In the furthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

Despite its rapid modernization, many of India’s 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators. So in villages that don’t receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular “radio” service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

“I call it the poor man’s iTunes,” says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India’s largest cellular companies. “A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available.”

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There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I’m excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity.

However, the tech is secondary, not nearly as important as repairing some current issues with trust and curation.

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We’ve already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy. We’ve already looked into the issue of aggregators and found there’s no problem there at all. Most aggregators either direct traffic to the original sites or are too small to matter.

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Hearst today launched LMK.com, a low-cost Web roundup on topics from college football to reality television.

(For the youth-challenged, “LMK” is the texting shorthand for “let me know.”)

LMK joins a crowded field of aggregation sites, which cull news and information from across the Web and organize them by topic or in other user-friendly ways. Other aggregators include Topix, Newser and Daylife, and sites like the Daily Beast that combine aggregation with their own content.

LMK will be nearly entirely automated, with just one full-time employee. Initially, the most developed part of the site is about college football, with news, blog posts, photos and statistics. It will roll out new topics every few weeks.

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Stanford University was one of the first academic institutions to come out with an iPhone (AAPL) app last October. Now Stanford has debuted an upgrade, dubbed iStanford, which lets students search for courses, add or drop them and see their grades.

Previous versions only allowed people to conduct a simple search of courses, locate themselves on a map to navigate the campus, and check out athletic scores or other news.

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With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age.

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Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

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I think I’ll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide. The choice appears grimly reached and irrevocable.

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Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.”

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The New York Times Co.’s (NYT) research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper–24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group–with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence”–are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.

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If you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq).

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In theory, the RSS reader is a great idea. Many years ago, as blogs became an ever-larger part of my news diet, I got addicted to Bloglines, one of the first popular RSS programs. I used to read a dozen different news sites every day, going to each site every so often to check whether something fresh had been posted.

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Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight–that is, more efficient–times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?

Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story.

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When it comes to the type of applications iPhone owners use most, ones for checking the weather trump games, music, news and everything else.

According to an upcoming report on smartphone usage by online market research firm Compete, 39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently.

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Once again, Google (GOOG) is the favorite bogeyman responsible for the rapid deterioration in the health of the news industry. This time it is Nick Carr doing the finger-pointing, describing Google as the most powerful middleman in news:

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