Mark Coddington

Most of America’s newsrooms have been aboard the Twitter bandwagon for at least a year, though few of them have found a way to directly make money off of social media. But one small daily newspaper in Nebraska has brought in a small but steadily growing stream of revenue this summer by creating and consulting for its own social media network for local advertisers.

The paper is the 20,000-circulation Grand Island Independent (disclosure: I worked as a reporter there until April, just before this project was formally launched), and the service is called the giNetwork. Here’s how it works: Companies pay for The Independent’s web editor to set up their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, with synchronized posts between the two. Their posts are then aggregated  and displayed with a Twitter lists widget on The Independent’s homepage (about midway down) and on a dedicated giNetwork page. The deal includes on-demand social media consulting during business hours and a regular email newsletter with tips and success stories.

The giNetwork was added on top of an existing local search service developed by the newspaper that boosts local advertisers’ search results on Google and other search engines, as well as the paper’s own local business listings. The search service, FindNEthing.com, had been offered to businesses for $79 per month, and the giNetwork is now included in the FindNEthing package for a total of $99 per month. (Businesses are required to sign on for at least 12 months in order to prevent them from quickly parlaying the paper’s network support and free social media setup into their own independent social media campaign.)

The two services together give advertisers a strong presence on Google, Facebook and The Independent, the area’s most-visited website. “You get the two most popular sites in the world and the most popular site here — it’s what I call the holy trinity of ‘onlineliness,’” said The Independent’s new media director, Jack Sheard. “You can’t get it anywhere else. There’s no other product that’s going to give you all three of those things.”

Advertisers seem to be buying into Sheard’s pitch: The network launched this spring with about a half-dozen businesses and now includes 37 in the rural town of about 50,000 — this after FindNEthing had struggled and flatlined, Sheard said. Here are the project’s main selling points, and how they’ve worked in practice.

— It makes social media simple for businesses. When Sheard, web editor Stephanie Romanski and The Independent’s sales reps talked to local advertisers, they found that few of them knew how to set up Facebook fan page for their business, and even fewer understood Twitter. “A lot of them, when we talk to them, say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know I need to be a part of that, I just don’t have the time. I know the way things are going; I just don’t understand it,’” Sheard said. So the giNetwork makes it simple: The paper sets their account up, gives them a single place to put in messages (usually Facebook; sometimes Twitter for the smartphone-attached) and provides help and advice along the way.

Sheard said the network’s been much more popular among older business owners than younger ones, largely because older ones tend to be unfamiliar with the technology while their younger colleagues are skeptical of paying someone for something they’re capable of doing themselves. Romanski’s expertise — she runs The Independent’s creative social media efforts and has done consulting for others in the newspaper business — is a major draw for advertisers and an important part of the program. “If [the businesses] are not successful with this, then we just have a dead product, and we’re just spending money on something that doesn’t work,” Sheard said.

— It gives targeted access to devoted local audiences. The key to this selling point is the aggregation of the Twitter lists widget on the homepage and the giNetwork landing page. That widget expands the business’s audience beyond the business’s few hundred Facebook fans or few dozen Twitter followers to potentially include the paper’s thousands of unique visitors per week. And, of course, a streaming list of constantly updating local deals draws a much more interested audience than a banner ad. To that end, the paper is hoping to make the giNetwork the hub of local-deals-of-the-moment — a sort of shaggier Groupon — as the network grows, attracting a devoted following of bargain-hunters. Joining the network is the only way to gain access to that following.

— Other local businesses have used it to attract new customers. The paper has plenty of small success stories. The local franchise of the Mexican fast-food chain Qdoba reached nearly 500 Facebook fans in its first two weeks with a giveaway offer; it now uses its page to spread word of its regular promotions, like kids-eat-free Mondays. A local florist started with a special deal for customers who came in and said “I love my dog,” and was getting new customers from the promotion months afterward. A tire shop has drawn new customers with its regular oil change deals.

The most successful local social-media user is a grocery store that actually launched its Facebook page independently, as the giNetwork was in the planning stages. It quickly gained thousands of followers with deep daily discounts, though it limited the deal to Facebook fans, necessitating a messy system in which customers printed out proof of their Facebook fandom, then exchanged it for a voucher at the customer service desk.

When the store joined the giNetwork, Sheard eliminated the Facebook fan requirement over the initial objections of the store’s manager. The Facebook fan page was merely a means to an end — increased business, Sheard said. ”We’re not in the business to sell Facebook fans,” he said. “We will help you build them, and that’s great, but we are in the business of getting people in your door. That’s what the giNetwork does that Facebook, maybe, is limited on.”

In the newsroom

So what has this meant for The Independent? Despite the relatively meager revenue, it’s come out a plus in the paper’s cost-benefit analysis; the initial setup is simple, and the project requires even lower maintenance after that point. The paper had initially discussed a much more intensive program in which Romanski would actually run the social-media efforts for local businesses, but that idea was scrapped because of ethical (the newspaper’s web editor also being the online voice of numerous advertisers) and time issues. This project has struck a much happier balance, Sheard and Romanski said.

The network won an award this year for best new revenue idea in the online group of The Omaha World-Herald Co., The Independent’s owners, and The Hays Daily News in Kansas has picked up the idea after talking with Romanski.

But don’t expect the giNetwork to look the same a few months from now; the paper plans to keep incorporating new technologies and services into it, such as Foursquare and Shoutback, a Groupon competitor. In a late-adopting social media city like Grand Island, that means the paper itself plays a role in pioneering those new products — a refreshingly unfamiliar role for the local paper. And while the numbers are small, Sheard and The Independent’s executives are excited about the fact that they’re making real money directly from their social media efforts. “We’ve started, and that’s the key,” Sheard said.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 13, 2010.]

TBD takes off: One of the most anticipated new news organizations in journalism’s recent history launched this week in the form of TBD, a site owned by Allbritton Communications (the folks behind Politico) covering local news in Washington, D.C. As The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson wrote, TBD is “something of a canary in the coal mine” of the future of journalism, being the protoype of a locally focused, community-driven, online-only news model whose effectiveness everyone’s eager to gauge. For the basics of the project, here are two local profiles from DCist and the more skeptical Washington Post, a paidContent interview with Robert Allbritton, and a Poynter chat with TBD’s Jim Brady and Steve Buttry.

After TBD gave its media preview last Friday, quite a few people listed plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the site: Ken Doctor liked the “out of the box” nature of TBD’s pro-am/social/mobile/multimedia efforts; Jeff Jarvis liked the collaborative, link-centric philosophy; the Lab’s Laura McGann called attention to TBD’s interactivity and collaboration through local blogs and social media; and Kevin Anderson was impressed by the project’s commitment to profitability. Several TBD analyses focused particularly on TBD’s interactive and collaborative news efforts, with Journalism Lives, Mashable and Poynter providing good area-by-area breakdowns. Mark Potts, who’s starting up a similar blog-network effort, Growthspur, wrote a thoughtful piece about the importance of TBD’s own network of local blogs: “TBD is without doubt the biggest, most ambitious effort yet to create a new paradigm for local news coverage of a major metropolitan area,” he wrote.

Poynter’s Steve Myers also touched on an distinct aspect of TBD’s operation — it also includes an Allbritton-owned all-news local cable channel that will be branded TBD TV. He examined how a web-TV converged newsroom operates, and Cory Bergman of Lost Remote (a local TV and hyperlocal news veteran himself) wondered if we might see more TV-local online news partnerships. Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor took a detailed look at the economics of TBD’s web-TV synergy, centering on its pioneering broadcast and online advertising hybrid. Meanwhile, David Rothman had some detailed advice for TBD’s competitors.

