Mark Coddington

We journalism/new media nerds like to think of ourselves as being pretty open, but we can be a bit clannish at times: We close ranks to defend a few core principles, we have our own hierarchy of gurus and we use our own set of words and phrases. When I dove into the future-of-journalism world, I quickly found that a few of these phrases function as shorthand for big, fundamental ideas. They often get traded without explanation and sometimes without links, leaving the uninitiated pretty confused and possibly a little turned off, too.

Consider this your dictionary for those phrases. If you’ve got any more suggestions, by all means, let me know in the comments. This guide is very expandable. (And if you have a correction, please let me know, too.)

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

Where it came from: This is the signature phrase of Jeff Jarvis, the Entertainment Weekly/TV Guide/San Francisco Examiner veteran, CUNY journalism prof and author of “What Would Google Do?” Jarvis first wrote it in a Feb. 22, 2007, post at his popular media-watching blog, BuzzMachine.

What it means: Your best bet is simply to read that initial post — Jarvis explains the concept pretty well there. The short version: Rather than duplicating what bunches of other news organizations are producing just so your outlet can have its own version of the story, just ask yourself, as Jarvis says, “‘can we do it better?’ If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.” For another illuminating angle on what this phrase signifies, see in particular the second-to-last paragraph of Megan Garber’s Columbia Journalism Review article from November 2009 on the Fort Hood and Twitter lists.

“If the news is important, it will find me.”

Where it came from: An unlikely source — an unnamed college student in an anecdote in a March 27, 2008, New York Times article by Brian Stelter on how young people share political news. (The actual quote is, “If the news is that important …” but it seems to have been compressed.)

What it means: The idea quickly became an apt summary of the way news is consumed online — by linking, sharing, reading one bit whether even seeing the whole or even the original source. In the other words, a long, long ways from reading the newspaper front-to-back every day. The news organization’s role as an authoritative arbiter of news value is diminished in this philosophy; the user creates her own news agenda, and her most trusted sources are her social networks. (Here’s The Huffington Post’s Josh Young, web entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Canadian journalist Mathew Ingram and the aforementioned Jarvis on this phrase.)

“Information wants to be free.”

Where it came from: Our first recorded use was back in 1984, when writer Stewart Brand said this (as he recalled it 13 years later): ”On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” That was eventually compressed into “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.” Not surprisingly, the ‘free’ part was a lot more appealing to us than the ‘expensive’ one, so that’s the part of the quote that stuck. (Roger Clarke and Wikipedia are good sources for this information, both on its origins and meaning.)

What it means: This part is pretty fluid — and controversial. Critics of a free-based Internet economy often take it as an economic statement, as in, “Information wants to cost $0.” While Brand seemed to have been talking about cost and economics when he first uttered the phrase, many Internet thinkers after him have defined it to mean a broader freedom to access, distribute, and adapt information, especially online. The phrase became central in the struggles of free content and copyright — a rallying cry for those on one side and a rather pejorative label for the other. Of course, some pro-free people, like Wired’s Chris Anderson, still use the phrase in its dollars-and-cents sense.

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

Where it comes from: It was the title of a keynote speech given by NYU professor and new media guru Clay Shirky on Sept. 18, 2008, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. The phrase has been quoted by others (and Shirky himself) in various forms, including “Information overload is filter failure,” and “There’s no such thing as information overload; there’s only filter failure.”

What it means: To get the fullest idea, watch the speech. Shirky gives a hasty, Cliff’s Notes version in this interview with The Columbia Journalism Review, in which he argues that information overload has been around for centuries, and the reason it seems so problematic on the web is that we haven’t developed the proper filters for all that information. The idea has been tied to several concepts on the web, including social filters and sharing, and curation and aggregation of news.

“Our readers know more than we do.”

Where it came from: This phrase is former San Jose Mercury News columnist and citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor’s, first uttered in 2004. It seems the phrase was initially coined as “My readers know more than I do,” and you’ll still find it in either form. (Jay Rosen has a link to what may be Gillmor’s first use of it, but the link is dead now. The phrase also figures prominently in Gillmor’s 2004 book “We the Media.” )

What it means: Look no further than Jay Rosen’s December 2004 piece, which refers to the idea simply as “Open Source journalism.” As Rosen describes it, it’s the concept that any journalist’s (or media outlet’s) audience knows more than that journalist, and the web allows them to communicate that knowledge with each other and the professional journalist. It’s a way of drawing on “the wisdom of the crowd” — another favorite web phrase — within a journalistic framework.

“The people formerly known as the audience”

Where it came from: The phrase is NYU professor Jay Rosen’s, first written and defined in his June 27, 2006, post of the same title. Rosen acknowledges that it’s partly derived from Dan Gillmor’s phrase, “the former audience,” outlined in his 2004 book, “We the Media.” In January 2010, Rosen called the post “easily my most quoted piece of writing and the best meme of the decade just ended. … Nothing else comes close.”

What it means: I can’t do you much better than simply reading Rosen’s initial post, plus his notes and after matter. It’s related to the idea behind “Our readers know more than we do,” referring to, as Rosen puts it, “The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.”

“The sources go direct.”

Where it came from: The newest phrase on the list. This one comes from blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer, who seems to have officially coined it in the March 19, 2009, post “The reboot of journalism.” Now, Winer commonly refers to it as simply “Sources go direct.” It’s helped formed the ideological backbone of Winer and Jay Rosen’s weekly podcast, Rebooting the News.

What it means: It stands for the idea that the “sources” who used to have their message mediated through the traditional media can go bypass those channels and communicate directly with their listeners. Winer provides plenty of examples in that initial post, and if you listen to most any episode of Rebooting the News, you’ll probably hear him expound on the idea.

“Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Where it came from: The phrase was originated by technology philosopher David Weinberger, who first said it in a lecture in Toronto on Oct. 23, 2008. He further defined the idea and put the phrase to writing in a July 19, 2009, post at his blog.

