictions. Here's Martin's rundown of how he fared. Up next, we'll post [...]

An invite-only conference began today at the American Press Institute with a singular directive: “generating revenue from online content.” At the morning session, which just wrapped up, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishing presented their survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. The cardinal finding, first reported this morning by Alan [...]

— The Wall Street Journal is talking out loud about poaching the markets of the major metros, Gawker says. Would that mean regional variations of the WSJ that are have just enough local content to turn two-paper subscribers into one-paper subscribers? I have a hard time seeing average newspaper readers converting in large numbers to [...]

— Andy Dickinson argues the Kindle-like device the news companies are hoping for misunderstands how people interact with a newspaper.
[T]he compelling feature of newspaper as a medium is that we are prepared to throw it away. Bin it, shred it, leave it on the bus. Whatever we do we are happy to spend money [...]