[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 [...]

It’s not just newspapers struggling to find their way in the digital era. Many content companies — broadcasting, film, music, publishing, and gaming — are grappling with the same business model uncertainty.
In a recent survey (pdf), the consulting firm Accenture asked 102 content-industry leaders to pick the biggest hurdle they face. Overwhelmingly, executives pointed to [...]

[Yesterday, we showed how our Martin Langeveld's predictions for 2009 turned out. A few hits, a few misses, but lots of thoughts provoked. Here's his list of what we can expect in 2010. —Josh]
Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.2 percent in Q3 of 2009 and [...]

Because it’s my job, I’ve followed pretty much everything Steve Brill has said in public about Journalism Online, the pay-for-news firm he launched in April with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey. From the start, they’ve been offering infrastructure and consulting for news organizations that want to charge for access to their websites. But as you’d [...]

For all the bluster about Google as an enemy of the news industry, you might be surprised to learn that Eric Schmidt, the company’s CEO, is kind of a triumphalist for mainstream media, big newspapers, and print.
He took questions from reporters this afternoon at Google’s offices in Cambridge, and I asked him, among other [...]

We are not lacking deep lamentations and grand plans for the future of journalism (clever commentary is abundant as well). New additions to this canon appear weekly, and many have a reactionary bent with lots of chest thumping and hand wringing. It’s often a bit much — which is why the appearance of a long-view, [...]

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of [...]

If you’ve been following our coverage of Journalism Online, the pay-for-news venture founded by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, you know how they plan to generate revenue for news sites. What hasn’t been clear is how the firm itself will make money.
But in a document submitted to the Newspaper Association of America, which [...]

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how [...]

WriteRoom is an iPhone app for taking notes that has a few nice features. I know about the developer, Jesse Grosjean, from some of his Mac work, and when I saw last night that the app was on sale for 99 cents, I bought a copy.
But that sale was actually part of an experiment Jesse’s [...]

Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review [...]

CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks [...]

It’s happening. Yesterday we revealed Steve Brill’s latest moves toward charging readers of newspaper websites, and separately, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney said he would erect an online pay wall by the end of the year. Those developments followed similar statements by executives of Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, among other newspaper companies.
As these paid-content [...]

Even as he leads newspaper publishers toward charging for their websites, Steve Brill remains skeptical of one oft-mentioned model for making money online: micropayments. In our conversation yesterday, he told me that his startup, Journalism Online, isn’t expecting newspapers to reap much revenue from per-article fees, though readers will have that option.
“I think that people [...]

Here comes the summer of paid content: Steve Brill tells me that his pay-for-news startup, Journalism Online, will soon announce deals with several newspapers to — in many cases, for the first time — charge readers for some of their digital content.
“We’ve signed a couple, we’re going to sign some more, but we’re sort [...]