How the use of a fold up keyboard and a mobile phone to file copy from a courtroom — because the judge might consider a laptop too obtrusive — would go down in England I don’t know. But Ron Sylvester’s account of using technology to cover a murder case in Kansas is fascinating.

Pity then, that following a link to an example in his blog post there is a message saying the Wichita Eagle is unable to locate the page. In some ways the account is high tech and in others it is making the best of limited resources. For example, he uses a memory stick to get pictures from photographers and file them, which suggests they cannot use their own laptops to send.

What I like, is the sense of a reporter working out the best available way of getting his copy in as fast as possible. That I can really understand. And it will be a bit faster than the copy boys who used to pick up hand-written copy from Bristol magistrates’ court.

The forthcoming departure of Roger Alton from the Observer is starting the produce a fascinating debate. At its heart is whether the web sites are taking over as the central element of traditional newspaper businesses.

First Patience Wheatcroft said her farewells at the Sunday Telegraph. Last week the Observer’s Alton was “defenestrated” as Stephen Glover puts it in the Independent.

Perhaps stung by comments on the lack of full coverage in the Observer and Guardian, Peter Wilby’s On the Press column in Media Guardian today is devoted to the subject. Wilby sums up the issue neatly:

But as newspapers develop 24-hour web operations, journalists who write once a week for a distinctive brand are increasingly anomalous. As I pointed out here last month, no newspaper group gives its Sunday paper a significant profile on the web. Even the market-leading Sunday Times is absorbed into timesonline. The Observer may be for the Iraq war and against inheritance tax, while the Guardian takes the opposite view on both, but the latter’s approach prevails on the group’s website. The Observer’s personality is overshadowed by the Guardian’s more conventional left liberalism.

This cannot continue. Sunday papers as we know them are, I believe, doomed. The Independent on Sunday has long been a Potemkin village, with a separate editor and distinct design, but drawing almost entirely on the daily paper for news and features staff. I expect most other Sunday papers to go the same way. But the Altons and the Wheatcrofts - strong-minded, independent journalists - cannot be expected to go gently into that good night.

Stephen Glover takes the more conventional position that merging daily and Sunday papers from the same stable does not work, writing:

For months there have been talks about integrating parts of The Guardian and The Observer. The justification is that The Observer is losing money, as, to a lesser extent, is The Guardian, and economies can be made by merging departments and turning The Guardian into a seven-day paper, though the integration of daily and Sunday titles hasn’t worked for other publishers in the past. According to one source, news, business and sport will be brought closer together.

Clearly the demands of the 24-hour newsroom have changed things, as has the way in which the dailies have followed the Sundays into the multi-section fill as many niches as possible approach.

Yet Sunday papers have continued to have clear identities (in print, if not online) because of the tension involved in finding distinctive stories — inventing their own news agendas, as Wilby puts it.

Economics as well as the traditional rivalry of stablemates comes into this. Newspaper businesses are having to finance the online operations while print circulations generally (not the Observer’s) fall.

I have a fear that if the separate identities and different approaches to news are lost there will be less reason the shell out a couple of quid for weekend editions on both Saturday and Sunday.

There is a place for Sunday-style journalism. Maybe, it just does not fit any longer into the economics of the Guardian-Observer, Telegraph-Sunday Telegraphy, Times-Sunday Times operations. But that could open up space for a kind of weekly newspaper or magazine which has not previously been viable in the UK.

Little more than a year ago Ray Hartley was blogging his experiences at the about-to-be-launched South African paper, The Times, of which he is editor. He is still blogging and has been joined by other staffers working in the paper’s integrated newsroom.

He reflects on the paper’s first year in an interview at RAP21, African press network site, in which he says:

You have to ask yourself why critics are wary of blogging. It’s not just about blogging, it’s about a change in the organizational culture of newspapers. If you understand that a newspaper is not a lecturing instrument, but rather an engagement with an opinionated audience, you understand blogging right away.

That is as neat an argument for newspaper blogs as I have seen. (via Sans Serif)

I am rather sorry that Craig Stoltz has stepped back since posting his simple proposition — “At a time when newspapers must reinvent themselves as New Media, it’s an ideal moment to do away with bylines” — a week ago.

The Washington Post man has added lots of explanation to his original post and produced a new one explaining:

I should have been clearer: I wish death upon only the single-author byline.

All content, whether packaged as a rich multimedia experience or a simple conventional report, should be clearly marked with the names of the team members responsible.

One tactic is a persistent shoulder text box appearing on each online page that carries content for an article or package:

Reporting: Jennifer Lee Editors: Macaulay Connor, John Deiner Photographer: Usher W. Fellig.