The site officially launched Monday, and the initial reviews were mostly positive. Rothman and Suzanne Yada had the most detailed ones; both were impressed by the site’s presentation and several of its features, though both were concerned about how much local news content the site would actually be able to produce. PaidContent’s Staci Kramer liked the smooth design, too, but wanted to see more out of the site’s locally personalized features. The New York Times’ David Carr (”extremely functional … kind of ugly”) and Mediaite’s Michael Triplett (”off to a good start,” despite “thin and D.C.-centric” content) also offered quicker reviews. The most thoughtful review belongs to Lost Remote’s Bergman, who noted that while many of the ideas are old, their implementation is new.“This is the first time that a local media group — especially in the TV space — has wrapped these ideas together and aggressively launched them with an investment to back it up,” he wrote.

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Demand Media’s profit-less past: Demand Media, the new-media lightning rod du jour, filed for an IPO last Friday, giving us the first detailed financial look inside the private company. Several sites took cracks at sifting through the numbers for significant bits, but two pieces stood out: One, Demand Media has yet to make a profit, losing $22 million this year; and two, 26 percent of its revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising deals with Yahoo.

That’s a pretty sizable chunk of Demand Media’s income, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram examined one of the company’s reported risk factors — that Google could use its own search expertise to create a search-driven content company to compete with Demand. Ingram pointed out that Google already has a patent for a process that identifies “underserved” search content. All Things Digital noted that Demand’s heavy reliance on Google “could torpedo the company” if Google changes its search formula or changes its contract with Demand, but it also countered that every web publisher is dependent on Google.

Then there’s the whole matter of profitability. The Wall Street Journal’s Scott Austin contrasted the numbers in Demand’s filing with its executives’ numerous past descriptions of the company as profitable, as a reminder that “no one outside the company can verify a start-up’s financial claims.” Slate’s James Ledbetter also noticed an inexplicably large and sudden drop in Quantcast traffic to Demand’s sites a few weeks ago and wondered what was behind it. Meanwhile, the Journal also profiled Demand Media’s efforts to court big-time advertisers on the web.

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A proposal to carve up the open web: A week after reports emerged that Google and Verizon were near a deal that would more or less mark the end of net neutrality, the two companies came forward this week not with a deal, but with a policy proposal. As for whether that would mark the end of net neutrality, well, it depends on who you ask. Google and Verizon called their plan a “proposal for an open Internet,” and their CEOs co-authored a Washington Post op-ed arguing that their proposal “empowers an informed consumer, ensures the robust growth of the open Internet and provides incentives to strengthen the networks that carry Internet traffic.” The proposal has quite a few moving parts, but it essentially prohibits Internet service providers from discriminating against or prioritizing “lawful Internet content,” while excepting wireless networks and some unspecified future services from that regulation.

The tech blog Engadget broke down the proposal, noting that would set something close to the status quo into formal policy, rendering the U.S. Federal Communications Commission powerless to change policy as the Internet changes. Most of the web was quite a bit harsher in its  judgment, calling it an open attack on net neutrality by excluding its fastest part, wireless. CNET and The New York Times put together good summaries of the backlash, but here are some of the most to-the-point examples: Free Press’ Craig Aaron (”one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet”), the Electronic Freedom Foundation (it limits net neutrality to “lawful” content, leaving “lawful” to be defined) Siva Vaidhyanathan (it gives Verizon control of the most exciting parts of the web) Public Knowledge’s John Bergmayer (it divides the Internet into several public and non-public parts) Ars Technica (its rules “will become meaningless as 4G sweeps the country”) Salon’s Dan Gillmor (”a Trojan Horse for a modern age”) Susan Crawford (future services is “a giant, enormous, science-fiction-quality loophole”) and Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain (makes way for “an impenetrable web of contracts and fees”).

Noted Google watcher Jeff Jarvis had the most colorful response, illustrating the proposal’s potential danger to the open web by presenting a future scenario with two Internets, the old “Internet” with everything pre-2010 and the new “Schminternet,” with everything mobile and post-2010. “Mobile is the internet,” he wrote. “Mobile will very soon become a meaningless word when — well, if telcos allow it, that is — we are connected everywhere all the time.” Meanwhile, Wired gets credit for the most fun phrase — “carrier-humping, net neutrality surrender monkey” — in its explanation of how Google got to that point.

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Reading Roundup: A few final items to send you off for the weekend:

— Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik has a smart overview of the shift toward personalized, socially driven news distribution, with a suggestion for a credibility and trust index to help sort through it all.

— Facebook has launched a media page and is pushing for more collaboration with media companies. PBS MediaShift’s Mark Glaser has an informative Q&A with Justin Osofsky, head of Facebook’s media partnership team.

— Google engineering intern Lyn Headley has written the first of a series of posts explaining the rationale behind his new Rapid News Awards. It’s a short, thoughtful take on aggregation, accountability and transparency.

— Finally, some (possibly) positive news: Spot.Us’ David Cohn takes a look at the data and notes that the wave of job cuts at America’s newspapers has largely subsided. Cohn wonders if it means newspapers are bouncing back, or if they’ve just cut down to the bone. I fear it’s more of the latter.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 6, 2010.]

A newbie owner for Newsweek: This week was a big one for Newsweek: After being on the block since May, it was sold to Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old audio equipment mogul who’s married to a Democratic congresswoman and owns no other media properties. The price: $1, plus the responsibility for Newsweek’s liabilities, estimated at about $70 million. The magazine’s editor, Jon Meacham, is leaving with the sale, though he told Yahoo’s Michael Calderone that he had decided in June to leave when Newsweek was sold, no matter who the new owners were. Harman’s age and background and the low sale price made for quite a few biting jokes about the sale on Twitter, dutifully chronicled for us by Slate’s Jack Shafer.

Harman didn’t help himself out much by telling The New York Times he doesn’t have a plan for Newsweek. In a pair of sharp articles, The Daily Beast painted a grim picture of what exactly Harman’s getting himself into: The magazine’s revenue dropped 38 percent from 2007 to 2009, and it’s losing money in all of its core areas. The Beast noted that with no other media properties, Harman doesn’t have the synergy potential that the magazine’s previous owners, The Washington Post Co., said Newsweek would need. So why was he chosen? Apparently, he genuinely cares about the publication, and he’s planning the least number of layoffs. (That, and the other bidders weren’t too attractive, either.) PaidContent reported that his primary goal is to bring the magazine back to stability while he sets up a succession plan.

Everybody has ideas of what Harman should do with his newest plaything: MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman wants to see Newsweek drop the opinion-and-analysis approach that it’s been aping from The Economist, as do several of the observers Politico talked to. (DailyFinance’s Jeff Bercovici just wants Harman to make it a little less excruciatingly dull to read.) Two other Politico sources — new media guru Jeff Jarvis and former Newsweek Tumblr wizard Mark Coatney — want to see Newsweek shift away from a print focus and figure out how to be vital on the web. Media consultant Ken Doctor proposes pushing forward on tablet editions, multimedia and interacting with readers online as the future of the magazine. Jarvis also has some pieces of advice for magazines in general, urging to them to resist the iPad’s siren song and get local, among other things.

