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.

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.

Last week, as the media blogosphere analyzed the announcement of a paywall at the New York Times, I was more fascinated with another recent obsession of mine: Foursquare.

UPDATE: Citibank has apologized to Fabulis. Here's the email here.

Citibank froze the bank account of the media startup Fabulis on Monday, due to "objectionable content" on Fabulis.com, according to Fabulis' CEO Jason Goldberg. 

As you may have seen around this site, eMedia Vitals recently launched its first on-demand workshop for media publishers. As part of the event, which covers new ways of making money online, we compiled a handful of “video case studies” where we interviewed employees of media companies and asked them about their unique revenue strategies. To many classically-trained print reporters, it may be difficult to make the transition in interviewing styles from print to video.

To find its way out of the red, the New York Times must begin acknowledging its strengths sincerely. There is no success in uninspired subscription models that already failed years ago. Sean Blanda is right, the Grey Lady no longer commands any loyalty, but that should not be confused with a lack of brand recognition — the Times, like many other large newspapers, still retains a high level of trust and prestige that can be leveraged without erosion of the brand.

What’s the best jargon generator, Google Buzz or iPad?

Nobody actually knows what impact either of these technologies will have, but everybody still wants to say something about them. Here’s a totally unscientific sampling from a bunch of blogs highlighting the best jargon describing each of them.

F+W Media has leveraged the power of the community – or communities in its case – to carve out a high-growth e-commerce business. Its 21 e-stores – selling everything from books, CDs and DVDs to workshops, calendars and, increasingly, affiliate products – helped the publisher grow its e-commerce revenues by 113% in 2009. 

Today Apple announced that the iPad will drop on April 3^rd and preorders will be open next week.

For many publishers the exact date of the device’s release is irrelevant as they already were approached by Apple months ago and will be completing their iPad offerings in the next few weeks.

In a world of free classifieds, newspapers are struggling to find a differentiating factor that local businesses value enough to pay for.  Yext, a startup based in New York City, may have found a way to overcome that threshold by developing an advertising system that enables local businesses to pay only for calls that result in business.