The future of news is aggregated, and personalised

The iPad has always been cited as the saviour of the newspaper (mostly by newspapers), but the future of news lies in aggregation, like Zite. Read this glowing review on Mashable to find out more. Here's the secret:

The app’s secret sauce is this: It learns from your everyday reading. It’s constantly watching what kind of stories you click on, how long those stories are, how long you’re reading them for — and just as importantly, the stories you don’t click on. (It’ll give you less of those.) Just as Netflix and Amazon bring you movies and products that users similar to you liked, Zite is doing constant behind-the-scenes comparisons between readers, both inside the app and on the web in general.

And just to stress that this is not really an iPad story (iPad apps always generate the most buzz), here's an online newspaper generated from my Twitter feed.

Rupert Murdoch to introduce paid content model

Here's what The Guardian, an online pioneer in the publishing world, thinks of Rupert Murdoch's plan to introduce subscriptions for its online contract. It has been tried before... click here to see what we think.

Proposal to ban Internet links demonstrates there will always be resistance to change

One of the most ridiculous stories of the year. Why would saving newspapers benefit anyone but printers and distributors?

Especially when you consider how much more fun newspapers can have bitching at each other online.

News wires way behind Twitter in reporting earthquake

The recent LA earthquake was reported on Twitter way before the newswires got hold of it, the Advertise of Go Under blog reports.

A result of the need to print "stories" rather than just headlines?

The rise of the newswire - and the blogpaper

The Economist ran an interesting piece last week about the effect the information revolution is having on the news industry. The gist:

The financial crisis is taking a terrible toll on both financial-services firms and newspapers, so you might expect the news agencies that serve them to be in trouble too. Not so. Christoph Pleitgen, a senior Reuters executive, says the big newswires have been staffing up in the past year.

The reason given is that newspapers, under competition not only from each other, but also from news aggregators like Google News and the Drudge Report, citizen journalists and other low-cost online efforts, no longer have the resources to chase after stories that can are only a link away on dozens of other websites. The newswires are benefiting from having a vast network of "straight" news gatherers not just locally but globally, paid to keep an eye on the news and tell it strictly  like it is. And that wholesale content is worth paying for, because it is clean, reliable and, above all, cheap. As a result, newspaper websites are also changing fast - the New York Times website promises "breaking news, world news and multimedia" - filling its stories with Wikipedia-style links to its own content.  In Britain, online "broadsheets" are giving "star" writers free reign to write whatever they want about the topics of the day. Call it blogging, or call it comment, news it ain't. This is fundamentally effecting the way we view news. Increasingly, it is not the newspaper or television that dictates the news, it is the reader. News sources simply take a bunch of stories and regurgitate them in a form that might "plug in" to the interests of some, but not all of its readers - and hopefully attract comments from insightful readers with something to add. Because you can no longer tell people what to read, much less what to think. The best you can do is interest, entertain and stimulate debate.