Poynter’s Rick Edmonds has the most intriguing idea for a new Newsweek — going nonprofit. That would likely require refining its editorial mission to a narrower focus on national and international affairs, with the pop culture analysis getting cut out, Edmonds says, but he believes Harman might actually be considering a nonprofit approach. Ken Doctor suggests that with Harman’s statements about the relative unimportance of turning a profit from the magazine, he’s already blurring the lines between a for-profit and nonprofit organization.

Meanwhile, others were busy speculating about who might be the editor to lead Newsweek into its next incarnation. Names thrown out included Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek.com editor Mark Miller, Slate Group editor Jacob Weisberg, and former Time editor and CNN CEO Walter Isaacson, though Isaacson has taken himself out of consideration.

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WikiLeaks and the need for context: WikiLeaks continued to see fallout from its unprecedented leak of 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan two weekends ago, with more cries for it to be shut down and its founder, Julian Assange, arrested, largely because its leak revealed the names of numerous Afghan informants to the U.S. Assange expressed regret for those disclosures, and WikiLeaks said it’s even asking for the Pentagon’s help in identifying and redacting names of informants in its next document dump, though the Pentagon said they haven’t heard from WikiLeaks yet. Not that the U.S. government hasn’t been trying to make contact — it demanded the documents be returned(!), and agents detained a WikiLeaks researcher at customs and then tried to talk with him again at a hacking conference this week. An Australian TV station gave a fascinating inside look at Assange’s life on the run, and Slate’s Jack Shafer contrasted Assange’s approach to leaking sensitive documents with the more government-friendly tack of traditional media outlets. WikiLeaks also had some news to report on the business-model side: It will begin collecting online micropayment donations through Flattr.

The ongoing discussion around WikiLeaks this week centered on what to do with the data it released. The Tyndall Report provided a thorough roundup of how TV news organizations responded to the leak, and several others pinned the rather ho-hum public reaction to the documents’ contents on a lack of context provided by news organizations. Former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg said the leak provides a new opportunity to shed an antiquated scoop-based definition of news and bring the reality of the war home to people. In a smart post musing on the structure of the modern news story, the Lab’s Megan Garber proposed an outlet dedicated solely to follow-up journalism, arguing that one of the biggest challenges in modern journalism is giving a sense of continuity to long-running stories. “What results is a flattening: the stories of our day, big and small, silly and significant, are leveled to the same plane, occupying the same space, essentially, in the wobbly little IKEA bookshelf that is the modular news bundle,” she wrote in a follow-up post.

Mashable also examined (in nifty infographic form!) how WikiLeaks changes the whistleblower-journalist relationship, while NPR wondered whether WikiLeaks is on the source or journalist side of equation. And PBS’ Idea Lab had something handy for news orgs: A guide to helping them think about how to handle large-scale document releases.

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Tumblr trends upward: The social blogging service Tumblr got the New York Times profile treatment this week, as the paper focused on its growing popularity among news organizations who are trying to jump on it as the next big social media trend — a form of communication somewhere between Twitter and blogging. The article noted that several prominent media brands have Tumblr accounts, though many of them aren’t doing much with theirs. Over at Mediaite, Anthony De Rosa, who runs the Tumblr account for the sports blog network SB Nation, said we can expect to see still more media outlets jump on the Tumblr bandwagon, especially because it rewards smart media companies who have a distinctive voice.

New York’s Nitasha Tiku tried to douse the hype, arguing that Mark Coatney’s often-mentioned Tumblr success for Newsweek “wasn’t thanks to the distribution channel on Tumblr, it was his irreverent, conversational style — and that will be difficult for the fresh-faced interns that old-media publications don’t pay to run their Tumblrs.” And Gawker gave us a graded rundown of traditional news orgs’ Tumblr accounts.

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Two Internet freedom scares: From The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times this week came two stories that have had many people concerned about issues of freedom and the web. First, the Journal ran a series on the alarming amount of your online data and behavior that companies track on behalf of advertisers. Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls argued that while the long-held ideal of intensely personal advertising is getting closer to reality, “the advertising business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: ‘consumers’ are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff.” Jeff Jarvis was much less moved by the Journal’s reporting, mocking it as scaremongering that tells us nothing new. Salon’s Dan Gillmor fell closer to Searls’ outrage than to Jarvis’ nonchalance, and media consultant Judy Sims said this series is a window into a complex future for display advertising, one that media executives need to become familiar with in a hurry.

Second, the Times unleashed an avalanche of commentary in the tech world with a report that Google and Verizon are moving toward an agreement that would allow companies to pay to get their content to web users more quickly, which would effectively end the passionately held open-Internet principle known as net neutrality. The FCC quickly suspended its closed-door net neutrality meetings, and despite denials from Google and Verizon (which Wired picked apart), a whole lot of whither-the-Internet concernensued. I’m not going to dig too deeply into this story here (I’d rather wait until we have something concrete to opine about), but here are the best quick guides to what this might mean: J-prof Dan Kennedy, Salon’s Dan Gillmor and ProPublica’s Marian Wang.

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Reading roundup: Just a couple of quick items this week:

— Thanks to Poynter, we got glimpses of a couple of softer paid-content options being tried out by GlobalPost and The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, that might be sprouting up soon elsewhere, too. The Lab’s Megan Garber profiled one of the new companies offering that type of porous paywall, MediaPass, and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka sifted through survey results to try to divine what The New York Times’ paywall might look like.

— Google’s social media platform Google Wave officially died this week, a little more than a year after it was born. Tech pioneer Dave Winer looked at why it never took off and drew a few lessons, too.

— Finally, the Lab’s Jonathan Stray took a look at some very cool things that The Guardian is doing with data journalism using free web-based tools. It’s a great case study in a blossoming area of journalism.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 30, 2010.]

WikiLeaks, data journalism and radical transparency: I’ll be covering two weeks in this review because of the Lab’s time off last week, but there really was only one story this week: WikiLeaks’ release of The War Logs, a set of 90,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan. There are about 32 angles to this story and I’ll try to hit most of them, but if you’re pressed for time, the essential reads on the situation are Steve Myers, C.W. Anderson, Clint Hendler and Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan.

WikiLeaks released the documents on its site on Sunday, cooperating with three news organizations — The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel — to allow them to produce special reports on the documents as they were released. The Nation’s Greg Mitchell ably rounded up commentary on the documents’ political implications (one tidbit from the documents for newsies: Evidence of the U.S. military paying Afghan journalists to write favorable stories), as the White House slammed the leaks and the Times for running them, and the Times defended its decision in the press and to its readers.

The comparison that immediately came to many people’s minds was the publication of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War in 1971, and two Washington Post articles examined the connection. (The Wall Street Journal took a look at both cases‘ First Amendment angles, too.) But several people, most notably ProPublica’s Richard Tofel and Slate’s Fred Kaplan, quickly countered that the War Logs don’t come close to the Pentagon Papers’ historical impact. They led a collective yawn that emerged from numerous political observers after the documents’ publication, with ho-hums coming from Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, and even the op-ed page of the Times itself. Slate media critic Jack Shafer suggested ways WikiLeaks could have planned its leak better to avoid such ennui.

But plenty of other folks found a lot that was interesting about the entire situation. (That, of course, is why I’m writing about it.) The Columbia Journalism Review’s Joel Meares argued that the military pundits dismissing the War Logs as old news are forgetting that this information is still putting an often-forgotten war back squarely in the public’s consciousness. But the most fascinating angle of this story to many of us future-of-news nerds was that this leak represents the entry of an entirely new kind of editorial process into mainstream news. That’s what the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal sensed early on, and several others sussed out as the week moved along. The Times’ David Carr called WikiLeaks’ quasi-publisher role both a new kind of hybrid journalism and an affirmation of the need for traditional reporting to provide context. Poynter’s Steve Myers made some astute observations about this new kind of journalism, including the rise of the source advocate and WikiLeaks’ trading information for credibility. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen noted thatWikiLeaks is the first “stateless news organization,” able to shed light on the secrets of the powerful because of freedom provided not by law, but by the web.

