A couple days ago, my tech-savvy grandparents e-mailed me a link to a story in the Gazette, my hometown’s newspaper and location of my summer 2003 internship.

While the Gazette has long been negligent in its online efforts, the reporting and photography at the paper has always been top-notch, garnering many awards for the 15,000-some circulation publication. Within the past two years, the Web site finally received a nice face lift, which was subsequently gutted for an awful replacement earlier this year. At least they enabled comments.

As circulations plummet, ad dollars evaporate and American newspapers head toward bankruptcy, what has the brilliant leadership (read: publisher George Hudnutt) decided to do for the Gazette? Start charging for content online.

George, where have you been for the past 18 years? (more…)

• AP puts money into Verve — Verve provides mobile services for news companies. I don’t get why media firms wouldn’t just bring this in-house, although a third-party platform may be useful, like Brightcove is for video, etc. This alone will not save newspapers.
• Webcasts are boring — I’m glad I’m not the only one not on the newspaper Webcast bandwagon.
• China now largest user of Web — The behemoth grows larger and the implications are huge. With more users, China may slowly push how the Web grows, albeit behind a big stone wall.
• MPAA to create online guide for legit places to download movies Industry research indicates many struggle with differentiating legitimate sources from illegal ones. The more tech savvy of us “scoff,” but it is plausible.
• Yahoo to reimburse users for DRM-protected music — somehow — Another DRM scheme fails
• College textbooks being pirated Quote the NYT: “THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later…”