Earlier today, ‘News War’ Producer Stephen Talbot participated in an online chat on washingtonpost.com, fielding questions about the “steady demise of original reporting,” newspaper ownership models, the public’s changing news consumption habits (especially with the Internet) and more.

In The Wall Street Journal today, Newspaper Association of American President and CEO John Sturm responded to an earlier op-ed by Steven Rattner called "Red All Over."  (We mentioned Rattner's op-ed in an earlier posting to the Digital Edge blog.)

I’m not diligent about reading user agreements or terms of service documents before clicking on the ‘I agree’ button. But some things NowPublic’s Co-Founder and CEO Michael Tippett said in a recent piece on NewAssignment.net got me thinking.

The Poynter Web site today has a "Leading Lines" piece about 24/7 television news operations and what newspapers can learn from their culture. Although television news has been long criticized for too much on 'if it bleeds, it leads' news judgment, the culture and operations at these organizations provide a few worthwhile lessons.  

Presidential candidates have gotten on the Web 2.0 campaign trail -- and it's starting to look like newspapers are following their lead. Hooray for The New York Times for leading the way in political convergence and print-Web bipartisanship.  

Editor and Publisher has an interesting (and long!) story on CNet's and Reuters' bureaus in the virtual world Second Life -- including some interesting ethical and technological challenges.

Since there's no Online Publishing Update today (President's Day) and I forgot (oops!) to publish a weekend reading for the long weekend, I wanted to post a few stories of interest that hit the Net over the weekend.

It appears (ahem) that cutting newsroom costs may not be good for the company's bottom line in the long run. A report from the University of Missouri (Columbia) School of Journalism based on ten years of financial data from news companies found this: "U.S. newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will make more money, according to a study released on Wednesday, which questioned the wisdom of the media industry's trend of cutting jobs to save costs," according to Reuters.

 Note: NAA’s Director of Audience Development Diane Hockenberry attended the We Media conference in Miami last week. She came back with some notes and observations – here are some of the soundbytes from the investment forum and the “soft power” forum (Jay Rosen described that as “people power and the social structures that connect them together”). Hockenberry also attended the town hall meeting, “Behold the Power of Us: A Future for Media, Democracy and Community.”

After months of controvery over the real population of the virtual world Second Life, parent company Linden Labs has released a census, of sorts. Most importantly, the company has addressed "Resident Population vs Unique Users vs Log Ins vs Active Users." Maybe now we can answer the question, "How big is this world?" that has been plaguing those of us who are trying to figure the relative importance of Second Life as a technology lab.

A Web site extension of Personal Democracy Forum called TechPresident launched today. The site will cover the Web features of the 2008 presidential campaigns. The Web site’s slogan is “How the candidates are using the Web, and how the Web is using them.”

PC World this month ranked the top five free (or very inexpensive) blogging platforms, many of which newspaper companies are already using.  

Some photos from the first camera phones were pretty bad, remember? Low to medium resolution, 400 px. wide (if that!), and difficult to send to friends and/or expensive to get off the phone. Those days are quickly passing, The Wall Street Journal reported today. "Until recently, camera phones haven't been very good at either of the main reasons people take photographs: preserving memories or sharing them...."

Yesterday's "Real Time" column in The Wall Street Journal is about whether newspaper Web sites can "recreate a joy" of print editions. Columnist Jason Fry, in "In Search of Serendipity," writes: There's one common complaint I don't buy, however. And that's that an online newspaepr can't possibly replicate the experience of paging through a traditional paper and having your eye alight on a story you wouldn't normally have read. The shorthand for this is "serendipity," and mourning its loss, struggling to recreate it or steadfastly defending it has become a ritual at every newspaper trying to navigate the wrenching transition between the print and online worlds.

Online video sites, perhaps appropriately, are the home of some interesting and well-done work about online journalism.   Kansas State University Prof. Michael Wesch, who teaches a Digital Ethnography class, released a video called “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” In today’s Online Publishing Update, we also mentioned an hour-long blogumentary (documentary about blogs) posted on Google Video by director Chuck Olsen.

Several of you have asked for the transcript from the 2007 Digital Edge Awards ceremony. The awards ceremony was Jan. 28, 2007 at the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference in Las Vegas. The press release on the event is a good summary (since the following transcript itself is rather long). The list of winners and list of finalists (both of which have links) are also available.   This is the final draft of the awards ceremony speech, and the actual event may have been slightly different. If you have any questions about this or would like to volunteer to judge next year's Digital Edge Awards, e-mail me at beth.lawton@naa.org.

Think of this as a bonus Online Publishing Update! A few articles didn't make it into the Online Publishing Update this morning (or, um, at all this week while we were at the NAA Marketing Conference). So here's a bit of weekend reading.