Recommended reading this week

• You have to read Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing from Bill Wyman at Splice Today. It’s an excellent analysis of How We Got Here from someone with perspective both inside and outside the news business. A lot of it we newspaper types know already – but a lot of it we don’t want to acknowledge is part of the problem.
• Part Two: On how the monopolistic mindset, terrible web design and a rejection of new technology contributed to the fall.
• Newspaper war raises a question: Who keeps the tweeps? – Once a reporter builds a base in social media – who owns that base? If a newspaper gets claim to/responsibility for a reporters’ tweets (which seems to be the case), do they also own those followers? In this case, at least, I say yes. but not always. Likely not the last we’ll see from this debate.

How-Tos and Ideas:

• 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust – Journalism has lost a lot of public trust of late – so these lessons should ring especially true for us. With so many online tools at our disposal, we should be good at this (but we usually aren’t).
• HOW TO: Take Advantage of FriendFeed’s Unique Features – Now that Facebook has purchased FriendFeed, I’d expect more people to take not of it’s network-combining power. Here’s some need-to-know tips on it.
• 10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media – Great examples from Mashable for innovative online contests.
• Add context to news online with a wiki feature – again, more good ideas for news and opinion content that goes beyond comments.

More Social Media News

• Industry Moves: National Geographic Gets A VP Of Social Media – Can anyone else just not believe that it took the Times and now National Geographic this long to get a clue?
• TWITTER ANALYSIS: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives on Twitter (like me), that tweets are largely empty. The ones of merit, though, are really worth it.
• Facebook’s New Privacy Features: A Complete Guide – Facebook’s always changing their game up. They’ve recently made it so anyone can see public profiles. Here’s a guide to how to adjust your settings.

• Facebook: No Sponsored Status Updates Allowed – So Facebook decides to keep it real (so to speak) and ban sponsored updates. The real question is – when will Twitter follow suit?