What it means: When Weinberger first said the phrase, he followed it with the statement, “We are not going to trust objectivity unless we can see the discussion that lead to it.” In his July post, Weinberger fleshed this idea out further, arguing that transparency is the modus operandi in a linked medium like the web, where we can easily see (and expect to see) someone’s connections, sources and influences. Transparency, he said, has subsumed objectivity: “Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.” The phrase picked up quite a bit of use in fall 2009 as a principle in the discussions over news media outlets’ social media policies.

I hope you’ve recovered well from all your holiday and year-end festivities (here in Nebraska, we’re just now starting to shovel out). Meanwhile, the flood of new media ideas continued (almost) unabated, so we’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. I’ll try to have you in and out of here in a hurry. As always, if you want to know what this is about, an explanation is here.)

— It’s not often we see veteran media critics go ga-ga over new technology, so when at least three of them gushed about the landscape-altering potential of the tablet this week, it’s probably best that we sit up and take notice. First, we had New York Times media critic David Carr getting giddy over the unreleased Apple iSlate, saying it “represents an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer.” (Elsewhere in the Times, Alice Rawsthorn says that the iSlate could explode the e-reader market, just like the iPod did for MP3 players.)

Then, longtime-journalist-turned-consultant Mark Potts said the iSlate “has the potential to strikingly transform large swaths of the media business, from newspapers to television to movies, pretty much all at once.” Finally, the biggest surprise: News-business guru Alan Mutter, possibly the most sober critic out there, declared that tablets “will the rock media as much, if not more, than the Internet.”

Wow. That’s a lot of praise being poured on a product that no one has seen yet. (Not everyone’s on the tablet bandwagon, though. Slate’s consummate contrarian, Jack Shafer, decried the tablet hype just before Christmas.) The always-sensible Ken Doctor weighed in with nine good questions about the iSlate and tablets. And by the way, Hearst also introduced its own e-reader this week: The Skiff. (Slate’s The Big Money looks at the details.)

I think the hype’s at least a bit overblown. It seems absurd to me to suggest that just about anything, let alone a new version of existing type of product, will change media as much or more than the Internet did. Some of the bolder statements about the iSlate may end up being embarrassing a few years down the road, the product more of wishful thinking than level-headed prescience.

But I don’t necessarily want to debunk the hype, either: To me, it seems more helpful to think of all of these media sea changes as something the tablet could do, not something it will do. I read Mark Potts’ medium-by-medium list of the effects of iSlate as a sort of call to action for people in those media to do some serious thinking, planning and developing to be on the front end of that revolution if it comes. This could be traditional media’s second chance to be more proactive in finding ways to (gasp!) use technology to its advantage, after its first chance with the Internet was largely squandered.

— NYU’s Jay Rosen has long railed against the Sunday morning talk show format on Twitter, but a couple of weeks ago, he took the opportunity to lay out his case and offer a fix. His case, in a nutshell: Sunday talk shows bring on a hyper-partisan rep from both sides then faux-interrogate them, so the public is no closer to the truth and is left throwing up their hands in cynicism. His solution: Fact-check the guests’ statements and post a midweek review online, as well as making it a segment on next week’s show.

Both The Huffington Post and Media Matters called Rosen’s solution “modest.” Instead, the HuffPo’s Jason Linkins advocated a real-time fact-check that would at the end of each show (ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption does a light-hearted version of this), and Media Matters’ Jamison Foser called on hosts to fact-check guests’ talking points ahead of time, then jump them if they tried using any of those points. The political blog Crooks and Liars has a few other ideas, including a “three strikes and you’re out” rule.

My response: Yes, please — to just about all of the above. And let’s apply it to 24-hour cable news while we’re at it. As Jon Stewart has so deftly pointed out, there are way, way too many patently absurd statements going unchallenged because hosts either don’t have the resources or the cojones to take them on. But lest we get too optimistic about things, one of Linkins’ readers, a veteran broadcaster, interrupts us with the reality of the TV news biz: “Such a program will have no commercially viable audience to sell and, if through some miracle it got on-the-air, it would soon be canceled for lack of revenue.” Call me an idealist, but I’m still hopeful that someone will try it anyway.

— Several interesting Twitter pieces the last couple of weeks: Anil Dash, a top Web entrepreneur and thinker who’s now working within the Obama administration, chronicled life on Twitter’s Suggested Users List, a magical ticket to hundreds of thousands of followers that’s both coveted and reviled. Dash’s counterintuitive conclusion: “Being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.” He later declared that no one on Twitter has a million legitimate followers.

Two other Web/media luminaries offered sterling defenses of Twitter: New York Times media critic David Carr opined on why Twitter will endure and writer and net-neutrality activist Cory Doctorow took down common criticisms of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Good stuff to beat your anti-social media friends over the head with.

— We’re now nine days into the new decade, but I’ve still got plenty of year-end/2010 preview leftovers for you. Actually, only one year-end review left — Ken Fang has a very detailed review of 2009 in sports media. As for 2010, Jason Fry has already tied several of the forward-looking pieces together in a good post, so check him out first. Here’s a quick summary:

Several folks take their shots at predicting the next year in media. Rachel Sklar of the Daily Beast says we’ll see bylines become brands and niche media explode; The Economist calls 2010 “the year of the paywall“; Poynter’s Rick Edmonds says we won’t find meaningful online ad revenue this year; Alan Mutter gives a very “maybe, maybe not” preview of 2010; and the Boston Phoenix hits all of the basic hot-button issues.

Others got much more practical, with some useful resolutions. Judy Sims has resolutions for news executives; and Gina Chen, Adam Westbrook, John Thompson and Adam Sullivan all have some tips for journalists to improve and adapt in the new year.

— We’ll probably be reading much more about this in the next week, but I wanted to get the front end of this news in the review yet this week: Rupert Murdoch looks like he’s officially beginning to act on all those fightin’ words about aggregation and paid content. He blocked UK aggregator NewsNow from his Times Online site. Meanwhile, Google News, his main target, has stopped hosting new content from Associated Press, one of Murdoch’s allies in his fight against aggregators. (Danny Sullivan has thoughts on both developments.) These are relatively small moves, but I believe they mean this fight is officially on.