Both John McQuaid and Slate’s Anne Applebaum emphasized the need for data to be, as McQuaid put it, “marshaled in service to a story, an argument,” with McQuaid citing that as reason for excitement about journalism and Applebaum calling it a case for traditional reporting. Here at the Lab, CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson put a lot this discussion into perspective with two perceptive postson WikiLeaks as the coming-out party for data journalism. He described its value well: “In these recent stories, its not the presence of something new, but the ability to tease a pattern out of a lot of little things we already know that’s the big deal.”

As for WikiLeaks itself, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Clint Hendler provided a fascinating account of how its scoop ended up in three of the world’s major newspapers, including differences in WikiLeaks’ and the papers’ characterization of WikiLeaks’ involvement, which might help explain its public post-publication falling-out with the Times. The Times profiled WikiLeaks and its enigmatic founder, Julian Assange, and several others trained their criticism on WikiLeaks itself — specifically, on the group’s insistence on radical transparency from others but extreme secrecy from itself. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz said WikiLeaks is “a global power unto itself,” not subject to any checks and balances, and former military reporter Jamie McIntyre called WikiLeaks “anti-privacy terrorists.”

Several others were skeptical of Assange’s motives and secrecy, and Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wondered how we could square public trust with such a commitment to anonymity. In a smart Huffington Post analysis of that issue, Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan presented this new type of news organization as a natural consequence of the new cultural architecture (the “adhocracy,” as they call it) of the web: “These technologies lend themselves to new forms of power and influence that are neither bureaucratic nor centralized in traditional ways, nor are they generally responsive to traditional means of accountability.”

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Keeping readers out with a paywall: The Times and Sunday Times of London put up their online paywall earlier this month, the first of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to set off on his paid-content mission (though some other properties, like The Wall Street Journal, have long charged for online access). Last week, we got some preliminary figures indicating how life behind the wall is going so far: Former Times media reporter Dan Sabbagh said that 150,000 of the Times’ online readers (12 percent of its pre-wall visitors) had registered for free trials during the paywall’s first two weeks, with 15,000 signing on as paying subscribers and 12,500 subscribing to the iPad app. PaidContent also noted that the Times’ overall web traffic is down about 67 percent, adding that the Times will probably tout these types of numbers as a success.

The Guardian did its own math and found that the Times’ online readership is actually down about 90 percent — exactly in line with what the paper’s leaders and industry analysts were expecting. Everyone noted that this is exactly what Murdoch and the Times wanted out of their paywall — to cut down on drive-by readers and wring more revenue out of the core of loyal ones. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram explained that rationale well, then ripped it apart, calling it “fundamentally a resignation from the open web” because it keeps readers from sharing (or marketing) it with others. SEOmoz’s Tom Critchlow looked at the Times’ paywall interface and gave it a tepid review.

Meanwhile, another British newspaper that charges for online access, the Financial Times, is boasting strong growth in online revenue. The FT’s CEO, John Ridding, credited the paper’s metered paid-content system and offered a moral argument for paid access online, drawing on Time founder Henry Luce’s idea that an exclusively advertising-reliant model weakens the bond between a publication and its readers.

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Flipboard and the future of mobile media: In just four months, we’ve already seen quite a few attention-grabbing iPad apps, but probably none have gotten techies’ hearts racing quite like Flipboard, which was launched last week amid an ocean of hype. As Mashable explained, Flipboard combines social media and news sources of the user’s choosing to create what’s essentially a socially edited magazine for the iPad. The app got rave reviews from tech titans like Robert Scoble and ReadWriteWeb, which helped build up enough demand that it spent most of its first few post-release days crashed from being over capacity.

Jen McFadden marveled at Flipboard’s potential for mobile advertising, given its ability to merge the rich advertising experience of the iPad with the targeted advertising possibilities through social media, though Martin Belam wondered whether the app might end up being “yet another layer of disintermediation that took away some of my abilities to understand how and when my content was being used, or to monetise my work.” Tech pioneer Dave Winer saw Flipboard as one half of a brilliant innovation for mobile media and challenged Flipboard to encourage developers to create the other half.

At the tech blog Gizmodo, Joel Johnson broke in to ask a pertinent question: Is Flipboard legal? The app scrapes content directly from other sites, rather than through RSS, like the Pulse Reader. Flipboard’s defense is that it only offers previews (if you want to read the whole thing, you have to click on “Read on Web”), but Johnson delved into some of the less black-and-white scenarios and legal issues, too. (Flipboard, for example, takes full images, and though it is free for now, its executives plan to sell their own ads around the content under revenue-sharing agreements.) Stowe Boyd took those questions a step further and looked at possible challenges down the road from social media providers like Facebook.

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A new perspective on content farms: Few people had heard of the term “content farms” about a year ago, but by now there are few issues that get blood boiling in future-of-journalism circles quite like that one. PBS MediaShift’s eight-part series on content farms, published starting last week, is an ideal resource to catch you up on what those companies are, why people are so worked up about them, and what they might mean for journalism. (MediaShift defines “content farm” as a company that produces online content on a massive scale; I, like Jay Rosen, would define it more narrowly, based on algorithm- and revenue-driven editing.)

The series includes an overview of some of the major players on the online content scene, pictures of what writing for and training at a content farm is like, and two posts on the world of large-scale hyperlocal news. It also features an interesting defense of content farms by Dorian Benkoil, who argues that large-scale online content creators are merely disrupting an inefficient, expensive industry (traditional media) that was ripe for a kick in the pants.

Demand Media’s Jeremy Reed responded to the series with a note to the company’s writers that “You are not a nameless, faceless, soul-less group of people on a ‘farm.’ We are not a robotic organization that’s only concerned about numbers and data. We are a media company. We work together to tell stories,” and Yahoo Media’s Jimmy Pitaro defended the algorithm-as-editor model in an interview with Forbes. Outspoken content-farm critic Jason Fry softened his views, too, urging news organizations to learn from their algorithm-driven approach and let their audiences play a greater role in determining their coverage.

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Reading roundup: A few developments and ideas to take a look at before the weekend:

— We’ve written about the FTC’s upcoming report on journalism and public policy earlier this summer, and Google added its own comments to the public record last week, urging the FTC to move away from “protectionist barriers.” Google-watcher Jeff Jarvis gave the statement a hearty amen, and the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby chimed in against a government subsidy for journalism.

— Former equity analyst Henry Blodget celebrated The Business Insider’s third birthday with a very pessimistic forecast of The New York Times’ future, and, by extension, the traditional media’s as well. Meanwhile, Judy Sims targeted a failure to focus on ROI as a cause of newspapers’ demise.

— The Columbia Journalism Review devoted a feature to the rise of private news, in which news organizations are devoted to a niche topic for an intentionally limited audience.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 16, 2010.]

Should papers charge for obits online?: We’ve written a whole bunch about Steve Brill’s paid-online-news venture Journalism Online around these parts, and the company’s first Press+ system went live on a newspaper site this week, with Pennsylvania’s LancasterOnline obits section going to a metered pay model for out-of-town visitors. PaidContent has a good summary of how the arrangement works: Out-of-towners get to view seven obits a month, after which point they’re asked to pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year for more access. Obits make up only 6 percent of the site’s pageviews, but the paper’s editor is estimating $50,000 to $150,000 in revenue from the paywall.

