Earlier this month we reported on how the newspaper industry has lost its future audience to the Internet.

It gets worse.

In the last year, the newspaper industry has experienced the worst ad revenue decline in its history, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006. This is the biggest decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures nearly sixty years ago.

Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

Newspapers as we know them are toast. Most people now get their news via the Internet and Craigslist has killed the classified market.

Newspapers are going to have to radically change, or they will be toast.

Last March, we enjoyed bringing you Thirty-One Days of Music, featuring a different free music podcast each day.

This March, blogger–podcaster–songwriter Dean Whitbread (aka @DeekDeekster) has been taking a different approach to a music-filled month of March. Five mornings a week, he and a group of spectator/collaborators have been writing a fresh song daily on Rise and Shine TV.

Says Dean, “We wake up very early, we read the news, and we decide which story is going to inspire us to write a song that morning, and we write and record a song in three hours’ time.”

The live streaming of the songwriting begins at 7am GMT (yawn! 2am here in Iowa, USA). Three hours later, the finished song is performed, and available for download shortly after as a free podcast. A high-fidelity mp3 of the song is available, for purchase, later in the day.

Proceeds from this one-month pilot project go to South African music nonprofit buskaid, which provides instruments and a classical music education for underprivileged kids based in South Africa. Rise and Shine hopes to raise $500US by the end of the trial (which finishes this weekend).

“It’s a collaborative effort, since the audience are also giving ideas, feedback, even lyrical and musical accompaniment sometimes. The audience is very much part of the process, so it’s kind of like a reality show, but the songwriters are responding to the audience and also responding to the headlines of the day,”Whitbread says.

Song topics and musical styles have ranged widely, from spooky tales of dismembered feet, to acoustic songs about Leap Day, techno songs about water on the moon, and even a song about hamster ownership in Vietnam.

Whitbread calls it “a crazy idea,” a combination of download-on-demand and live, combining his background of podcasting post-production work, with live content creation and performance. “In last ten minutes of the process, we’re ready to record the song, and we don’t always have the melody down. It’s crazy but it always works.”

There are already some murmurs of this pilot songwriting/live interactive/downloadable content format being made into an ongoing series, which would be great.

In the meantime, Dean shared a little mp3 about the Rise and Shine “model” and how it has worked. If you’re up early (or very late, if you’re in the US), check out the last live show in this pilot today. It’s exciting to look in on, and sometimes be privileged to take part in, the creative process.

Podcasting with Movable Type just got easier with Byrne Reese’s release of the latest version of the Podcasting Plugin for Movable Type.

iTunes support has been improved, making it easier to get your podcast listed properly within the iTunes Music Store.

In addition, this release adds the following features:

• a complete RSS feed that includes all of the proper iTunes meta data;
• an enhanced submission form that collects addition information about your podcast including its duration, whether it contains explicit material, a subtitle, summary and keywords;
• additional plugin options to capture important information about your blog so that its listing within iTunes can be finely tuned;
• support for basic authentication to access podcasts located behind a username and password; and
• enhanced error messaging when linking to feeds.

Reese credits podcasters Bud Gibson, Todd Cochrane and others for the feedback that led to the updates.

The Houston Business Journal reports that Data Call Technologies Inc. is acquiring privately-held Podcast Ready.

Podcast Ready is a software and Web services company whose products and services permit the aggregation and distribution of audio and video podcasts. Their myPodder podcast client is preinstalled on some MP3 players.

Data Call said the acquisition will strengthen its business strategy focusing on emerging new markets for audio and video content.

Chuck the Poetic Prophet offers a rap that looks at how web standards and proper design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on your site.

Yep – user generated media about search engine optimization and proper coding. You gotta watch that!

The rapping may be a bit wooden, but the advice is good, and along the way he name checks everything from style sheets to Twitter.

YouTube has introduced a new analytics tool to provide YouTube publishers on how their videos are being viewed.

Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) And for those of you who are also partners, the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate.

We’ll be making new features and additional information available fairly quickly — like a specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video — so keep an eye out as we roll out new features. As for now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the “About this Video” button under “My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”

We have some serious availability problems at Podcasting News over the last five days, for which we apologize. We’ve moved most of the site to a new host, Media Temple, and still have a few loose ends to wrap up.

Our previous web host, 1and1, updated our main server last week with a system that proved to be unstable for us and many of their other users. (Problems with udev). We tried working with them to get the problems resolved, but they wouldn’t roll the system back to the previous version, they wouldn’t say when they could have the problem fixed, they wouldn’t pro-actively monitor the affected servers that had been destabilized and they wouldn’t document the issue so that their first-tier support people could get the servers back up and running. After a couple of days of this, we decided we had to switch hosts.

Our experience with Media Temple has been night and day different. Every time we’ve called them with an issue, the person that answers the phone has been very knowledgeable, easy to understand and friendly. We’re hoping their stability and reliability is as good as their service.

Thanks for bearing with us!

The French have always been careful guardians of their long-lived and vibrant culture. But in recent decades, the globalization of communication, commerce, and technology has brought about an influx of unwelcome, widely-used English terms. People look forward to le weekend, and surf le web.

Fed up with the creeping anglicization (is that even an English word?:) of la langue Francais, French linguists at the Academie Francaise – the body responsible for protecting culture through the French language – have come up with equivalents to more than 500 mostly English words for a new language website, being run by the culture ministry’s “General Commission for Terminology”.

Among the offending foreign words being banned from French utterance: WiFi, previously pronounced oui-fee (now acces sans fil a l’internet), e-mail (courriel) and (gasp) podcasting, derived from the very not French iPod (now called diffusion pour baladeur).
The sixty-five page list covers many non-technological terms as well, including words for coach (entraineur) and carry-out/take-out food. A whole page is devoted to the podcasting vocabulary.

It remains to be seen whether these new terms will be widely adopted among the general French population. We are reminded that when a few xenophobic elected officials suggested that Americans reject French foods, cultural icons, and vocabulary earlier this decade, U.S. potato lovers across the country did not rush to call them “freedom fries, ” as was suggested. The shared vocabulary of our increasingly connected world will probably continue to grow — even if some of the terms (supermodel, monetize, long tail) are annoying in any language.

YouTube today announced the winners in its 2007 YouTube Video Awards, which seem to have come and gone again this year with a whimper, not a bang.

Winning videos include Laughing Baby, Potter Puppet Pals and Human Tetris. Here’s the complete list.

Given its place as the number one Internet video destination, you’d think YouTube would put some promotion into their video awards and try to create some drama around them. Instead, they seem to treat the Awards as an afterthought.

Edirol has announced the availability of the R-44, a professional mobile recording workstation.
The Edirol R-44 is a 2 lb. portable recorder that offers up to 24-bit and 192kHz recording and uses SDHC cards to store the audio recorded.

Features:

• 4 channels
• XLR (with phantom power) & balanced/unbalanced TRS combo inputs
• digital RCA and headphones outputs
• 20Hz to 40kHz frequency response
• built-in effects (limiter, low cut filter, 3-band EQ, 6-band GEQ, Enhancer and DeEsser)
• built-in stereo mic and speaker
• pre-record function (captures the sound from few seconds before you press the rec button),
• level control per channel
• transport controls
• OLED display
• USB and control sync mini jack connections.

The device can be powered by DC adapter, external battery and six AA batteries and with the sync connection you can use 2 recorders at the same time – offering 8 channels controlled by one device.

The recorder is selling for $795.