The decline of traditional newspapers isn’t as bad as it looks – it’s worse.

According to an Associated Press story, newspapers are loosing subscribers at a staggering rate, but you wouldn’t know it from their circulation figures because they’ve changed the way they count circulation:

Since April 1, new auditing rules have made it easier for newspapers to count a reader as a paying customer.

These looser standards are especially helpful to a newspaper if it sells an “electronic edition.” That can include a subscriber-only Web site, such as what The Wall Street Journal has, or it can be a digital replica of a newspaper’s printed product.

Under the new auditing standards, if a newspaper sells a “bundled” subscription to both the print and electronic editions, the publication is often allowed to count that subscriber twice.

If not for these rules, the industry’s numbers would look even worse. Average weekday circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers fell 10.6 percent during the six months ending in September.

Between inflated print numbers and fuzzy tracking of unique visitors on the Web, is it any wonder advertisers are confused these days?

Image: just.Luc (just.Censored)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants your help to beat a recently approved patent on podcasting that many feel is bogus.

In July, Volomedia announced that it had been awarded a US patent on podcasting, and the company said that  it expects companies creating products relating to podcasting and media synchronization to enter into partnerships with VoloMedia.

Many think the Volomedia patent is overly broad and fails to take into consideration prior work.

“I’m certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law,” said podcast pioneer Dave Winer upon hearing of Volomedia’s patent announcement, “but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their ‘invention’. It certainly predates it.”

EFF agreed – so they are are working on “busting” the Volomedia patent, and they want your help:

In order to bust this patent, we are looking for additional “prior art” — or evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use before November 19, 2003.

In particular, we’re looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.

EFF has previously taken on ten of the worst free-speech and innovation crushing software patents approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and they’ve been successful at taking a bite out of eight of the ten so far.

See the EFF page on the case for more information.

We’ve seen a lot of ignorant new media moves over the last few years – but it looks like photosharing site TweetPhoto and their lawyers could be blazing a new trail.

TweetPhoto, via their representatives Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has sent a takedown letter full of legal threats to podcaster Frank Peters, because Peters published an on-the-record interview with the TweetPhoto CEO Dan Caulfield (now former CEO). In the interview, CEO Caulfield discussed business plans that the company did not want publicly discussed.

Here’s an excerpt of the TweetPhoto takedown letter:

Dear Mr. Peters:

We represent TweetPhoto, Inc. (”TweetPhoto” or the “Company”). It has come to our attention that during the course of your recent interview with Dan Caulfield, Mr. Caulfield breached numerous continuing legal obligations that he has to TweetPhoto, including his obligations not to disclose the Company’s confidential and proprietary information.

The Company is concerned that the reproduction of your interview with Mr. Caulfield on your website will substantially damage TweetPhoto and TweetPhoto will not hesitate to enforce its rights against any person contributing to this damage. Accordingly, on behalf of TweetPhoto, we hereby demand that you immediately disable and remove any link, transcript or any other reproduction of your interview with Dan Caulfield from your website – http://thefrankpetersshow.com.

In the history of ignorant PR moves, sending a podcaster and blogger a threatening takedown notice for publishing an on-the-record interview with your company’s CEO has to be right up there at the top.

The story of TweetPhoto’s bizarre PR fiasco has now made it into TechCrunch and onto TechMeme. Within a few days, TweetPhoto will be best known, not for photosharing, but for loose-lipped CEOs and for hassling bloggers and podcasters.

Voting is now open for the 2009 Podcast Awards.

It’s the fifth year for the annual event, which has the goal to “recognize the best podcasters in the world by allowing the people (Listeners and Podcasters) to nominate, and then vote for their favorite podcast.”

Voting for the slate of podcast nominees is open through November 30th.

People’s Choice Podcast Award winners will be announced during a live Podcast Awards Ceremony in Mid December.

YouTube has announced a new platform for aggregating user-generated content, YouTube Direct.

YouTube Direct allows you to embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos.

YouTube Direct Features:

• 100% open-source
• Customizable interface – allows you to tailor the look and feel of the tool precisely to your audience
• Visitors can answer your call for content by uploading their videos to YouTube via your site without leaving the page
• A moderation panel enables your editors to review and approve/reject all submitted videos, deciding which ones meet your organization’s editorial criteria
• All videos approved by your editors include a link back to your site when viewed on YouTube

This is an interesting development for citizen media – but also an interesting strategic move by YouTube. By giving you a link back to your site for any visitor submissions, YouTube is offering a tantalizing carrot to adopt them as your video platform.