— Writing for The Atlantic, Slate founder Michael Kinsley urged newspaper journalists to write shorter, pointing out numerous examples of unnecessarily verbose language in The New York Times. He got a lot of pushback: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx and Megan Garber defended long stories (Garber’s critique is a little more thorough and thoughtful), and political blogger Spencer Ackerman proposed modular journalism — covering one topic per story, and linking to the rest — as a solution.

I think Reuters’ Robert MacMillan hits on it the best, though: What Kinsley really has a problem with is not length, but bad writing that’s overblown and doesn’t get to the point. That’s the root cause; long stories are only a symptom, and kind of a red herring at that.

— I’ve gone way long, so I’ll make these last few links quick. In order of awesome-ness: 1) The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a wonderful post on journalism as community organizing (You don’t just show up online and get read, he says); 2) longtime Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing writes his last piece, an alternative history of newspapers and a look to the future; and 3) ReadWriteWeb has a great primer on the real-time Web. Enjoy.

I’ve spent the past week alternately shoveling through snow drifts and being stranded away from home with family by a good old-fashioned Nebraska blizzard, so I haven’t had much time to check out what’s been said about media and journalism this week. On the other hand, I’ll be in Portland visiting friends next weekend, so I thought I’d at least give you a mini-review to tide you over until after the holidays.

— Most of what we got last week (through Thursday, anyway — I haven’t been able since then to look at Twitter or my RSS) came in the form of  retrospectives looking at the year or decade that was and predictions about 2010. Here’s a roundup of a few of the more interesting media-related pieces from that category:

The massive social media blog Mashable flooded us with year-end stuff. Columbia grad student Vadim Lavrusik has the most useful stuff, giving us a couple of posts of news media predictions for 2010, one about business and the other about content. Both lists function as great summaries of where we are in media innovation right now, with links to great examples and ideas in each area. Mashable also has tons and tons of predictions for 2010 by “social media experts” and makes a decent case for YouTube as the social media innovation of the decade.

The New York Times’ David Carr has a realistic yet optimistic snapshot of where the news business is right now.

Northeastern University prof Dan Kennedy looked at how newspapers fared in 2009 and argued that things weren’t as bad as we thought they’d be. Alan Mutter explained why that might be and remembered the 140-plus newspapers that closed this year.

CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, named Google his icon of the decade. Go figure.

Missouri prof Clyde Bentley has a roundup of some of this year’s most interesting social media research findings.

I love great long-form sportswriting, so I have to highlight the list from Deadspin, the web’s largest sports blog, of the best sportswriting of the decade. I haven’t read as many of the pieces on this list as I’d like, but those I have read have been brilliant. (I’d start with J.R. Moehringer, Joe Posnanski and Gary Smith.)

— John Bollwit has a great post for small newspapers, arguing that a good local news site is not that difficult to create, thanks to WordPress. I absolutely agree, though I do have a bone to pick with Bollwit: His hometown newspaper publisher’s email explaining why they don’t put much effort into their website is wrong-headed, but it’s still reasonable enough to be acknowledged and refuted, rather than dismissed out of hand. This is the mentality of just about every weekly rural newspaper I know of; it deserves a real counterargument.

— Once you start on that local news site, Amy Gahran at the Knight Digital Media Center has a solid argument for implementing local topic pages and some fantastic practical advice on how to get started. I love it.

Have a wonderful last week of the year, and I’ll be catching you again in 2010.

On Monday, ESPN launched ESPN Los Angeles, the fourth of its local sports sites (Chicago, Boston and Dallas are the others). The network has assembled an all-star lineup of bloggers, reporters and columnists, and it plans on tackling the nation’s biggest market, New York, within a few months.

Of course, a bunch of massive media companies (even ESPN competitor Fox Sports Net) are trying to branch out into hyperlocal sites right now, but none of them are doing it with ESPN’s success. Consider this fact: Within a month of the time it was launched, ESPN Chicago drew more unique visitors than the sports sections of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun-Times. This means that it took ESPN all of one month to overcome the Tribune and Sun-Times’ decades-long head start in building trust and authority and insinuating themselves into readers’ habits, and their 14-year head start in specifically covering Chicago sports online. One month, and all that was out the window.

Let that sink in for a while. If there’s a better indicator of ESPN’s absolute dominance of the sports media world and the completeness of its takeover of local sports coverage in the public’s mind, I haven’t seen it.

What’s most remarkable to me about ESPN’s invasion of local sports journalism, though, is the climate in which it’s taking place. It seems strange to think of it this way now, but ESPN is an old-media company, just like the Tribune and the Sun-Times and every other newspaper it’s advancing on. For virtually every other American old-media company, this decade has been one of collapse, of downsizing, of a steady chipping away of authority. The theme of this decade in news media could easily be Yeats’ line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Yet for ESPN, this has been the decade of expansion, of hegemony, of steadily mounting authority. How has ESPN managed to make itself all but immune to the social and market forces that are tearing down just about every other establishment media organization in America? Here are a few ideas:

— It’s working with a captive audience. Most establishment news media organizations traffic in just that: news. And by that I mean general news — politics, crime, business, foreign affairs. And we’ve all seen the statistics about the growing number of people (especially young people) who just don’t care about that kind of news. Well, guess what? We’re not seeing the same trend with sports news. Interest in sports in the United States is not going to be declining anytime soon. So whereas many news organizations have to ask themselves two fundamental questions (”How do we get people interested in the news?” and “How do we get them interested in our news?”), ESPN is only concerned with the latter, and that’s one very big thing not to have to worry about.

— It moves quickly to master every style and medium its competitors use. Despite that native advantage to sports news, ESPN has still had to outmaneuver its many competitors to reach its position at the center of the sports media universe. And it’s been able to do that, quite frankly, because it’s generally very, very good at what it does. You can see it medium after medium: When WFAN and sports talk radio were just starting to explode, ESPN launched a radio division in 1992, quickly scooping up local stations and top talent and becoming a force in the business. When the blogosphere’s snarky tone was starting to bubble up early in this decade, ESPN acted quickly, snapping up the nationally unknown Bill Simmons in 2001 and turning him into the most widely read sportswriter in America, creating the irreverent, pop-culture-heavy Page 2, and absorbing the fantastic NBA blog TrueHoop.