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell offered a detailed look at the numbers behind the decision and said the plan has several characteristics in its favor: It has valuable content that’s tough to find elsewhere, flexible payment, and doesn’t alienate core (local) readers. (He did note, though, that the paper isn’t providing anything new of value.) Most other media watchers on the web weren’t so impressed. MinnPost’s David Brauer was skeptical of Lancaster’s revenue projections, but noted that obits are a big deal for small-town papers. Lost Remote’s David Weinfeld was dubious of the estimates, too, wondering how many out-of-towners would actually be willing to pay to read obit after obit. GrowthSpur’s Mark Potts’ denouncement of the plan is the most sweeping: “Every assumption it’s based on—from projected audience to the percentage of readers that might be willing to pay—is flawed.”

TBD’s Steve Buttry posted his own critique of the plan, centering on the fact that the paper is double-dipping by charging people to both read and publish obits. The paper’s editor, Ernie Schreiber, fired back with a rebuttal (the experiment is intended to help define their online audience, he said, and no, they’re not double-dipping any more than charging for an ad and a subscription), and Buttry responded with a point-by-point counter. Finally, Buttry came up with the most constructive part of the discussion: A proposal for newspapers on how to handle obituaries, with seven different free and paid obit options for newspapers to offer families. Jeff Sonderman offered a different type of proposal, arguing that obituaries should be free to place and read, because if they aren’t, they’re about to be Craigslisted.

Meanwhile, MinnPost’s Brauer discovered that all you need to bypass the paywall is FireFox’s NoScript add-on, and Schreiber added a few more work-arounds while responding that he’s not worried, because the tech-geek and obit-junkie crowds don’t have a whole lot of overlap. Reuters’ Felix Salmon backed Schreiber up, arguing that a loose paywall is much better than a firm one that unwittingly harasses loyal customers.

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A new level of news-advertising fusion: We may have caught a glimpse into one less-than-savory aspect of the future of journalism late last week through the sports media world, when ESPN aired “The Decision.” Here’s what happened, for the sports-averse: 25-year-old NBA superstar LeBron James was set to make his much-anticipated free agency decision this summer, and ESPN agreed to air James’ announcement of which team he’d play for last Thursday night on a one-hour special. The arrangement originated from freelance sportscaster Jim Gray and James’ marketing company, which dictated the site of the special, James’ interviewer (Gray, naturally), and a deal in which the show’s advertising proceeds (all lined up by James’ company) would go toward James’ designated charity, the Boys and Girls Club. ESPN insisted that it would otherwise have full editorial control.

The show — and particularly the manner in which it was set up — received universally scathing reviews from sports media watchers: Sports Illustrated media critic Richard Deitsch called it “the worst thing ESPN has ever put its name to,” legendary sportswriter Buzz Bissinger said ESPN’s ethical conflict was so big it can never be fully trusted as a news source, Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik fumed that “never in the history of sports has the media behaved in a such a whored-out, dazed, confused and crass a manner,” and LA Times media critic James Rainey accused ESPN of playing up both sides of a spectacle it created.

The ethical conflict seemed even worse when there was a report that Gray, the interviewer, was paid by James, rather than ESPN (as it turned out, ESPN covered his expenses, but other than that he says he wasn’t paid at all). But the true details, as revealed by Advertising Age, were almost as shocking: ESPN had previously hoped to arrange a special program before its sports awards show, the ESPYs, with James handing out the first award just after his announcement.

Ad Age’s phenomenal article hammered home another important point for those concerned about the future of news: This program represented a new level of integration between advertising and news, and even a new breed of advertiser-driven news programming. Ad Age detailed the remarkable amount of exposure that the program’s advertisers received, and included superagent Ari Emanuel, the man who orchestrated the arrangement, boasting that “we’re getting closer to pushing the needle on advertiser-content programming.” In his typically overheated style, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi called the show “the prototype for all future news coverage,” in which a few dominant news organizations create their own versions of reality in a race for advertising money, while a few scattered web denizens try to ferret out the real story.

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Replacing the newspaper, or complementing it?: This week, the University of Missouri School of Journalism publicized a study that its scholars published this spring comparing citizen-driven news sites and blogs with daily newspaper websites. The takeaway claim from Mizzou’s press release — and, in turn, Editor & Publisher’s blurb — was that citizen journalism sites aren’t replacing the work that was being done by downsizing traditional news organizations. Not surprisingly, that drew a few people’s criticism: Ars Technica’s John Timmer said the study provides evidence not so much that citizen-driven sites are doing poorly, but that legacy media sites are embracing many of the web’s best practices. He and TBD’s Jeff Sonderman also pointed out that if one startup news site is lacking in an area, web users are smart enough to just find another one. The question isn’t whether a citizen journalism site can replace a newspaper site, Sonderman said, it’s whether a whole amateur system, with its capacity for growth and specialization, can complement or replace the one newspaper site in town.

TBD’s Steve Buttry (who must have had a lot of free time this week) delivered a point-by-point critique of the site, making a couple of salient points: The study ignores the recent spate of professional online-only news organizations and vastly over-represents traditional news sites’ relative numbers, and, of course, the long-argued point that the question of whether one type of journalism can replace another is silly and pointless. One of the Mizzou scholars responded to Buttry, which he quotes at the end of his post, that the researchers had no old-media agenda.

After hearing about all of that debate, it’s kind of strange to read the study itself, because it doesn’t actually include any firm conclusions about the ability of citizen-led sites to replace newspapers. In its discussion section, the study does make a passing reference to “the inability of citizen news sites to become substitutes for daily newspaper sites” and briefly states that those sites would be better substitutes for weekly papers, but the overall conclusion of the study is that citizen sites work better as complements to traditional media, filling in hyperlocal news and opinion that newspapers have abandoned. That’s quite similar to the main point that Buttry and Sonderman are making. The study’s guiding question may be deeply flawed, as those two note, but its endpoint isn’t nearly as inflammatory as it was publicized to be.

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Looking at a BBC for the U.S.: A few folks went another round in the government-subsidy-for-news debate this week when Columbia University president Lee Bollinger wrote an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal advocating for a stronger public-media system in the U.S., one that could go toe-to-toe with the BBC. Bollinger argued that we’re already trusting journalists to write independent accounts of corporate scandals like the BP oil spill while their news organizations take millions of dollars in advertising from those companies, so why would journalism’s ethical standards change once the government is involved?

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson agreed that government-funded journalism doesn’t have to be a terrifying prospect, but several others online took issue with that stance: CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis said we need to teach journalists to build self-sustaining businesses instead, and two British j-profs, George Brock and Roy Greenslade, both argued that Bollinger needs to wake up and see the non-institutional journalistic ecosystem that’s springing up to complement crumbling traditional media institutions. But the people who do want an American BBC are in luck, because the site launched this week.

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Reading roundup: A few cool things to think on this weekend:

— Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review has a long story on what is a safe bet to be one of the two or three most talked about issues in the industry over the next year: How to bring in revenue from mobile media.

— French media consultant Frederic Filloux asks what he rightly calls “an unpleasant question”: Do American newspapers have too many journalists? It’s not a popular argument, but he has some statistics worth thinking about.

— Adam Rifkin has a well-written post that’s been making the rounds lately about why Google doesn’t do social well: It’s about getting in, getting out and getting things done, while social media’s about sucking you in.

