Big thanks to the talented team at Warm Design, who did the artwork and typesetting, and Newspaper Club, for a fabulous print job.

The paper is a special print edition of the alumni newsletter I write for Newcastle University, produced for this year’s summer graduation. It contains info about what graduates get from the Uni after leaving, some quirky infographics about locations and career paths, a few interviews with interesting alumni, and a big aerial photo of Newcastle in the centre pages. Take a look here if you fancy.

I’m really impressed with the service we got from Newspaper Club. I first heard about it from founders Russell Davies and Ben Terrett at Thinking Digital 2009, an annual conference in Newcastle about technology and the future (for which I volunteer). Their ethos is simple: print is here to stay – it’s much nicer than the web and it should be accessible to more people.

It’s great that newspapers are no longer just the dominion of the media-mighty. I saw a funny tweet from Edinburgh bookshop, Analogue Books, the other day, who blamed Newspaper Club for a massive increase in small-run newsprint on its shelves.

Mainstream newspaper circulation may be dwindling, but niche products are on the up, and they’re far more exciting.

(Damn WordPress won’t let me embed videos from Vimeo, so here’s the link directly to Vimeo)

The interview is from an event at the Institut für Medienpolitik in Berlin. Thanks to Carta for posting it.

So just to summarise a few of Rusbridger’s points:

• Reader comments from the web are valuable for harvesting information to improve newspaper content
• There will be a concentration of media ownership in the future
• Quality journalism will need to be subsidised
• The Victorian chain of newspaper distribution is a broken model – too much money is lost in the chain of supply, falling ad revenues and declining audiences
• Modern journalism is about dialogue, not monologue
• Twitter is useful for crowdsourcing information for content, and then distributing that content

So are media houses in the future going to be like ‘recycling points’ for content? Taking junk from their readership, recycling it into attractive and digestible content, and then re-distributing? I guess this is arguably how the media has always worked, but now the relationship between producer and consumer is more explicit.

It’s clear that no-one still really knows what the digital age has in store for the future of media. Some of my favourite soundbites from Rusbridger: “Occasionally we see glimmerings of how it’s going to work” and “There’s a blurring of the distinction between journalist and reader”.

Vaguity at its best, and this is from one of the best minds in the industry. But I find this strangely comforting, because the digital age is re-defining journalism, and re-defining the distribution and consumption of news as we know it. And we’re still really at the beginning.

Thanks to Emily Bell for the link.

There’s no doubt Hornby had his tongue firmly in cheek when he put these words in the mouth of his intimacy-shy hero, Rob Fleming. Of course, how can someone be defined by their hobbies, musical tastes and choice of conversation? Well it all depends on how cynical you are about humanity, but it sure counts above anything on the Internet.

Whether we’re crowdsourcing for information, sharing links through delicious, or blogging about our top five books, our personal opinions are the very lifeblood of social networking. But of course, these opinions need to have value and be useful, and be much more than just bursts of hot air.

It was Mike Arauz‘s latest blog post, ‘Spectrum of Online Friendship‘, that got me thinking about this. Friendship online is a very different beast to friendship in real life, to the extent that its values are often completely inverted.

Look at Twitter, for example. This is a social network entirely built around the premise that friendship is not necessarily reciprocal. Granted, on Twitter you have ‘followers’ rather than friends, but this is one of very few platforms that draws a distinction.

Again on Twitter, there are plenty of third-party services that help you find people with similar interests – Mr Tweet and TweeterTags for example. And you can also look at what topics are trending, so you can engage in topical conversation – again often to find new people with whom you share mutual interests.

And it gets more personal too. With the music-streaming application Spotify, for example, you can broadcast your musical tastes to your network by sharing playlists. Effectively, this lets you use your personal tastes as a currency to gain acceptance and credibility, as much as it asserts your individuality.

Perhaps I’m being overly cynical here. But the point I’m trying to make is that your social success on the Internet is fundamentally tied to the things you like, and the things you’re interested in. Maybe this could be translated as your ‘usefulness’ value.

If Mike Arauz’s Spectrum of Online Friendships can be used to plot developments on the relationship ladder from passive interest to full engagement, then your usefulness value can be leveraged as a tool to help you move along this ladder.

This is great for crowdsourcing information and trends, and there must be some interesting implications for brands here. But I just hope that people won’t compromise on their individuality on their journey to becoming more engaged with the digital world.

This has been 11 years in-the-waiting for Condé Nast, who bought the US technology magazine from Wired Ventures in 1998. And it’s hardly surprising it’s waited so long, considering Wired’s first attempt at a UK launch in 1995, which resulted in failure.

Cover of Wired UK sample issue

What is surprising, however, is the timing of the launch. Why has Condé Nast waited until now – the most fragile financial period in recent history – to establish a new technology magazine, when it’s up against a culture of successful blogs, dedicated to breaking the same content, and a media landscape scattered with the corpses of failed print publications?

As a high-end technology and lifestyle magazine, its intended readership – the UK digerati, which largely consists of 20–40 something middle-class men – is already fully immersed in the Internet, with free content and more information than could ever possibly be consumed. Not only is it also up against men’s magazines – and as the Guardian points out, high-end publications like the Economist and Monocle – but its sister magazine, WIred US, and that’s going to be a tough act to follow.

Advertising models are in tatters too, and according to the Guardian, Wired US has been hit by a 57% drop in ad revenue.

But even in the face of these huge obstacles, Condé Nast has decided the time is right to give life to Wired UK, as well as style magazine, Love. For me, this is a bold move, and a huge investment in the future survival of print media – especially in the wake of Bauer’s closure of Arena, and news that Nat Mags is clipping 15% of its UK workforce.