ESPN may be at its core a cable network, but its efforts in other media are smoothly integrated enough to feel native: It functions on the web, for example, as a multimedia, 21st-century sports website, one that feels like it was produced by people who specifically had the web in mind. Most newspaper sports websites, on the other hand, still have the awkward feel of a fundamentally print-based mindset superimposed on the web.

— It has money, and it’s not afraid to use it. Of course, ESPN also pumps out an alarming amount of crap, but it’s still managed to protect its brand and its territory in the industry. Every sports fan I know has a love-hate relationship with ESPN, and the love part mostly stems from the fact that there’s nowhere else to go; no one else offers what ESPN does. No one else has made a bona fide effort to produce a regular sports news program like SportsCenter, treating sports the same way CNN treats news. No one else (except Best Damn Sports Show, and that’s off the air) has tried to produce the daily televised discussion-as-entertainment gabfest like Pardon the Interruption, treating sports the same way Fox News treats politics. And the reason they haven’t tried it is simple: It costs too much money, and ESPN got there first.

There’s a reason ESPN keeps poaching top sportswriting and on-air talent from the nation’s newspapers and TV networks: It’s paying them piles and piles of money. It’s the same reason ESPN keeps swallowing up more college football and basketball broadcast rights. I’m not privy to their financial statements, but I’m pretty sure other networks, like Fox and the new Comcast/NBC have this kind of money; they’re just not as willing to spend it as ESPN is. And the more money ESPN spends, the more of the sports landscape it takes over, and the more money it makes.

— Other sports media organizations’ declines have helped pave its way. Finally, it’s worth noting that ESPN doesn’t deserve all the credit for its own dominance — it’s been pretty serendipitous, too. The decline of the newspaper has decimated the longtime stronghold of sports coverage that was the local sports section. The collapse of their authority has created a void that ESPN has gladly and smartly stepped into. It’s also helped that newspapers have generally moved onto the web so timidly and awkwardly (especially initially — they’ve improved drastically now), making ESPN’s online offerings appear so strong by comparison.

I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that ESPN will continue its dominance through the next decade. I think ESPN has some legitimate challengers on the horizon, whether it’s on the fringes or right smack-dab in front of the network, and it’ll be interesting to watch to inevitable battle. But I think as the decade closes, it’s worth appreciating how ESPN got its position as the undisputed king of the sports media hill in the first place.

The future of journalism and new media is fun to talk about in the abstract, but things get a little hairier when we start talking about actual projects tried out at actual news organizations, especially the small, local ones that make up the vast majority of our journalistic ecosystem. So I thought it’d be helpful to survey how one small daily newspaper uses social media to engage with its community and gather and disseminate news.

The easiest paper to do with is, of course, my own — The Grand Island Independent. We’re a 20,000-circulation paper covering a city of 45,000 in the middle of Nebraska, along with 16 rural counties around it. I talked with Stephanie Romanski, our awesome web editor, who has spearheaded bunches of creative uses of the web and social media, including daily Cover it Live chats with readers and a personal voice for the newspaper on Twitter and Facebook. (She writes in more detail about those efforts on her blog, so make sure to check it out.)

Steph and I talked last week for a half hour about those initiatives and others, along with the differences between social media at small news orgs and large ones and tons of Steph’s advice for people jumping into social media at smaller outlets.

Have a listen — Steph’s got some great stuff to share.

Download

I started this post thinking it had been a slow week, but by the time I was done, I had the longest week in review yet. Enjoy it over a nice, tall glass of egg nog. (Want to know what I’m doing? It’s here.)

— The discussion about Demand Media has been simmering since NYU’s Jay Rosen made it (or, more specifically, calling attention to how “demonic” it is) his cause du jour following the publication of this Wired profile of the online content factory. Early this week it reached a boil after both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb sounded the alarm about the coming onslaught of cheap, superficial “content farms” or “fast food content” like Demand Media. Here are the highlights, the miscellaneous commentary and my take.

The highlights: Pioneering tech thinker Doc Searls tells TechCrunch to stop hyperventilating, arguing that “Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it.” Rosen interviews Demand’s founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt, and while Rosenblatt makes things sounds a lot less scary than Rosen does, his statements are so filled with corporate platitudes and empty CEO-speak that they’re tough to take at face value. Two people with experience working for Demand Media weigh in: Andria Krewson says the work is low-paying but well done, and in a thoughtful post, John Zhu says companies like Demand Media might be the inevitable outgrowth of all media’s marginalization of quality.

The other commentary: And common (and very salient) point among much of the commentary was best put by Fred Wilson, who wrote that our friends and other trusted sources will play a big role in helping us separate the good stuff from the crap. Cody Brown and others noted that it’s tougher to “game” social networks like Twitter than search algorithms. In a related point, a few others noted that Google seems to be losing its battle against SEO-gaming spammers. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis says news orgs might have something to learn from Demand.

My (very quick) take: I’m with Doc Searls on this one. The best way to keep crappy content from choking out good content? Keep creating and linking to good content. Google’s search dominance depends (at least in part) on its ability to lead users to the good stuff; makes sense to just produce quality stuff, link to it and pass it around, and let Google’s engineers do their jobs. As Scott Rosenberg points out, it’s not like people actually want to read empty, cynically produced search-bot fodder, anyway.

— We’ve talked about this “transparency is the new objectivity” idea a bit here before, and this week Paul Bradshaw at Poynter provided us with us an intriguing example of the clash between the old and new philosophies in this area. After an email interview with a reporter for a story, Bradshaw asked for permission to publish the exchange on his blog after the story ran. The reporter said no and eventually allowed Bradshaw to post only his side of the email conversation, not hers.

Bradshaw uses the case to ask the question, “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. In this case, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either.

And why does she do this? Bradshaw gives us a pretty strong hint when he notes in passing that in her email “she gives her position on the issue.” Aha! This wasn’t about suppressing transparency for the sake of privacy or the final product or anything like that; this was about preserving the appearance of objectivity at all costs. What better way to illustrate the idea of transparency being the new objectivity than by this, its precise opposite?

