"There's no good reason why incumbents can't devote a similarly minuscule amount of energy doing so as well. Because the question is not whether to stick with your current offerings or bet on a new, high-risk one. The question is how much time will you have before someone else comes up with the same innovations your bright, clever staffers have thought of — and what will happen to your customer base when they do? "

"An experiment in sharing and visualising my television-watching habits. by Dale Lane "

After an emergency meeting yesterday morning, around 100 print workers took unannounced strike action over potential job losses at their plant after Le Monde said that it was considering selling the factory, which employs 270 people.

The social web mantra of “authenticity” and “transparency” is a load of crap. Nobody is truly authentic. Nobody is truly transparent. Nor should you be! However, there is an urgent need for civility, tolerance and honesty in this space.

The content has to be somehow better than what can be read on a Kindle. That’s made easy almost out-of-the-box given the iPod Touch software base. Here’s the potential for content that actually does something. I think that’s key. For this device to succeed it has to have a large volume of content that simply does more than you’d generally expect on other platforms. Otherwise why buy the reader?

Enter Steve Jobs, stage left, proffering an appealing concept (I make lots of money selling content: look at iTunes), embodied in an attractive package (the Apple tablet/reader/thingee), and suggesting an exciting outcome (the salvation of Big Publishing). And his mojo is having some effect.

My question is prompted by recent conversations with some of those who know Mr Lebedev well. They confirm that he remains in deadly earnest about buying the Independent and – more germanely – that he would turn it into a free newspaper.

"Smart newspaper publishers once knew this, back when most papers were owned by someone in the community and not by some far-flung chain. They supported community causes and made sure that the community knew about the paper's support."

"The ads only appear when the pages are printed, with the theory that users who print the page are inherently committed to the content. "

"The real challenge for magazine publishers in this joint venture may be to find ways to truly innovate. Though the "iTunes for magazines" concept and its primary use on state-of-the-art tablet devices might seem innovative enough, the fundamental question is whether this new distribution and business model fully utilizes the advantages of the digital format in exciting, engaging and creative ways. "

",,,once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.