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It's been just over two months since Google, the New York Times and the Washington Post joined together to experiment with a new way to provide news with Google's Living Stories. Today, Google has declared the experiment a success and has said that it will offer the project's functionality to the general public.

As struggling newspapers file for bankruptcy left and right, the quest is on to find the new business models for news consumption in a new digital age. Recently the New York Times announced that it has begun investigating and testing a system for placing some of their content behind pay walls based on a daily allowance of free articles, but this may just be a new spin on an old trick. Entrepreneurs are needed to help the news industry as it shifts online, and that's precisely who the Knight Digital Media Center (KDMC) is targeting for an expenses paid seminar this May.

While there are a million rumors over what Apple's new tablet will do, from having a built-in Web cam to doing your laundry (not really), we can be sure that it will at least have a color display and show pictures, right? These simple features would put it well ahead of the Kindle in the newspaper industry's hopes of finding a savior in new technology.

A study out of the University of Georgia took a look at whether or not the Kindle would be a viable substitute for the traditional newspaper and it found the device lacking in a few key areas.

On the eve of the Apple tablet announcement, a lot of people are talking about the role the tablet could play in saving the newspaper industry by making paid content a viable alternative to ad-based revenue models. Clearly, though, this strategy won't work for every paper. Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, instituted a paywall three months ago. Since then, according to a report in the New York Observer, the paper has sold a grand total of 35 subscriptions at $5 per week. The paper's owners spent $4 million on redesigning the site to prepare for the paywall.

The New York Times confirmed today that beginning in early 2011 the company will adopt a paid model for its Web site, NYTimes.com. The move comes at a time when much of the newspaper industry is searching for a way to stop the bleeding brought on by the Internet and the accompanying smaller revenue streams that online advertising produces.

Many fear that putting content behind a paywall will just drive readers to other sources, but perhaps the Times' approach will help to combat that issue.

One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me.

Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It's like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl raises questions, though, about what constitutes news and whether or not human reporters are expendable in the news process.

The New York Times just launched a new way to read the paper's stories online. With Times Skimmer, which first launched as a prototype application earlier this year, the New York Times is trying to bring the feeling and serendipity of reading the physical newspaper to its online presence. Users can choose from seven different layouts. Most of these are based on a grid-based design, though some also mimic the feel of an RSS reader with stories organized in chronological order, or ranked according to the the recommendations of the New York Times' editorial team.

According to a new Forrester survey, almost 80% of Internet users in the US and Canada would not pay for access to newspaper and magazine websites. Those users who would consider paying for content are mostly interested in subscriptions. Only a very small number of consumers is interested in making micropayments (3%). The study also asked which distribution channel consumers would prefer if their favorite print publications ceased to exist. 37% preferred the web, 14% mobile phones and 11% would prefer to read the content on their laptops or netbooks. 10% would prefer PDFs delivered by email and 3% would read the content on their e-readers.

Yesterday, Google launched Fast Flip - a Google Labs product that wants to give users a new way to browse newspaper sites and blogs on their desktops and mobile devices. The big business news here is that Google will share ad revenue from this product with the publishers. The relationship between Google and the newspaper industry has always been somewhat tumultuous, so this revenue-sharing model can be seen as Google extending an olive branch to content producers. The problem, though, is that Google Fast Flip simply isn't a very good product and that it feels more like a step backwards than the future of news.

Mathew Ingram is the Communities Editor at the Toronto-based Globe And Mail, Canada's biggest newspaper. He's a traditionally-trained reporter, but he's got years of experience blogging and using experimental new services, so he has one foot planted firmly in each world. We interviewed Mathew as part of our first premium report, The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, where you'll find interviews and gleaned wisdom from 40 top experts in the field. The following is an excerpt from that interview that we thought would be of general interest to readers; it's about online community, transitioning from traditional to social media and it's about Twitter (what isn't these days?). We hope you enjoy it.

This is historically important stuff. "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing," Ingram told us. "It's a big change."