— The New York Times and the Lab have profiles of two startups, Techmeme and Spotery, that are living examples of the growing role of human-powered editing alongside algorithmic authority. And Judy Sims urges newspapers to embrace the social nature of life (and news) online.

— Finally, news you can use: A great Poynter feature on ways news organizations can use Tumblr, from someone who used it very well: Mark Coatney, formerly of Newsweek, now of Tumblr.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 9, 2010.]

Time’s non-pay paywall: Thanks to some collaborative online sleuthing — OK, basically just wandering around on a website and asking some simple questions — we found out that Time magazine is planning an online paywall. Reuters’ Felix Salmon ran into the wall first a few weeks ago, but saw that it had disappeared by the next day. Then on Tuesday, the Lab’s Josh Benton noticed it again, pointing out that this was an odd kind of paywall — one without any sort of way to pay online (”a paywall without a door,” in his words).

All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka got word the next day that the paywall is part of a company-wide strategy at Time Inc. to separate its print and iPad content from its online material. The Lab found out that Time does indeed have a plan to give that paywall a door and provide a way to purchase articles online, and The New York Times reported that this non-pay wall is part of a gradual effort to retrain readers to pay for content online and noted that not everything from the magazine is gone from the website.

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer called the move not a paywall, but “the magazine equivalent of a condom” — a way to separate online readers from its print content. She noted that the move limits non-print access to Time to a very select group of people — namely, iPad owners. Essentially, it’s a hardware requirement to read Time magazine, something Publish2’s Scott Karp asked whether we’re going to start to seeing more of.

All Things Digital’s Kafka wondered why Time wouldn’t just offer its print articles for free if the magazine’s print and online audiences were as separate as they’re typically said to be. New York’s Chris Rovsar posited that the new wall is about protecting its $4.99 iPad app: If all your print stuff is available through the iPad browser for free, why buy the app? DailyFinance media critic Jeff Bercovici made the same point and argued that while Time may appear forward-thinking here, this move is really a regression. Newsweek’s Mark Coatney, a former Time staffer, was ruthless in his assessment of the strategy, saying that it all comes back to value, and Time hasn’t articulated why it’s print content is worth paying for, but its online stuff isn’t.

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Pay vs. free in Britain: Time was far from the only paywall news this past week: Three relatively small Gannett papers put up a $9.95-a-month paywall last Thursday, and the most important new paywall may have been at The Times of London and The Sunday Times, two of Britain’s oldest and most respected publications, which began charging for everything on their site last Friday. That development is particularly important because it’s the first move in the paid-content crusade that Rupert Murdoch has been gearing up for since last summer.

Steve Outing and Poynter’s Bill Mitchell noted that the Times’ paywall is among the most impenetrable we’ve seen yet in newspapers: All non-subscribers can see is the homepage, and even the headlines are blocked from online news aggregators. New York’s Chris Rovsar took stock of what The New York Times (planning its own paid-content system next year) could learn from how the Times rolled out its paywall, and basically, it boils down to, “Whatever they did, just don’t do it.” He and the Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford ripped the Times’ paid-content strategy, criticizing it for not being RSS-compatible, not linking, and giving away desperate-looking freebies. (Rovsar and Ponsford do acknowledge that the site is cheap and pretty, respectively.) British journalist Kevin Anderson used the Times’ paywall as an opportunity to light into the thinking that leads newspapers to charge for content online in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Guardian, another prominent British paper which is staunchly in favor of free online content, released a Wordpress plugin that allows blogs and websites to embed the full text of Guardian stories for free. (Steve Outing demonstrated with a post on the iPad.) It’s an unprecedented move, and one that made for a pretty easy contrast with the Times’ protectionist strategy online. Outing did it most explicitly in two posts, arguing that the Guardian’s strategy taps into a worldwide revenue potential, while the Times relies on its brand-loyal British readers. Murdoch “apparently still doesn’t understand that this whole pay-for-news-online thing is not about the needs of publishers like him. It’s about what the audience for news is willing to do and willing to pay for,” he wrote.

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Learning from (and fighting with) content farms: Since acquiring the online content provider Associated Content in May, Yahoo has become the latest online media company to begin producing articles based on a calculation of search terms, including for its new news blog, The Upshot. The Wrap’s Dylan Stableford took a look at these “content farms,” focusing on why journalists hate them and what news organizations might be able to learn from them. (On the latter point, Stableford’s sources said content farms’ acute attentiveness to what people are interested in reading could be particularly instructive.)

One of the people Stableford quotes, NYU professor Jay Rosen, gets some extended time on the subject, and another, Jason Fry, posted some additional thoughts, too. Fry, who is quoted in the article as saying, “If you want to know how our profession ends, look at Demand Media,” clarified his stance a bit, saying that what bugs him is not the low pay, but the lack of quality. Still, he acknowledged that because of cost-cutting, many small- and medium-sized newspapers’ content is just as mediocre. Peter Berger, a CEO of Suite101.com, one of those content generators, said the concern from news organizations is a red herring, and his industry really presents the biggest threat to non-fiction books.

Canadian writer Liz Metcalfe voiced some similar thoughts, arguing that the problem with the “demand content” model isn’t the model itself, but the poor quality of what gets produced. Newspapers should find a way to incorporate the model while producing high-quality material, and beat the content farms at their own game, she said. On the other hand, Harvard prof Ethan Zuckerman said dictating content based on search would be a bad way to run a newspaper: “You’d give up the critical ability to push topics and parts of the world that readers might not be interested in, but need to know about to be an engaged, informed citizen.”

A private group called the Internet Content Syndication Council wants to do something about these dastardly villains, and they’re exploring a few options, including drafting a set of content-quality guidelines, licensing content syndicators and asking Google to tweak its search formula. CNET’s Caroline McCarthy wondered what a guideline or licensing system would do with bloggers.

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Chronicling a growing shift to mobile: The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a couple of fascinating studies in the past week, the first on the future of social relations online and the second a survey of Americans’ mobile use. The latter study in particular turned up a raft of interesting statistics, led by the finding that 59 percent of adults go online wirelessly, including 47 percent of Americans with their laptops and 40 percent with their cell phones.

Poynter’s Mobile Media focused on the rise in “non-voice” uses for cell phones over the past year (Silicon Alley Insider has it in graphical form). The New York Times and Washington Post centered on the survey’s finding that African-Americans, Hispanics, young people and poorer Americans are among the heaviest mobile media users, with the Times stating that “the image of the affluent and white cellphone owner as the prototypical mobile Web user seems to be a mistaken one.”

Here at the Lab, Laura McGann seized on another tidbit from the study indicating that about a fifth of young adults have made a donation via their cell phone. She tied that finding to the public radio station WBUR’s attempt to find a way to allow users to donate via an iPhone app, something Apple doesn’t allow, asking how nonprofit news orgs might be able to find a way to tap into that willingness to give through their cell phones.

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Reading roundup: Lots of really thoughtful stuff this week that’s well worth your time (I assume it is, anyway — maybe your time’s much more valuable than mine):

— The debate over objectivity and journalism raged on this week, fueled by the firing of CNN’s Octavia Nasr over a remark she made on Twitter. Many of the arguments circled around to the same ground we’ve covered with the Gen. McChrystal and Dave Weigel flare-ups, but I wanted to highlight three takes that stand out: Salon’s Dan Gillmor on America’s “technically good subservient press,” Jay Rosen on “objectivity as a form of persuasion,” and Mediaite’s Philip Bump on a journalism of individuals.