Now let’s say it’s a more elaborate package: “After Human Bite, Dog Gets 7 Painful Abdominal Rabies Injections.” It includes a video of the attack taken by a surveillance camera, audio/video gallery of witness photos and comments, and a Q and A with a vet about how dangerous human bites really are to dogs.

The box above would be expanded to include an online producer. The Q/A and gallery would each carry bylines for those elements.

What an awful idea. Just because films have interminable credit lists, there is not reason why the same should apply to news. I can’t believe readers want all this.

Yet there is an interesting debate here. Some have commented that bylines are about credibility: tell that to the Economist.

There are good arguments for and against bylines.

The idea bylines encourage journalists to come up with better stories may have had some truth but is a nonsense when every piece of copy has a name on it. It would also also a good argument for giving the sub who writes a good headline a credit.

It is said that printing writers names provides readers with someone to call if they have more information on a topic. From experience, I would say it also gives readers the chance to complain about an individual; there have been times when I would have wished for the subs name to be on the story so that I was not blamed for the headline or a piece of missing information.

As a reader, I find bylines are a useful guide to whether a story is likely to be worth reading. But that applies largely to the work of specialist reporters and feature writers.

A more profitable debate can be had the circumstances when bylines are really justified. The Washington Post clearly thinks the Craig Stoltz byline is justified because it offers an RSS feed on his stories and the chance to email him.

With reports that the New York Times is to pull down the pay wall surrounding its op-ed columnists, and suggestions Murdoch will head towards all free content at the Wall Street Journal, the question is whether the idea of paid text content is dying.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 argues that it is. The web and digital media have generated an overabundance of content — “not just a spike in high-quality content but, more disruptively, and even larger spike in “pretty good” or “good enough” content”.

In other words, people will not pay if something which is adequate for their needs is available free. The other side of the coin is that readers will not accept the merely adequate or good, if the excellent is also free.

That should mean a concentration of ad revenue and other revenue earning on the excellent sites if they demolish the wall. But while advertising may compensate well for the loss of subscription payments, it is not going to replace the revenue streams lost lost from declining print sales.

So, I wonder whether paid content is really dying or whether it is more a question of getting the technology right. Subscriptions are a hassle and expensive if you make only occasional use of a site while one-off payments are often pitched too high and are also a hassle.

We need something like a virtual Oyster card (the Transport for London pre-payment card) which can make small payments. As it is not connected to a bank account, the security issues for the user are about the same as stuffing some £10 notes in your back pocket.

If, say, 5p per article was deducted from the card by participating sites, that would seem fair, especially if the payment to the site was capped at say 50p a day. That way it would be fair alternative to paying 70p for the paper. Oyster cards calculate when it becomes cheaper to pay the day pass rate rather than for individual journeys so something similar should be possible.

I do not think we should be too ready to write off the paid content model just because no one has get found a way to make “loose change” work on the web.

The micro-payments idea has serious problems in addition to the technology.

In the UK we have, for example, the Times, Independent, Telegraph and Guardian competing for a similar readers. It would be hard for any of them to move to micro-payments alone and, as British Airways has discovered, it is dangerous to collude with rivals.

Archant, the regional newspaper group based in Norwich, may have arrived at a better approach to managing change in the industry than its rivals. It has been steadily developing and buying magazines which in general circulate in the same areas as their newspapers.

The half-year figures show modest increases in both turnover and operating profit. John Fry, the chief executive believes that while “negative sentiment” and high profile disposals have given the impression the sector is in decline this “couldn’t be further from the truth”.

That is the view you might expect from the boss of a regional group but there are signs that Archant’s rather different approach is working. It now has four dailies, 75 weeklies and 75 magazines as well as 120 websites.

The half-yearly announcement describes the approach as the “development of a layered strategy” which recognises that while newspapers continued to be an important part of the local mix many advertisers and consumers also want a range of comlpementary products.

This has, they say, been particularly noticeable with web classified advertising where the closely tied online and print brands offered more than online only competitors were able to provide.

One of the results is that Archant says its recruitment advertising has been showing “solid growth” helped by the online revenues.

Fry says: “We have demonstrated that tight cost control, on the low growth areas of the business, allows you to invest in higher growth activities. Our web audiences are growing in excess of 50% a year. The advertising revenue we generate from those audiences is also growing. Our local magazine business is showing audience growth, revenue growth, and an increasing number of the titles delivering profits as they become established.”

Storytelling did not escape Mindy McAdams as she learned to be a video journalist at a boot camp. Her 1 minute 30 second look at an El Salvadorian restaurant in Washington DC provided a cameo of immigrant life in the city.

