Every newsroom should have its own seer. Not to predict the next breaking news story (that’s half the fun of being a journalist, surely?) but to foresee how the newspaper model will change and adapt in the future. Keeping a news title abreast of the latest technological and economic challenges is part and parcel of an editor’s role, and is a task that has been rendered all the more urgent over the past two decades as technological advances and a difficult economic climate.

Even without the services of an in-house sibyl, editors have long been second-guessing how content production, publication and delivery will evolve – sometimes with alarming success. The Kaiser memo, written in 1992 by then- managing editor of The Washington Post, Robert Kaiser, is startlingly accurate in many of its predictions. After being told of an impending digital revolution by leading lights in the world of technology, who spoke with certainty of a time when “the PC will be a virtual supercomputer, and the easy transmission and storage of large quantities of text, moving and still pictures, graphics,” Kaiser recommended that the Post get ahead of its competitors by designing “the world’s first electronic newspaper… with a series of ‘front pages’ and other devices that would guide readers the way our traditional cues do -- headlines, captions, story placement, etc.”

In a post on Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor considers whether "newspapers have a shot at stepping ahead of their broadcast rivals as web video evolves."

On Poynter, Mallary Jean Tenore discusses "What Twitter teaches us about writing short & well"

The UK's Press Gazette reports that The Wall Street Journal is hosting a series of events with a tech theme in Shoreditch, East London, for three days from 12 September.

The Newspaper Association for America (NAA) is said to be preparing a legal challenge to a “sweetheart deal” established between the postal service and Valassis Communications.

Having received approval from the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, the agreement will see Valassis receive a substantial rate-cut from the post office, thereby allowing the direct-marketing company to send the kind of preprint advertisements usually carried by newspapers straight to the customer. The mailing system will cost 42 percent less than the service now provided by newspapers.

Newspapers could see advertising revenue diminish by $2.5 billion as a result of the agreement, of which $1 billion could be businesses turning away from the newspaper advertising model altogether.

Three and a half years after the bosses of Michigan’s Ann Arbor News “informed a shocked roomful of newspaper staffers that the paper would be rebranded as a web site” with a reduced-frequency print edition, its parent company Advance Publications has made similar changes at several more of its local titles throughout the United States.

This spring brought cutbacks to the New Orleans Times-Picayune and three Alabama dailies. Now, Advance newspapers in Syracyse, New York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are the latest to follow suit.

“It seems like they are doing this in regional clusters,” said Paul Pohlman, a Poynter faculty member with knowledge of Advance, according to a report by Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon.

As of January 2013, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, whose 24 year-old reporter Sara Ganim won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for her work on the scandal at Penn State University, will appear in print only three days a week. The newspaper will merge with the website Pennlive.com to form PA Media Group.

Which GOP governor is the weakest link? Which democrat senator wants to marry a multi-millionaire? The New York Times’ David Carr consults top authorities in the world of reality television about how the U.S. Republican and Democratic National Conventions could spice up their images.

"At one point, when he was about 24, he took off into the Tasmanian wilderness with just a knife and pitted himself against nature to see if he could survive out there," says Julian Assange’s mother of her son in the Guardian’s compilation of testimonies from the whistleblower’s nearest and dearest.

Pasadena publisher James Macpherson claims to have received death threats five years ago when he began hiring workers in India to write local news stories. Now he has launched Journtent, a system for helping other publishers outsource local reporting. CJR reports.

As Google announces that Hangouts, its most successful Google+ feature, will be making its fist external appearance on NFL.com, The Next Web asks: Could broadcast journalism see a revival in online media? Joel Falconer makes the case for online broadcasters to “use tools such as Hangouts to deliver news as it comes in.”

The New York Times has agreed to sell the struggling About group, including search site About.com, to Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive for $300 million in cash, reports the Media Decoder blog.

At leading media companies, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the majority of traffic now bypasses the homepage, writes Neiman Lab's Adrienne LaFrance. Newsrooms are increasingly finding that visitors to their sites are "coming in through the sidedoor" meaning homepages are perhaps less important than they once were. 

Media Network Carat is predicting that digital ad spending will surpass newspaper ad spending this year. Btobonline reports that "digital ad spending will garner a 15.3 percent share of the global ad market this year, up from a March projection of 14.5 percent."

Meanwhile time is of the essence for Time Inc.'s digital overhaul, according to the New York Post's Keith J. Kelly, who writes: "after operating profit tumbled more than 40 percent in the most recent quarter, there’s a new sense of urgency surrounding Time Inc. and its push to capture digital dollars."

Fairfax News and Media Company has posted losses of A$2.732 billion for the financial year 2011/12, after writing down its media businesses and plants and equipment (including printing presses in Tullamarine and Chullora that are to be shut down in 2014) by almost A$3 billion. The losses announced on Thursday for the year to June were seven times higher than those for the same period in 2010-11, which stood at $390.9 million. Fairfax is Australia’s oldest news publisher, and its titles include the country’s oldest paper, The Sydney Morning Herald

The company’s write-down of mastheads and goodwill comes in light of the woeful financial forecasts predicted for the next three years. In a statement following the release of the company’s full-year financial results, Fairfax Chief Executive Greg Hywood said: "The assessment of the carrying value of our intangible assets - mastheads, goodwill and customer relationships - is based on the three-year outlook for each of our business units. That outlook worsened considerably over the course of the second half of the year as the cyclical downturn became more pronounced, and our confidence in a sustained improvement in market conditions reduced."

Commenting on the present state of the advertising market, Hywood expressed his belief that never in his 30-year career had it been in such a bad condition, but he also added that the present drop in advertising revenue was part of a “cycle” and would “inevitably pass.”

In an article on Adweek's website, Lucia Moses looks at the hugely successful but low-budget approach that US-based publisher Condé Nast has taken in expanding its empire overseas.

In the UK, Robert Andrews on the paidContent website writes that Johnston Press, which publishes some 230 regional newspapers, is gaining ground with its new digital strategy and its use of online outsourcing.

AFP is reporting that the Foreign Correspondents' Clubs of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong have expressed alarm over recent reports of intimidation against foreign journalists working in China.

On the MediaShift Idea Lab website, Heather Ford discusses how Wikipedia manages sources for breaking news.

The New York Times reports that while "most Western broadcasting and newspaper companies are retrenching, China’s state-run news media giants are rapidly expanding in Africaand across the developing world." The article states the efforts are aimed at improving China’s image and influence around the globe.

Rappler, a news startup in the Philippines, is taking a social media approach to news and using a "mood meter" with its stories in an attempt to understand the role of emotion in newsaccording to an article from Adrienne LaFrance on theNieman Lab website.

Twitter could face legal action in India if the website fails to comply with the government's demand to censor objectionable contentposted by users, according to a report from The Times of India.

The government of Burma has taken a major step towards freedom of expression according to a report from The Associated Press and published on the Guardian's website. The country has stopped the practice of requiring reporters to submit their articles to state censors before they can be published.

Rachel McAthy on the journalism.co.uk website offers an interesting look at eight examples of long-form digital content projects.

Recovering Journalist Mark Potts highlights a vision for the future of newspaperwritten 20 years ago by Robert G. Kaiser, the then-newly appointed Managing Editor of The Washington Post, which as Potts points out, remains "a striking document, even today."