— This being mid-December, we’re starting to see the inevitable end-of-year, end-of-decade, and preview-of-next-year lists. (I’ll admit it: I’m supposed to hate these kinds of lists, but I can’t stop reading them.) Here’s this week’s review of those lists:

End of year: Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp has the top 10 newspaper stories (40,000 jobs lost is appropriately #1); Lifehacker has a rather overwhelming list of all of Google’s developments in 2009; and though I mentioned it last week, C.W. Anderson still has the best year-end snapshot of media so far.

End of decade: The Austin (Texas) Statesman’s Robert Quigley has an insightful piece at Mediaite looking at how the Gawker media empire defined this decade; and About.com, not usually known as a font of quality media criticism, has a surprisingly solid roundup of the major developments in journalism this decade.

2010: Martin Langeveld, Adam Westbrook and Sean Blanda all have predictions for 2010 — Langeveld’s are more newspaper-centric, and Westbrook’s more optimistic and presented in spiffy video format; Save the News has 10 New Year’s resolutions for journalism organizations; and newspaper publishers think advertising will magically flatten next year after collapsing this year, prompting Alan Mutter to wonder, “What the heck are they thinking?”

— In tech-oriented news, Twitter’s API (the interface that allows it to interact with other programs) was added to Wordpress last week and Tumblr this week. Combined with its integration with Facebook’s status API and tons of other programs over the past year or so, that effectively means that, as tech thinker Anil Dash puts it, Twitter’s API is complete. I don’t understand the implications of this quite well enough to summarize it, but fortunately, we have the renowned Dave Winer to explain it to us. So read what he has to say about Twitter’s API becoming a new Internet standard here and here and listen to him here.

— In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten makes an interesting point regarding the ratings rise of MSNBC and Fox News and decline of CNN. He says that it’s not a sign that most Americans now want their news provided through an ideological lens, but that cable news instead attracts a relatively small niche of news junkies who follow news throughout the day. When evening rolls around, Rutten says, “they’re hungry for analysis rather than recycled reportage, and like most Americans today, they prefer interpretation that reinforces their own opinions.” I think the truth lies somewhere in between conventional wisdom and Rutten’s point of view, but it’s still a valuable corrective.

— I missed this one last week, but Jim Barnett of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a helpful quasi-scientific study of the finances of several significant local and national nonprofit news organizations. He finds a pattern, then looks at why Mother Jones might be an exception.

— Three social media-related links before I send you off for the holidays: 1) The Bivings Group’s study of newspapers’ use of Twitter (would like to see someone look at smaller newspapers, too, but I’m sure that’s coming from someone sometime), 2) A fun look at some reeeaaally early predecessors to modern social networking sites, and 3) Dan Schultz’s nifty survey and map of the participatory web, focusing on scope and individual vs. group focus. Enjoy.

Big, big week last week. Let’s get into it. (As always, an explanation of what I’m doing is here.)

— There’s no doubt about the biggest journalism-related news this week: It’s the impending death of Editor & Publisher, the magazine that’s been covering the newspaper industry since 1884. E&P’s owner, Nielsen Business Media, announced on Thursday that it had sold the magazine’s sister publications and would be shutting down E&P. (Editor Greg Mitchell offers some more details.) Yup, it was pretty easy to see this as symbolic of the death of the entire newspaper industry itself, and that’s where many left it.

A few went deeper, though, on what E&P stood for and what killed it. Longtime E&P columnist Steve Outing reflected on the newspaper industry’s resistance to change, adding that “I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P.” The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch praised E&P and Mitchell in particular for their criticism of the media’s coverage of the runup to the Iraq war. The two main explanations for E&P’s demise being passed around are 1) the drying up of advertising dollars, especially classifieds; and, 2) as articulated by former Rocky Mountain News publisher John Temple and agreed with by Outing, the rise of online media-news aggregators like Romenesko. Steve Yelvington gave us a little of both in his explanation.

I think Yelvington’s analysis probably hits closest to the bullseye. E&P was a publication largely operating in a traditional, dying medium (magazines) covering another traditional, dying medium (newspapers). In other words, we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised at its death. I suspect that what killed E&P was not so much Romenesko as it was sites like JournalismJobs.com, as the Internet eroded the magazine’s classified base.

That said, E&P did solid work covering both the everyday and big-picture issues in the newspaper industry right up until the end. Judging from his byline counts and takeout pieces, Joe Strupp was a force of nature there.  But news media coverage is still in fairly good hands; sites like the Nieman Journalism Lab and PBS’ MediaShift have taken on the task of providing regular reporting on journalism in transition, and I’ve been fairly impressed with the work they’ve done (particularly the Nieman Lab). E&P will be missed, but it isn’t a mortal wound for journalism.

— Google made big media news twice this week: First, it announced that it’s adding real-time search from sites like Twitter and Facebook to its traditional search results. This is the beginning of the implementation of all the deals we heard about in October, and it’s big news. Google assured us its real-time search won’t kill journalism (duh) and will find a way to make sure the cream rises to the top. Daniel Honigman gives a quick look at how the change will affect the PR world.

— Second, Google introduced a new partnership with The New York Times and Washington Post called Living Stories, a smart, personalized version of the Wikipedia-style explainers that Matt Thompson has advocated. (The New York Times has more of the nitty-gritty details.) The announcement created a lot of buzz early in the week, with Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw calling it a “jaw-dropping online journalism form” and others wondering if it would “give newspapers new life.” Elsewhere, Thompson and Danny Sullivan are less enthusiastic: Thompson likes that news orgs are trying to tie stories together for readers, but says Living Stories is more of a starting point than a finished product. Sullivan has some  qualms with its usability.

I’m with Thompson on this one: Living Stories may be getting a lot of hype because Google’s behind it, but this type of re-envisioning of the way a news story should look is not new, and Google’s manifestation of it is not exactly the pinnacle of the form. But, most importantly, it’s a good start, and it’s miles ahead of the Post’s and Times’ concept of topic pages. Like Thompson, I sense that the pinnacle of this “explainer” form is a long way off, but it’s encouraging to see news orgs and the brilliant minds at Google diving into the pool.