I’ve just picked up a copy of Wired UK’s sample edition, but until I see the launch issue as a whole, it’s probably unfair to pass judgement. As far as first impressions go, though, I’m not really blown away. The cover is a somewhat clichéd and poorly rendered image of a futuristic London, and I didn’t find the content particularly engaging.

It does, however, hint at the clever infographics Wired US is famous for, and the potential for forward-thinking, long-form journalism that could set it apart from its foes in the blogosphere.

At a recent editors’ forum in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of hearing from Scott Dadich, the Design Director of Wired US. He gave us a tour of the magazine from a visual perspective, and it’s clear that its print format is a world apart from the web – with multiple page features, powerful photography and well-considered graphics that bring a hoard of new dimensions to the magazine’s editorial.

Hopefully, Wired UK can emulate the look and feel of its American sibling, whilst publishing content that is engaging, topical and quintessentially British.

But whether the print magazine can finance its future survival is a question that’s still, as yet, unanswerable. The web still offers free content, and that undervalues the very lifeblood of the media. I’m going to agree with Rupert Murdoch on this one, we need a money-spinning model for online content that doesn’t rely on ad revenue, and we need it fast.

A few days old, but I absolutely love this video from Current.com.

Brian Solis at PR 2.0 has been blogging about the rise of the Statusphere (i.e. Twitter & Facebook) over the Blogosphere, and it got me a bit worried. I wrote a comment on his post about how we’re becoming distracted by more and more things online, and this is compromising our ability to focus on the task in hand. I then made some quip about us heading for a ‘singularity of minimal input and output’. I guess my head must have been full of dystopian fears from watching Wall-E the other week…

Anyway, I’m pleased to announce that I’m wrong, or at least I think I am anyway. The chat on the web this week is about how platforms like Twitter have more of a human touch and real-life value than anything we’ve used before.

One of the big themes is ‘searching’ on Twitter compared to Google – not necessarily using Twitter Search, but asking followers to share their knowledge and provide recommendations. Wadds blogged about an experiment by Drew Benvie who’s been using Twitter to crowdsource answers to questions like “Where can I get a good Sunday roast”, rather than search Google. I’ll post an update here when he publishes his results.

Elsewhere, Danny Sullivan has blogged about Twitter’s ‘help engine’, publishing his findings from a survey on how people use Twitter to answer their queries. He writes that his survey was derided before it even began as ‘unscientific’ and ‘meaningless’ because it was biased towards the behaviours of Twitter users, rather than the online community as a whole. But I can only see the value in it – innumberable studies have shown that qualitative research findings have just as much gravitas as anything else, so I don’t buy the ‘bias’ argument.

Importantly, Twitter is a subjective community of individuals with fiercely guarded opinions. And as Ad Parker points out in ShowMeNumbers, ‘Google isn’t people, it’s an algorithm’. Surely then, real-time human opinions are much more reliable than Google’s easily fleeced and predominantly ad-driven algorithms? So good luck to Drew, and I’m looking forward to seeing his results.

There’s been some talk in the media too about Google’s supposed desire to buy Twitter, in order to improve its real-time search capabilities. But if this is the case, it must have a lot to do with Twitter’s ‘people power’ too.

Finally, I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve been avoiding Twitter this week in order to get some work done. It was a decision that I made out of desperation, because on Twitter, I’m constantly ducking through rabbit holes and chasing nuggets of information that I arguably don’t need (a culture Mike Arauz eloquently refers to in his ‘Desire Paths‘ presentation).

But I’ve missed the folks on Twitter, I’ve missed the banter, and I probably feel worse off for not aimlessly chasing through Twitter’s labyrinth of knowledge. Even though I’ve bitten the bullet, and had a productive week.

I often feel like an aimless, square-eyed procrastinator on Twitter. But reassuringly, Brian Solis calls us an ‘active, engaging, and enlightened community of media literate information socialites’. I’ll take the latter please.

Or I’d like to believe in that. Instead, we’re faced with a media that seems to care little for its duty to the public, its employees, and indeed itself.

And this isn’t really anyone’s fault. By its very nature, the media is subjective, at the disposal of its bankrollers, and never realistically able to fulfill the wishes of the idealists. Hell, does anyone really know what ‘proper news’ constitutes anyway? And if so, how can we quantify it and assess its value to society? There’s an apparent decline in journalism, which is beyond the control of journalists and editors everywhere.

So we work with what we can. A constant flow of budget cuts wipe resources from the newsroom, and the media is ever more reliant on news subsidy, which is content from third parties – news agencies, user generated content and PR.

In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies and a team of Cardiff University researchers found that the content of most UK national papers contains between 65 and 69 per cent news subsidy. And this isn’t just the ranting of an embittered hack – it’s backed up by almost every related academic study of the last decade.

So we’re now in a position where it’s not just the media that has a duty to the public interest, but PR practitioners too. And PRs have to offset this responsibility against their duty to their clients.

In this age of multi-platform news delivery, we’re inundated with news content from all directions – the majority of which is free. It’s a challenge to gauge the reliability of media providers, but those displaying a high degree of integrity and transparency are clearly ahead of the game.

Thanks to the Internet, a lot more people have become content providers. And this is both a great and terrible thing of course. But with a multiplicity of perspectives, and increased accountability to media-critic-bloggers (the new integrity police), the workings of the media can be much more transparent.

And with great virtue comes true glory…