ReadWriteWeb has posted a surprisingly pessimistic look at recent stats on how many people in the US are willing to pay for access to online news: 80% of US Consumers Won’t Pay For Online News.

They cite two sources on this:

• According to a new Forrester Survey, 80% say they wouldn’t bother to access newspaper and magazine content online if it were no longer free.
• According to the Boston Consulting Group, cited in the New York Times, 48% of all Internet users would be willing to pay for the news that they read online.

RRW’s angle on this is surprisingly pessimistic because 20%-48% of US Internet users say they would pay to access news content online. That’s 100 million people or more.

Compare that to the percentage of people that are willing to pay to read a traditional newspaper. The New York Times, for example, has a daily circulation of 928,000, in a city of 8,363,710. That’s only about 11%.

Internet users are 2 to 4 times as willing to pay for online news as New Yorkers are to pay for one of the best newspapers in the world.

What do you think? Is the cup half empty for paid Internet media or half full?

Blue Microphones has introduced Blue FiRe (App Store link), a free, high-fidelity field recording app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, developed in partnership with Audiofile Engineering.

Blue FiRe is optimized for use with Blue Microphone’s Mikey microphone, which attaches to the iPhone and iPod touch.

Coupled with the Mikey, Blue FiRe provides high-fidelity recordings in mono and stereo, while allowing users to see the audio waveform in real-time.

Features:

• Navigation of waveform via double-tap with configurable behavior.
• Configurable time units display.
• Record For, Record Until, Record Over Threshold and settings.
• Quality settings: Low (11.025 kHz), Medium (22.050 kHz) and High (44.1 kHz).
• Browser based file export via local web server.
• WAV, AIFF, CAF (Core Audio Format).

If you’ve used Blue FiRe or the Blue Microphone Mikey, leave a comment with your thoughts!

If you do location recording, you probably use a battery-powered portable audio recorder.

WingFieldAudio did a battery life comparison test on the recorders that they sell, and found that there was a huge range in how long the recorders could work.

Here are their top 10:

10 Top Long-Lasting Battery-Powered Portable Audio Recorders

1. Sony PCM-M10 – 43.0 hours
2. Sony PCM-D50 – 25.5 hours
3. Olympus LS-11 – 19.2 hours
4. Olympus LS-10 – 8.5 hours
5. Tascam DR-07 – 7.5 hours
6. Marantz PMD620 – 6.4 hours
7. Zoom H2 – 6.3 hours
8. Marantz PMD661 – 5.8 hours
9. Tascam DR-1 – 5.8 hours
10. Edirol R-09HR – 5.3 hours

Battery life is just one factor in choosing a portable audio recorder – but if it’s important to you, the list is an eye-opener.

Open source media platform Boxee has announced plans to partner with consumer electronics manufacturers to create a Boxee Box platform – an open Internet video hardware set top box.

Here’s the text of their announcement:

We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device.

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

We will show mockups of the box and share more details at our upcoming Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, NY on Dec 7th. RSVP here.

Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations.

We are building Boxee as a platform that would:

• make it easy for users to consume and find content – no matter what the source
• give content owners, aggregators, and developers the tools to create unique experiences with a variety of business models
• enable CE companies to enhance their Connected devices

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc.

Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room.

Apple TV showed tremendous promise when it was announced, because it offered a way to play Internet video and user-generated content on your TV.

Apple TV has stagnated, though, while the open platform Boxee has blazed forward, so the idea of a Boxee Box is a very interesting development.

What do you think? Will the Boxee Box beat Apple TV and turn Internet television from a “hobby” into the future of television?

YouTube has announced that they are now supporting HD Internet video sharing up to 1080p:

We’re excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.

As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.

Here’s an example, the official trailer for Toy Story 3:

YouTube also announced that, if you have previously uploaded a video in HD, it will re-encoded so tha it can be watched in HD.

YouTube is very quickly going to have the largest collection of free HD video in the world. Now, if there was just an easy way to watch it on your TV…..