— Some Google miscellany: Google also expanded its search personalization to include everyone. Danny Sullivan tells you how it works and what it means. Also, Rupert Murdoch responded to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Wall Street Journal op-ed with his own. His two main points: Media companies need to give people the news they want, and quality content is not free. Oh, and his third: The FCC needs to let me own everything.

— NYU professor Jay Rosen’s been talking for a while about his idea for a site built around the concept, “What is your question? Journalists are standing by.” This weekend, he gave us a mockup for that idea at explainthis.org. I love the journalists-as-question-answerers idea — the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News has been quite successful with it at MyReporter.com, and my paper, the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, began trying out the concept a few weeks ago. (Jeff Sonderman has a good roundup of similar projects.)

Matt Mireles raises a good question about the project: Why use journalists at all? Why not let the experts answer and cut out the middle man? It’s a valid point, but I think journalists still have a role in answering a lot of these questions. “Sources go direct” is wonderful and all, but what if the question is about corruption or incompetence somewhere? Do we really want the “experts” answering those questions for us?

Take even Rosen’s sample question: “Why is corn still subsidized?” I wouldn’t expect an entirely honest answer from the American Corn Growers Association, even though they’re certainly experts on the issue. Answering questions like these is a key part of the craft of  journalism, and I expect projects like these to start popping up soon at local news orgs around the country.

— Top tech blogs TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are both lamenting the coming rise of organizations like Demand Media that offer cheap, mostly useless, ad-driven content. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington calls it “fast food content,” and RWW’s Richard MacManus calls them “content farms.” Both fascinating reads on the assault on quality in some corners of the Web.

— Three for the road: 1) Steve Buttry has a comprehensive (read: long) followup spelling out the details of his earlier proposal of a mobile-first news strategy; 2) Conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart talks to Mediaite about his plans to develop the right’s Huffington Post; 3) and CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has a great roundup of the news industry’s current battles and the ones you’ll be seeing flare up soon. It’s a short but sweet primer on the state of the journalism.

After taking Thanksgiving week off, we’ve got two weeks to catch up on, instead of just one. And while that first week was relatively slow, this week has been a pretty eventful one, both in terms of media happenings and in important thoughts about journalism.

— Almost a month after Rupert Murdoch first said he plans on removing News Corp.’s sites from Google, that declaration (and its aftermath) are still the top item of discussion in journalism/new media circles. The story got another boost just before Thanksgiving when word spread that News Corp. was in talks with Microsoft about creating an exclusive search deal with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. (Yup, exactly as Cory Doctorow predicted.)

Much pondering ensued from just about every corner of the Internet, but here’s the most important stuff: On Tuesday, Murdoch gave attendees at an FTC conference the rationale behind his plans, during which he bashed online news aggregators and also said he’s against a U.S. government subsidy for news, but wants them to rewrite copyright law to stop aggregators. Arianna Huffington, the most prominent of those aggregators, followed him up at the conference with a speech that 1) noted that News Corp. sites do quite a bit of aggregating themselves, 2) defended the free-content model, and 3) extolled the virtues of citizen journalism.

Meanwhile, one of Murdoch’s top execs, Dow Jones CEO Eric Hinton, gave a speech in India that amounted to: “All these new-fangled future-of-media ideas might be great, but they’re not going to make any money.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to the hubbub with an op-ed in Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal that amounted to: “Why can’t we be friends?” Oh yeah, and then a Microsoft exec told the Financial Times they’re not planning on paying any news organizations to leave Google in the first place. Clear as mud?

A few of the smarter pieces of commentary on the whole ordeal: Search engine guru Danny Sullivan and new media entrepreneur Umair Haque explain why a News Corp.-Bing deal wouldn’t work. As usual, Ken Doctor has some really sharp questions on the issue. And Sullivan also prompted an interesting discussion on whether infrequent visitors to news sites through Google News are worth anything. Sullivan and Jeff Jarvis say yes, and news orgs are blowing an opportunity; Steve Yelvington says no, not really.

— If the last four paragraphs have you feeling overwhelmed, reset for a while with two beautiful elegies for journalism as we knew it, focusing on two cities on either side of the country. In an essay for Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the importance of local news orgs providing a sense of place through a look at the history and decline of San Francisco and its two longtime papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner. (Official/incomplete version here; illicit/full version here.)

And New York Times media columnist David Carr gives a picture of the collapse of the traditional media model (with a helping of hope for the future) by looking through the eyes of the young go-getters who flood New York’s media landscape. Both essays are lyrically written, and both highly insightful.

— The Dallas Morning News, one of the nation’s best newspapers only a decade ago, internally announced a reorganization plan this week in which some news section editors will report to sales managers, now called “general managers.” From the memo, this looks like one of the biggest breaches of the long-standing wall between news and advertising we’ve seen at a major traditional American news organization. The memo’s writer, Editor Bob Mong, its publisher, and other editors have backpedaled from that idea over the past few days, saying it’s not really much of a change from what a lot of other traditional news orgs are doing and won’t affect the integrity of the paper’s reporting.

A bit surprisingly, the commentary on the move from media and journalism thinkers has been cautiously optimistic. Alan Mutter thinks the news folks’ tenacity could rub off on the ad side, Canadian j-prof Mark Hamilton thinks the collaboration could help fund better reporting, and the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Jim Barnett says this may simply be a case of traditional news catching up to the online world.

I wish I could share their optimism, but there are far too many question marks for me to be anything but concerned about this deal. I don’t think the news/advertising wall should be sacrosanct (as Barnett notes, online news does fine without a wall), but there’s a huge difference between journalists working with someone who’s spent their entire career in advertising and working for that person. And there’s also a big difference between that superior being a seldom-seen, corner-office publisher and a hands-on immediate supervisor. But it’s not impossible for this to work well; a lot of it depends on how well these sales managers mesh with the news folks, and how well they understand the need to keep their hands off editorial judgment when it counts.