— Many new media folks have been following the fate of the nonprofit Texas Tribune, and the Columbia Journalism Review has apretty definitive account of where they stand.

— ReadWriteWeb has a handy resource for zooming out and taking a look at the big picture — a summary of five key web trends so far at 2010’s halfway point.

— Spot.Us’ David Cohn takes a look at the short-lived journalism startup NewsTilt and comes away with some helpful lessons.

— Finally, Google researcher Paul Adams has a presentation on the problems with the way social media is designed that’s been making its way around the web. It’s a whopping 216 slides, but it’s a simple yet insightful glance at what feels just a little bit wrong about our social interactions online and why.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 2, 2010.]

Finding a place for a new breed of journalist: Laura touched on the resignation of Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel in last week’s review, and several of the questions she raised were ones people have been batting around in the week since then. Here’s what happened (and for those of you looking for a more narrative version, Jay Rosen has you covered via audio): Weigel, who writes a blog for the Post on the conservative movement, wrote a few emails on an off-the-record journalists’ listserv called Journolist bashing a few members of that movement (most notably Matt Drudge and Ron Paul). Those emails were leaked, the conservative blogosphere went nuts, and Weigel apologized, then resigned from the Post the next day. Journolist founder Ezra Klein shut the listserv down, and Weigel was apologetic in his own postmortem of the situation, attributing his comments to hubris toward conservatives designed to get other journalists to like him.

This was The Episode That Launched A Thousand Blog Posts, so I’ll be sticking to the journalistic angles that came up, rather than the political ones. A lot of those issues seemed to come back to two posts by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that included attacks on Weigel by anonymous Post staffers, the tone of which is best summed up by Goldberg’s own words: “The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.” (Goldberg did quickly back down a bit.) Fellow Post blogger Greg Sargent defended Weigel (and Klein, a young Post blogger who’s an outspoken liberal) by arguing that just because they express opinions doesn’t make them any less of a reporter. New media guru Jeff Jarvis decried the “myth of the opinionless man” that Weigel was bound to, and Salon’s Ned Resnikoff called for the end of neutral reporting, urging journalists to simply disclose their biases to the public instead.

Several other observers posited that many of the problems with this situation stemmed from a false dichotomy between “reporting” and “opinion.” That compartmentalization was best expressed by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, who asked of the Post’s bloggers, “Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?” (He proposed that the Post have one of each cover conservatives.) The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf said the Post is imposing binary categories on its reporters that don’t fit real life, when the two in fact aren’t mutually exclusive. Blogging historian and former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg made a similar point, suggesting Post “simply lets them be bloggers — writers with a point of view that emerges, post by post.” The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait pointed out that the Post has created a type of writer that it doesn’t know what to do with, while Jim Henley offered a helpful definition of the “blog-reporter ethos” that those writers embody.

Finally, a few other points well worth pondering: Nate Silver, whose opinionated political blog FiveThirtyEight just got picked up by The New York Times, marveled at how much more outrageous the response seemed to be than the comments themselves and wondered if even opinions expressed in private are now considered enough to disqualify a reporter. John McQuaid saw the episode as evidence that journalism traditionalists and the “view from nowhere” political press still rule in Washington, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx saw in the conflict a backlash against a new generation of journalists who emphasize personal voice, as well as “an opportunity to establish a new set of journalistic values” — fair-mindedness and intellectual honesty backed by serious reporting, rather than a veneer of impartiality.

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Google News gets a makeover: For the first time since it was launched in 2002, Google News got a significant redesign this week. Now, a little ways down from the top of the page is what Google called “the new heart of the homepage” — a personalized “News for you” section. That area can be adjusted to highlight or hide subjects, individual news topics, or certain news sources. The redesign is also emphasizing its Spotlight section of in-depth stories, as well as user-bookmarked stories. Search Engine Land has a nice visual overview of what’s changed.

The Lab’s Megan Garber also has a helpful summary of the changes, noting that “the new site is trying to balance two major, and often conflicting, goals of news consumption: personalization and serendipity.” All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka wondered how many people are actually going to take the time to customize their page, under the idea that anybody news-savvy enough to do so is probably getting their news through a more comprehensive source like RSS or Twitter. Jay Rosen wanted to know what news sources people choose to see less of. Meanwhile, in an interview with MediaBistro, Google News lead engineer Krishna Bharat gave a good picture of where Google News has been and where it’s heading.

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A possible polling fraud revealed: For the past year and a half, the liberal political blog Daily Kos has been running a weekly poll, something that’s reasonably significant because, well, it’s a blog doing something that only traditional news organizations have historically done. This week, Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote that he will be suing Research 2000, the company that conducted the polls for the blog. The decision was based on a report done by three independent analysts that found some serious anomalies that seem to be indicators that polls might be fraudulent. Zuniga renounced his work based on Research 2000’s polls and said, “I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent detailed the planned suit, including a clear accusation from Kos’ lawyer that the polls were fraudulent, not just sloppy: “They handed us fiction and told us it was fact. … It’s pretty damn clear that numbers were fabricated, and that the polling that we paid for was not performed.” Research 2000 president Del Ali asserted the properness of his polls, and his lawyer called the fraud allegation “absurd” and threatened to countersue. Polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who began his blog as a Kos commenter, echoed the study’s concerns, then was hit with a cease-and-desist letter from Research 2000’s attorney. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s John Cook laid out Research 2000’s troubled financial history.

This may seem like just a messy he-said, she-said lawsuit involving two individual organizations, but as Sargent and The New York Times pointed out, Research 2000’s work is cited by a number of mainstream news organizations (including the Post), and this could cause people to begin asking serious questions about the reliability of polling data. As trust in journalistic institutions wanes, the para-journalistic institution of polling may be about to take a big credibility hit here, too.

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How much do reporters need to disclose?: Conversation about last week’s Rolling Stone story on Gen. Stanley McChrystal continued to trickle out, especially regarding that tricky relationship between journalists and their sources. CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan stoked much of it when she criticized the article’s author, Michael Hastings, for being dishonest about his intentions and violating an unspoken agreement not to report the informal banter of military officials. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald saw the argument as a perfect contrast between adversarial watchdog journalism and journalism built on access, and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi came out firing with a characteristically inspired rant against Logan’s argument: “According to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass!”

The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson backed Taibbi up, but DailyFinance’s Jeff Bercovici rapped Taibbi’s knuckles for his disregard for the facts. Military and media blogger Jamie McIntyre found a spot in between Logan and Taibbi in ruling on their claims point by point. Politico takes a look at the entire discussion, paying special attention to how relationships work for other military reporters and what this flap might mean for them in the future. On another angle, the Lab’s Jason Fry used the story to examine whether the fragmentation of content is going to end up killing some news brands.

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Reading roundup: We’ve had a longer-than-usual review this week, so I’ll fly through some things and get you on your way to the weekend. There’s still some really fascinating stuff to get to, though:

— A newly released Harvard study found that newspapers overwhelmingly referred to waterboarding as torture until the George W. Bush administration began defining it as something other than torture, at which point their description of it became much less harsh. (They still largely described it as torture when other countries were doing it, though.) The study prompted quite a bit of anger about the American media’s “craven cowardice” and subservience to government, as well as its unwillingness to “express opinion” by calling a spade a spade. James Joyner noted that it’s complicated and The New York Times said that calling it torture was taking sides, though the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent said not calling it torture is taking a side, too.

