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.

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.

The Boston Herald has never been one to update just for the sake of updating. At the Herald (where I used to work) the general theory is, “If it’s good enough for Gutenberg, it’s good enough for us – and besides anything new would cost money.” So now the paper says it is “preparing” to move away from the Atex system it has been using for the last 27 years.

Does your sales forecast call for clouds? Cloud computing – in which hosted services are delivered over the Internet – is gaining traction in many industries as companies look for cost-effective ways to manage IT infrastructures and applications such as customer relationship management (CRM). For media companies looking for cost-effective ways to upgrade their aging tech systems, the cloud may hold at least part of the answer.

"Media has become a platform of services," said David Liu, CEO of The Knot, during day one of Federation of International Periodical Publishers (FIPP) Digital Innovators Summit yesterday. During a session named, "Digital revenues: beyond the banner," Liu laid out how The Knot transformed itself from a handful of websites relying on national display advertisers for well over 50 percent of its revenues in the early 2000's to a network of over 280 sites with less than 20% reliance on display today.

Publishers are sure to glean value from a new magazine innovations report from Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP) and UK-based Innovation Media Consulting Group.  The Innovations in Magazines 2010 World Report (PDF), published for FIPP, contains over 31 trends from companies around the globe.

There’s plenty of talk, most of it negative, about the “content factory” model that’s gaining traction on the Web. Media companies including Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com have created high-volume, commodity editorial businesses, relying on a network of freelancers who are compensated solely on how many page views their articles generate.

Aggregate mobile data in the U.S. is expected to reach 20 exabytes (that’s 20 billion gigabytes) by 2013. Another study predicts that mobile data traffic will double every year through 2014.