— A weird, weird incident involving Tiger Woods, Elin Nordegren, an SUV, a golf club, extramarital affairs and the Florida Highway Patrol transfixed much of the media world for about a week. Just about every columnist in America took the opportunity to write about celebrity, privacy, the 24-hour news cycle and tabloid journalism. Not much of it was very interesting. Two exceptions: Time media critic James Poniewozik wrote a sly critique of the traditional media’s ambivalence about covering tawdry stories like this, and St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans expressed his concerns about those media outlets outsourcing celebrity stories to organizations whose ethics they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

— After months of leadup, the cable company Comcast agreed this week to buy a majority of the media empire that is NBC Universal from General Electric. A few quick takes on various angles of this deal: The New York Times’ Brian Stelter looks at the Internet/TV divide and reviews Comcast’s new news holdings, paidContent’s Rafat Ali says the deal’s not about digital media, and the Times’ Richard Sandomir and former ESPN.com writer Dan Shanoff say this deal gives ESPN a legitimate competitor in sports media.

— Two great journalism school discussion-starters during the past two weeks: Steve Buttry offers some comprehensive advice for journalism schools on how to overhaul their curriculum for the 21st century (Buttry covers it well here — it’s worth a read), and tech pioneer Dave Winer makes the case for a semester of journalism education for everyone, framed as “How to be a citizen in the 21st century.” Wonderful idea.

— Before we’re done, there’s some nifty statistics and graphs that are worth a look. Slate tech columnist Farhad Manjoo marvels at Facebook’s relentless growth, The Awl has a magnificently depressing graph of magazine revenue, and Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow graph news sites’ users and wonder where a paywall is supposed to go. Enjoy.

There was quite a bit of compelling stuff said this week in the new-media-and-journalism department, but unlike the last few weeks, there’s no one or two issues that much of the discussion has orbited around. So rather than doing my usual mini-essay on the top item or two, I’m going to have some shorter comments a few more of the items. Enjoy. (By the way, I’ll be taking next week off for the holiday, and if you’re new, an explanation of what I’m up to is here.)

— Jason Fry, who’s been pumping out consistently thought-provoking posts at his blog lately, has this week’s best pithy one-sentence summary of a key future-of-journalism idea: “If we were starting today, would we do this?” Fry, who used to write for The Wall Street Journal Online, looked at a couple of journalism conventions and concluded that they were, as he says, “broken as in ‘this no longer works, and we need to stop doing it.’” First, he took on the hoariest of sportswriting traditions — the game story. In a world of continual SportsCenter highlights and instant mobile updates, the next-day game story needs to be blown up, he concluded.

Then, Fry dissected a New York Times story to show why the standard inverted pyramid-style structure for an incremental development in a larger story can be virtually incomprehensible. (On that point, Matt Thompson’s Nieman Reports piece from earlier this fall makes for wonderful background reading.)

These two critiques make perfect case studies for the need for a started-from-scratch news mentality — “rebooted” is the much more apt word Dave Winer and Jay Rosen use — where all the old-school assumptions, even on such elemental aspects as basic news story structure, are considered on equal merits along with the new ones. It would be like the ideological equivalent of the Gannett paper that made every one of its employees reapply for new jobs as part of an overhaul of the newsroom. And the central question in this reboot should be, “If we were starting today, would we do this?”

— A sequel of sorts to last week’s Rupert Murdoch/Google brouhaha: NPR’s On Point held a freewheeling show discussing the issue with “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff — both firmly in the anti-paid content, pro-Google camp. The real fireworks start 17 minutes in, when host Tom Ashbrook brings in Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, the new business that’s working with traditional news orgs to charge for their content online.

Jarvis and Wolff (especially Wolff) smelled blood, and the feeding frenzy began before Brill finished his first answer (though, to be fair, Brill took the first bite). After Brill’s nearly-out-of-control segment ended, Jarvis and Wolff teed off on whatever listeners were intrepid enough to call in and challenge them.

The pair made their points loudly and clearly — and for the most part, I agree with them — but they don’t come off well here. Wolff is almost laughably boorish, and both and he and Jarvis end up sounding like those phantom “the Internet will fix everything” Pollyannas that Jay Rosen spends so much time calling out as straw men. Which is disappointing, because having read a decent amount of their writing, I know they’re both much more reasonable in print than that. Brill’s claims about his startup are sketchy enough — as the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary Seward deftly pointed out this week — and it doesn’t help to make him sound so thoughtful by comparison.

— For anyone interested in the intersection between journalism and academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education released a nifty batch of ideas last weekend. In descending order of importance: Penn’s Carlin Romano opines on the need to teach philosophy of journalism, 18 people from various segments of the academy offer their quick takes on how the decline of the traditional news media will affect higher education, and Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson make the case for university-based reporting.

— The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a smart post on the need for news orgs to move from a “Web-first” to a “mobile-first” mentality. I’ll be honest: This is a difficult transition for me to make, given the spotty 3G coverage in rural Nebraska and my own personal apathy toward cell phones. But Buttry’s right — we should be moving past Web-first and into a mobile-centric outlook if we’re going to stay in front of (or even in the neighborhood of) of the social forces that are dramatically shifting the way news is consumed. Could anyone honestly argue that the demand for mobile news consumption isn’t going to be exponentially greater five years from now? Why not prepare for it already?

— Search expert Danny Sullivan has a wide-ranging two-part interview with Google News business product manager Josh Cohen that covers just about everything having to do with Google News. I haven’t taken time to absorb it all yet, but it’s must-reading if you’re trying to understand the controversy over aggregation, search and Google News.

— More bad news at The Washington Post, the paper that’s arguably fallen farther within the past five years than any other in America other than The Los Angeles Times: The online and print departments are merging, and it’s the Web folks that are getting the axe. Former employee Derek Willis and Mathew Ingram of The Globe and Mail in Toronto are worried about what this says about the print-focused direction the Post is headed.

— Over at Xark, Dan Conover, who is usually good for some of the more thoughtful long-form blog posts on the state of journalism and new media, has another that I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. He examines the question of what assets journalists have that they can put a monetary value on, depressingly whittling down each candidate until he comes to “the structure in which it assembles and stores freely available (but expensive to gather) information.” I think he could be onto something here, but take that with a grain of salt, because I’m still trying to figure out what he’s referring to.

