Have just finished reading Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It’s a big read, 702 pages including notes and index, but fascinating. I first wrote about the book in a post on March 1, so it’s taken me a month to read the book. Weiner covers national security for The New York Times and this is his third book. He won a Pulitzer for an earlier book, Betrayal. Legacy of Ashes details a litany of disasters at an organisation meant to provide the US government with accurate information. What amazes and fascinates me is the chasm between the bumbling reality of the CIA versus Hollywood’s portrayal of the agency as all-conquering hero. The CIA must have an excellent PR representative in Hollywood.

Newspaper advertising revenue in 2007 dropped 9.4 per cent compared with the previous year, according to figures just released by the Newspaper Association of America. It was the biggest fall since 1950, the year the NAA started tracking annual revenue. But people forget how much money is spent on newspaper advertising. Last year it was worth $42 billion in the US. The diagram at right shows how advertising has grown in the past half century.Online advertising revenue grew 18.8 per cent to $3.2 billion. The growth rate was lower than the 31.4 per cent for 2006. Online revenue (the light brown section) was 7.6 per cent of total newspaper advertising revenues.

It’s a lovely idea: a web site detailing the seven wonders of the journalism world. A useful tool for teachers of journalism. But like so many ideas that originate in the United States, it is almost entirely US-focused. Like air to the bird and water to the fish, so it is with American perspectives of the world. It appears they can only view the world through a local lens.

Mark Glaser at PBS’s MediaShift blog offers an excellent guide for journalists about the mobile web. Like his other guides to blogging and citizen journalism, it is comprehensive and readable. ”The mobile web, or mobile Internet, is the experience of browsing the Net or using Internet functionality such as online maps and web search on your cellular phone or personal digital assistant (PDA),” he says.

Give people the right tools and their Internet behaviour changes. A survey about mobile phone habits shows high Net use among iPhone owners. M:Metrics, a company that studies mobile media, has released a survey showing iPhone users access news and information more than other smartphone owners. The company surveyed more than 10,000 adults and found that 84.8% of iPhone users accessed news and information on their phones compared with 13.1%  of the overall mobile phone market and 58.2% of smartphone owners (including Blackberries and Windows-based devices). And 58.6% of iPhoners used a search engine on their phone, compared with 37% of smartphone users and 6.1% of the general mobile phone population. Mark Donovan, an analyst at M:Metrics, said Apple had created a device that fitted the lifestyle of people who used digital tools often. Looks like yet another reason for news organisations to get into mobile delivery.

A colleague in the US recommends a tool called Feedity, and says it’s the easiest way she has seen yet to create an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one. URL is http://www.feedity.com/

FeedJournal has possibilities for people who read RSS feeds but also like the feel of paper. FeedJournal Reader (it’s free) lets you define the blogs you want to read and then the software assembles those blogs as a pdf. The file looks like an A4 newspaper. The number of pages is dictated by the number of blogs you select.  For people who like paper, you can print the file for a personalised newspaper.

Further to my previous post, the Graphic Designr blog reports more than 2,000 layoffs and buyouts in America’s newspaper industry in the second half of 2007, though it does not make clear what jobs are involved. The blog shows visually where the losses have occurred, and says another 1,000 jobs have gone in the first two months of this year. Over time, the losses are worrying because they are cumulative. The newsroom at the Philadelphia Inquirer went from 635 staff to 515 in the past year. Editorial numbers at the San Francisco Chronicle  have dropped from more than 500 to about 300 in the past 3 years. Yet people with both journalism and multi-media skills are in demand. Starting salary for such people at The New York Times is at least $US 80,000 a year.

Research from Zogby International in the United States, just published, suggests traditional print and broadcast news are reaching an ageing (and thus shrinking) demographic, and therefore are not a good long-term bet as a business model. Almost half of respondents (48 per cent) said the Internet was their primary source of news and information, up from 40 per cent who nominated the Internet a year ago. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source: 55 per cent of people aged 18 to 29 said they got most of their news and information online, compared with 35 per cent of the 65 and older demographic.

It is early spring here, and the acacia (wattle), magnolia and plum trees are in splendid bloom. Petals litter the roads like confetti. Jon Carroll writes a witty column most days for the San Francisco Chronicle. Yesterday’s column talked about people suffering from allergies caused by wattle pollen. Time to build walls against the Wattle Cabal, Carroll wrote. “Australia is a big place, and lots of places have no trees at all. Let’s repatriate the acacias, by force if necessary.” Guess it’s time for me to go home. I leave tomorrow. Most Americans do not know that the wattle is Australia’s national flower.