According to Flurry, the average news mobile application session clocks in at ten minutes – even game apps don’t do that.

The mobile analytics company was one of four panelists at the “App-vertising” panel here at South by Southwest. Representatives from Foursquare, I’m Big in Japan, Flurry and Mobile Behavior gathered to talk about the next generation of mobile advertising with a focus on the $4.2 million downloadable application market.

Can people get even dumber? Forgive me for the cynical view of my own species but … well, some of my best friends are human. Actually dumber is not quite accurate. Can they get even more ignorant? If our lack of interest in anything besides ourselves wasn’t bad enough, now humanity is being aided and abetted by the latest in technology.

To wit, this advance being unveiled at the MSN homepage:

First Facebook pioneered the concept of a “news feed” for friends. Now, the social networking giant is about to strike again with its upcoming roll out of Facebook Credits, an online currency to purchase digital goods. 

If Google can’t make money off the news, who can? That’s the heart of a brilliant post by C.D. Nixon which says a bunch of things most journalists and many publishers can’t bear to admit. Nixon’s post  features a picture of a Google search for “Afghanistan war.”  

After I filed my piece detailing my experience as a Demand Studios writer, I was discouraged that I had to leave the reader hanging as I had yet to get my story approved and published.

I’ve been in journalism for close to 30 years. As one would expect, my skills, the tools of the trade and the state of the industry itself have evolved dramatically over that time.

Newsrooms that once functioned under a cloud of cigarette smoke now work in a cloud computing environment. Writers who once tucked a reporter’s notebook in their back pocket now wield a digital voice recorder or a Flip camcorder. Editors who once redlined copy and haggled over how headlines matched the lead art now stress over Web analytics and keyword selection.

Our industry is caught between “what was” and “what will be.”  Which means that “what is” is up for grabs. And when things are up for grabs, people get busy.  Busy preserving their livelihoods, their positions, their power.

Ironically, the preservation of editorial power comes down to language.

The average American spends 66 hours a month online. While publishers can't make readers spend all of that time on their webpages, they can make sure readers are engaged with the brand, even if they are spending time on another domain.

However, it will require a few helpful tools:

Most media companies are running on skeleton editorial crews, but must feed a constant 24/7 demand for new content online. If your editorial team can't consistently produce enough content to satisfy reader demand, those readers may drift away.  Many media companies succeed in spite of stretched editorial staff by blending professional editorial content with user-generated content (UGC) and advertiser-generated content (AGC).

Audiences want to interact with media brands on mobile devices—via “untethered digital content”  said John Loughlin, Hearst Magazines EVP and general manager, at the recent Digital Innovators' Summit in Berlin.