— Two for the road: Microsoft’s danah boyd, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on youth and social media, gave a talk at the Web2.0 Expo last week on attention and the flow of information in social media. The talk was pretty poorly received (partly, yes, because of the audience’s inattention to a speech on decreasing attention), but it’s still great stuff in print. Finally, Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore has a look at America’s best media critics, the writers of The Daily Show. Want some examples of their work? Start with their eviscerations of Fox News and CNN.

No time for much of an intro — we’ve got way too much to get to this week. (As always, a look at what I’m doing is here.)

— There’s no question what — or who — is the biggest story in future-of-journalism talk this week: Rupert Murdoch. After months of talking around it, he finally made a splash by telling an Australian interviewer he plans to remove all of News Corp.’s sites’ content from Google’s search index. (He also said he thinks the fair-use doctrine should be overturned and threatened to sue the BBC for copyright violation.) Almost immediately, he got a vote of confidence from another billionaire media mogul — Mark Cuban, who argued that whereas Twitter and Facebook are growing platforms news orgs can use to their advantage, Google is a competing news source whose time is slipping past. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,” he said.

Well, this just about set the new-media folks’ hair on fire. Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow guessed that Murdoch plans to exclusively put his content on an (inferior) competing search engine, a scheme he called “a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet.” (Social media guru Jason Calacanis loves this idea, by the way.) Newser founder (and Murdoch biographer) Michael Wolff said Murdoch’s plan has its own curious but internally consistent logic, but he doesn’t have even the most basic know-how of how to build an online news business. The Australian site Crikey! and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan tried to not-so-gently explain to Murdoch how Google and Google News work.

Bill Tancer and Sullivan used numbers to show why Murdoch’s plan won’t work, and The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum countered with numbers of his own to show that not much of News Corp.’s revenue comes from visitors sent through Google.

I’m with Sullivan and Doctorow on this one: Any plan by Murdoch to erect a paywall, freeze out Google and offer content exclusively through a lesser search engine is doomed to fail, simply because his publications’ content don’t have enough value to draw people away from Google. He’s basing these ideas off of the success of the Wall Street Journal, but the Journal should be treated as an exception, not the rule. It offers a highly specialized form of information, and many of its subscribers are able to get the cost reimbursed on expense accounts. The work of the rest of his publications, frankly, can be replaced by tons of free news sites, dropping their value to virtually zero. Murdoch’s operating as if the web is still his own little media playground, ruled by scarcity. Instead, it’s ruled by abundance, and that causes the value of any one online publication to tank, even if they’re as large as Murdoch’s.

Still, I think a colossal failure of this kind by Murdoch would be good for journalism in the long run, because it would a long way toward disabusing publishers of the notion that people will pay for their easily replicated content on the web. And let’s face it: If Rupert Murdoch, with the most resources of any traditional-media publisher in the world, can’t succeed charging for content, your 50,000-circulation paper probably can’t either.

— A fascinating discussion was spurred last week by The New York Times’ publication of a story on a patch of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. This was the highest-profile effort yet by Spot.Us, an initiative by David Cohn that allows reporters to make pitches for stories they’d like to do and raise money online through what’s commonly called “crowdfunding.” In this case, Lindsey Hoshaw raised $10,000 to spend a month at the garbage patch, producing a blog and an article in the Times.

The Times article was not outstanding. Not bad, to be sure — but pretty much your garden-variety, cover-your-bases Times feature. When the Columbia Journalism Review’s Megan Garber pointed this out, things got interesting. Cohn defends Hoshaw and Spot.Us in the comments, Garber responds, others chip in, and we have a whole (somewhat tedious, but still interesting to journalism nerds like me) conversation about whose fault a lackluster story is (probably mostly the Times) and whether Garber’s piece is an indictment of Spot.Us (it wasn’t, though the subhead makes it sound that way).

Hoshaw wrote her own response, concluding that “people want to feel connected to the stories they’re reading and the people who write them.” But the two most insightful takes on the situation come from Mathew Ingram, Jason Fry and Mike Masnick, who note that the real story here is that with all other things being equal (like, say, the author, the reporting and the subject matter), a personal blog offered a fuller, richer, more engaging picture of a story than an article in the venerable New York Times. That says a lot about the actual capacities of journalism in traditional outlets versus blogging.

And why was the Times’ story worse? Because it’s so limited by the strictures and traditions of establishment journalism. As Fry wrote, “you get the feeling that the Paper of Record took an interesting square peg of a story and made it fit into a rather dull round hole.” And the Times does that because, to lean on Masnick here, focusing on the product over the process has been the way it’s always done things. If we ever needed a case study in the advantages of process over product journalism, this is it.

— We got two thoughtful pieces on search and authority this week: First, Thomas Baekdal wrote about how much more influential people we know are in our purchasing decisions than impersonal general traffic and brand recognition, then connected it to the idea of personalized search streams through social media connections. Then, Clay Shirky wrote some preliminary thoughts on “algorithmic authority” — the idea that we’re actually willing to trust impersonal machines to find things and help make decisions for us, apart from any human explicitly lending authority to them. I’m still trying to figure out how to square these two ideas that seem contradictory at first, but I think both of them should play a big role in the future of search.

— While most online advertising is struggling to find a sweet spot, ads associated with news sites’ videos are booming, The New York Times notes. I had found anecdotally that most news orgs’ video efforts had been a ton of work for a small amount of revenue, so this is a pleasant surprise to me.

— Longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s new book “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It” dropped earlier this month, and this week he offered a little treat: The book’s original last chapter of media maxims that Auletta learned from Google, cut by Auletta because it didn’t fit with the rest of the book. Very Jeff Jarvis-esque. Good stuff.

— Sports Illustrated’s (SI.com, if you want to get technical) national college football writer, Stewart Mandel, has a look at Twitter and YouTube’s effect on the college football universe. He finds — not surprisingly — that social media and the increasing ease of user-produced content has had the same effect there that it’s having in every other of life: Democratizing analysis and opening up the conversation to a much broader group of people.

— Finally, if you’re wondering how to dive in a little deeper with this whole journalism-and-new-media stuff, you could do a lot worse than this list of 50 journalism blogs. It covers the bases quite well.