Fast Company has an interesting article about Rob Curley, the newspaper new media guru who is now VP of Development at Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. It tracks his career from Kansas to the Post and his interest it making it all local.

Google has bought YouTube for 1.65 Billion dollars (that is $1,065,000,000 if you need to see all the zeros to realize how much it is) in a stock to stock transition. I wonder how many of YouTube’s 67 employees will be instant millionaires when the deal goes through? That’s right a company with 67 employees just sold for $1.65 billion. If you can’t tell, I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around that.

I guess the reality of the situation is the value of the company isn’t a byproduct of those 67 employees. The value comes from the all of the user posted video and everyone that goes to watch the videos. To me that is a very transient value because users are fickle and easily chased off, but Google does have a track record of keeping users happy. It will be amazing to watch Google monetize the user videos and the audience from YouTube to justify their investment.

In the news website contest a key piece of the puzzle is breaking news. For local news websites it has always been the local TV stations vs. the newspaper. The TV stations have always had to compete, but competition is new to most monopoly newspapers. This morning in Memphis the TV news websites scored big points in the breaking news battle over the regional newspaper’s website (note of potentional conflict: I used to work for the newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. and helped start their new media department in 2000).

As I woke-up this morning and turn on the news around 6:15 a.m., the Little Rock station KARK is showing live video from a three building fire in downtown Memphis as I turn to Fox News they are promoing an upcoming story on a big fire in downtown Memphis (as they show all of their 10th anniversary celebration which I could care less about). After I have a chance to sit down at breakfast, I grab my laptop and go check out the newspaper’s website, commercialappeal.com, for more information on the big fire.

Nothing, nothing at all on the newspaper’s website about the big fire. I mean if it’s on the national news station you should have a big banner photograph, a story, a slide show and probably some video on it. So, I try a Memphis TV station, WMC-TV. The TV station has a locally written story, photos of the fire and on the story page three video clips of the fire (one set from a helicopter), a map of the eight blocks of downtown Memphis that are closed from the fire and a list of closings and delays due to the fire which include two courthouses and the county government complex. The TV station is also streaming their station live which I watch at full-screen on my laptop until I leave to take the kids to school and head to the office.

Once I arrive at work, I checked the CA’s website again around 8:05. Nothing, nothing at all, again. WMC-TV is still going and they have updated their story. Finally, I check again about 8:40 a.m. and Yes, yes the CA has a story on their website posted at 8:35 a.m. Unfortunately, it is a three paragraph AP story. No photo, no map, no video, no closings. In fact it even has a typo in the byline.

Yes, admittedly, the story occured at the worst possible time for the newspaper. The fire started at 3 a.m. An hour after the paper was put to bed and the last editorial staffer left the building, but that is no excuse for not having one word about the fire on your site until 8:35 a.m. Nothing for commuters to check before they leave. Nothing for those “early morning take a peak at the paper” before I do my actual work visitors.

Newspaper websites must move beyond the shovel the news from the print edition onto the web stage and realize they are in a competitive 24 hour breaking news cycle and staff accordingly. At least have a breaking news dayside staffer come in at 5 or 6 a.m. to get the top stories updated before the majority of traffic hits the site as they get to work. The dayside staffer can then work on dayparting the site’s lead stories, multimedia stories, rewriting call-ins from morning news and monitoring the newspaper’s citizen journalism initiatives.

Another recent study published in the journal of Psychological Science tested people to see what images they liked the most. They tested people by showing them images made up of dot and geometric patterns and variations. The results showed that the less time it took to classify a pattern, the more attractive people thought it was.

Piotr Winkielman from UC-San Diego led the research told Reuter’s new service, ““We show that this preference for the prototype is a function of the prototype being particularly easy to perceive, So the easier the better.”

An Indiana University study has shown The Daily Show to be as substantive as network news.

Julie Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications said, ” there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show. You have real newsmakers coming on, and yes, sometimes the banter and questions get a little silly, but there is also substantive dialogue going on … It’s a legitimate source of news.”

On the other hand their study found that The Daily Show’s audio and visual content contained more humor than substance, but their study also found more hype than substance in broadcast news.

“Interestingly, the average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories about the presidential election,” she wrote in a paper to appear in the summer 2007 edition of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media published by the Broadcast Educator’s Association.