links for 2009-03-17

Get back to the essentials – news people need, delivered where they need it. Timely.

“In the last year, alternative news sites, have continued to grow, including those produced by journalists who have left legacy newsrooms, but their scale remains small. The new media in aggregate are far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms, and despite enthusiasm and good work, few if any are profitable or even self-sustaining.” The meaty Pew report also considers trends such as how the power is shifting to individual journalists and the concept of partnership. Plenty more to mull over here too.

If you want to know who’s who in news on Twitter, check out WeFollow.com. It lists the news feeds and news commentators with the most followers on Twitter. They may not be all to your taste but you’ll almost certainly find a few news feeds and news voices in there you hadn’t come across before.

Seattle newspaper web only experiment which promises “to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to.” As the post says “And to be sure, the entire news industry will be watching to see what an editorial staff of 20 can accomplish compared to a staff of 165.”

Steven Berlin Johnson’s full speech from SXSW. Will surely become essential reading so thanks to him for blogging it so soon. “But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest. But of course, that’s what the web can do.”