links for 2009-08-12

Local newspapers are quietly dying when they should be staging everything from commercial fairs to sporting events and arts and book festivals. There is money in all of them. Newspapers should not be investing in fancy printing presses but in the "long-tail" economics of live enterprise, with the printed word as a mere core activity.

Based on a study it commissioned, MTV said a five-second pre-roll ad combined with a lower-third ad is the most effective and consumer-friendly ad unit for short-form video on sites like MTV.com and ComedyCentral.com.

The experience has made me realize something I should have done when I was an editor/publisher. I should have gone cold turkey on the print edition of my own and other newspapers for two weeks or a month and determined what life was like for those who were living solely in a digital world.

Growthspur will take lessons from the BackFence experiment, says Potts, in particular the challenge of sustaining funding and momentum for a hyperlocal site once initial interest and funding has faded.

Newsquest has relaunched its entire network of regional newspaper websites with a new design.

More than 150 new-look sites, including the Dorset Echo and Wirral Globe, went live over the weekend with changes made to improve site navigation, accessibility and search.

Feedback by Paragraph is a plugin that does a number of things

* It hijacks the content of the post, looking for the </p> tag and inserts some code that attaches a pop-up box to that paragraph so you can leave comments. It inserts a little bubble with a link to open the box which also displays the number of comments there already. It only does this on the article page (what WP calls a single post as defined by the template single.php). It uses the closing p tag because it’s the easiest one to find as the <p> is often full of crap like classes etc and my regex is not really up to that. Using </p> also has the advantage of picking up any image captions without breaking the styling class.
* It saves any paragraph comments with a custom ‘comment type’ so that they can be associated with a paragraph
* It filters out any paragraph comments from the normal comment display.
* It only allows you to comment if you are an admin or the post author but anyone can see the comments.