Although I have never been to south or central America I was convinced of its authenticity by the soccer match playing the television while a singer performed. Just like Spain, although the food is a reminder that the tortillas are very different.

Video storytelling is very different to a print story too, as Mindy found out. "This is not print reporting, and if I want to learn to tell a visual story, then I’ve got to check my print techniques at the door," she writes.

Not all of them, I think. There is a reporter’s curiosity in both the restaurant video and another on a bike shop she has posted. Both would fit well beside a written story, illustrating in a way words cannot.

Digital editions will never be an important revenue stream according to Neil Thurman of the journalism department at City University in an article on paid content strategies (pre-print version) published in Journalism Practice.

Thurman, a colleague of mine when I worked at City, and his co-author Jack Herbert, of Cambridge Publishers, say there is little reason for newspapers not to provide the service, which appears to be "an easy way of generating small amounts of additional online revenue".

They say: "Difficulty of use is a concern for newspaper managers, but in a way this allows the digital edition to satisfy the need of users who cannot access the print edition, without cannibalising circulation among users who can access the print edition."

While their wide-ranging examination of sources of online revenue reaches no earth-shattering conclusions, they suggest a better understanding of the way users make decisions and how the presence of online editions affects their decision to buy a print newspaper, is needed.

But back to digital editions and their use as a way of giving a service to those who cannot buy the printed edition. I know that the issues for trade publications like Press Gazette are not the same as those for national newspapers, but there are similarities.

Cannibalisation is a greater, and real, concern for trade papers. So recently I welcomed the PG redesign but suggested that the digital edition was not the best way of providing full online access — a subscription wall would be better.

Feeling that a blog post might not be the best way of reaching the decision makers at PG I also wrote a letter and after its publication I was contacted by Exact Editions who offered me a trial subscription.

I thank them for that but will not be shelling out £57.50 for a year’s subscription. In the past when I have looked at similar offerings I have rapidly turned away. This time I gave it a go and it provided what is the worst reading experience of my life.

By comparison, a normal PDF is a delight. There are only three size views, thumbnail, fit to screen and 100%. There is no hand tool and all moving around a page has to be done with scroll bars, unless you have a mini-trackball on your mouse.

Two pages cannot be displayed side-by-side at 100% so if a story runs across a spread, you have to go back to the thumbnails and click on the next page to continue reading. Individual stories cannot be extracted.

Digital editions can be a lot better than this. If you don’t believe me take a look at the Press Gazette’s demo and then visit the Guardian’s demo. I particularly urge anyone with a management role at Press Gazette to do this.

The Telegraph has launched a breaking news blog with the aim of rapidly updating developing breaking news stories, according to journalism.co.uk. I took a look at it today and the mystery is, why are they doing it?

Marcus Warren, the Telegraph site editor, is quoted by journalism.co.uk as saying the Making News blog will offer "updates and commentary on the day’s stories" throughout a news day.

His comment on the site’s other blogs is rather grudging:

I, for one, was more than conscious of the shortcomings of our existing blogs.

I’m a great fan of them, of course. But if you want to know what is going on in the world or air your opinions about the events of the day as the happen, Telegraph blogs are not a lot of help. For the general, news-hungry, drive-by user they don’t offer much.

So this afternoon we find latest "breaking" story to benefit from exposure on the Making News blog is the refloating on the Napoli which ran aground earlier this year. At 37 words it is a brief that fails even to remind readers in which country (England, Branscombe beach) the boat grounded. As there is a picture gallery of the refloating linked from the site home page  the purpose of putting a paragraph on the breaking news blog looks thin.

The previous item was the conviction of three terrorists. That was the front page news top to which the blog adds nothing.

The post before that was a link to the New York Times story that Bush was considering withdrawing troops from Iraq. Now there is an idea: a blog of missed stories we wish we had.

 Jeff Jarvis makes a compelling argument for a rethink of home pages on media websites. Fewer than one person in five now lands on the home page, most arriving directly at story pages through search or other links, he says.

Ironically, having read his column in the Guardian, the easiest way to find it on the web was to go to the Guardian Home page and do a search for "Jeff Jarvis". That is because is was not on the Media Guardian RSS feed and had not appeared on the Google News search.

The front page is deeply embedded in the way journalists think and it has been natural to transfer the concept to the web. Readers too are familiar with this structure and while I most frequently arrive at a story page I often click "home" to re-orientate myself. Often the serendipity that flows from the home page is rewarding, taking me to things I would never reach through search or the confines of my selection of newsreader feeds.

The home page is going to be with us for some time but Jarvis’s thinking makes sense. It is something every journalist should be thinking about.