— I was gone last week, so I didn’t get a chance to highlight this thoughtful post by the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf on what it takes to replace the local beat reporter. As for the newspaper itself, the folks at Reason gave you a section-by-section guide to replacing your newspaper consumption habit.

— Finally, in the you-must-bookmark-this category: Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee put together an indispensable glossary of tech terms for journalists. Whether you’re working on the web or not, I’d advise reading it and digging deeper into any of the terms you still don’t quite understand.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 18, 2010.]

The FTC’s last round of input: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wrapped up its series of forums on journalism and public policy Tuesday, and this forum got quite a bit more attention than the others — partly because it’s the last one, and partly because the FTC released its draft of possible policy proposals a few weeks ago, which gave people something concrete to pick apart.

Before the forum, The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters and TBD’s Steve Buttry both gave good summaries of what various people are saying about the issue, and Save the News’ Fiona Morgan gave a helpful, detailed description of what went on at the forum itself. As for the FTC’s final report due out this fall, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Olga Kharif both wrote that we’re unlikely to see any proposals for significant government intervention in the news business. Edmonds offers a handful of reasons that the idea has fallen out of favor: Newspapers’ financial fortunes have improved lately, we’ve seen an explosion of strongly backed digital journalism experiments, the government might not be able to do it well, and news organizations themselves aren’t sure what they want from Uncle Sam. Both Edmonds and Kharif also noted that Congress won’t be willing to be seen as bailing out another for-profit industry.

A few more voices — media economics professor Robert Picard, TBD’s Mandy Jenkins and conservative Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi — joined the anti-subsidy chorus this week, and the Times’ Eric Pfanner provided some evidence to back them up, pointing out that countries with the largest direct subsidies for newspapers also have the lowest newspaper readership. (He also noted the U.S. media’s extreme reliance on advertising compared with the rest of the world.)

Other folks offered a few ideas of what policy proposals they’d like to see the FTC endorse. Edmonds wants to see nonprofits allowed to accept advertising, j-prof C.W. Anderson says public policy has a role in “fostering an entrepreneurial, innovative, reinvented journalistic sphere,” Salon’s Dan Gillmor stumps for open broadband subsidies, and Save the News’ Josh Stearns lists five ideas he wants endorsed. The themes that run across several of those people’s proposals are clear: Net neutrality, expanded broadband, open government data, and encouragement for innovation, rather than protection for traditional media businesses.

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Google News goes human: One low-key but potentially significant development from late last week: As the Lab’s Megan Garber reported, Google News began an experiment called Editors’ Picks, in which editors from partner news organizations like the BBC and the Washington Post curate lists of news articles to go along with Google’s algorithm-run selections. Garber notes what a shift this is from Google’s historical approach to news aggregation and ties it to the quest for serendipity: “This is one way of replicating the offline experience of serendipity-via-bundling within the sometimes scattered experience of online news consumption,” she says.

GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram saw in the project a similar sign of a shift toward human-powered news aggregation at Google, though he noted that Google has tried numerous news-related experiments that never caught on. That’s exactly what a Google spokesperson told paidContent’s Staci Kramer, and both sites mentioned Google’s ill-fated commenting experiment as an example.

Still, Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik loved this idea, making a case for the value of human editors in making sure that people are reading what they need to know online as well as what they want to know. In other Google News news, its creator, Krishna Bharat, gave a long interview in which he discussed its role in journalism and his idea of what the future of journalism might look like.

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Murdoch picks up some paid-content pieces: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. continued its long, steady march toward a paid-news future with a few small but potentially important moves this week: It bought the Skiff mobile software platform from the newspaper chain Hearst — not the Skiff e-reader itself, though it seems they’re working on that — invested in Journalism Online, Steve Brill’s news paid-content venture, and bid to take full control of British Sky Broadcasting, Europe’s largest for-pay broadcaster.

Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein called the first two moves huge news for the digital news business, arguing that Murdoch is setting the standard for the way everyone else does business online. “This is about laying the groundwork for the very process by which people pay for that news; namely, the device they consume it on and the virtual storefront that handles the payment,” he wrote. And with BSkyB’s digital music and broadband services, it looks like Murdoch’s hoping to add another major asset in his plans to find new ways to get people to pay for not only news, but digital entertainment media as well.

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A theory of the political press defined: If you’ve been following NYU professor Jay Rosen on Twitter or reading his blog for any length of time, you’ve probably absorbed a general sense of his guiding philosophy about the American political press. But this week he posted the definitive explanation of that philosophy, which is most simply that political journalists’ prevailing ideology is one of false equivalency between two sides of political extremists, while they (and their favorite politicians) stand at the sane, savvy, skeptical center. It’s obviously just one critic’s opinion, but it’s a remarkably helpful frame to help interpret what the Washington press corps values and why it does what it does.

There’s some fascinating discussion about Rosen’s ideas in the lengthy comments of his post, and he got a few thoughtful responses elsewhere, as well. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf agreed with the main thrust of Rosen’s argument, though he challenged the assertion that political journalists are “big believers in the law of unintended consequences” who don’t pay much attention to the direct consequences of public policy. The Economist likewise endorses the post but counters that Rosen’s concepts of “he said, she said journalism” and “the sphere of deviance” are at odds. Over at Slate, Tom Scocca affirms a point of Rosen’s about journalists’ disregard for street protests, and Australian journalist Jonathan Holmes adapted the concept to the Australian media.

Also, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder — as a political editor, part of the tribe Rosen was dissecting — asked the professor what he would have the political press think instead. Rosen has promised an answer.

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Future-of-news thoughts and innovation: Before we get to the reading roundup, a note on a couple of interesting items that the Lab has been highlighting this week. First, our sister publication, Nieman Reports, has published its quarterly issue, which is always chock-full of thought-provoking essays on journalism in transition. This summer’s issue is titled “What’s Next for News?” so it’s right along the lines of the stuff we write about here at the Lab. The Lab has been pointing out several of the issue’s 36 pieces — including thoughts on the Internet’s effects on our thinking, the editor-as-gatekeeper role, and the semantic web — but there’s plenty more out there, so go look around.

Second, the Knight News Challenge announced the 12 winners of its $2.74 million worth of grants for innovative journalism projects. The Lab’s Josh Benton has a rundown of the winners and a few observations about the crop as a whole, and we’ve got profiles of a few of the initiatives, too. There’s Stroome, the wiki-style collaborative video-editing site; Public Radio Exchange, a crowdfunding project for public radio journalism; and Order in the Court 2.0, an effort to open up courtrooms through new media. They should have several more profiles up over the next few days (probably even before this post is published) if you’re in the mood to be encouraged by innovation in news.

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Reading roundup: Two ongoing discussions, one news economics development, and one thoughtful piece on context:

— Two news economics experts, Alan Mutter and Frederic Filloux, weighed in this week with their assessments of iPad news apps so far. Mutter looks at the winners and losers, and Filloux talks about what makes iPad news apps work.

— We’ve been hearing for a couple of weeks about what the Internet is (or isn’t) doing to our brains, and that conversation continued with a defense of the web by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton a caution to doomsayers by psychology professor Steven Pinker.

— Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated this week that Internet ad revenue will surpass newspaper ad revenue by 2014. Both will still remain behind TV ad revenue, they said.)

— Finally, former journalist John Zhu wrote a wonderful explanation of the state of, well, explanation in the news. (Complete with helpful visual aids!) If you’re interested at all in how journalists can make complex stories more understandable to people, this is the perfect place to start putting together where we’ve been and where we could be going.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 11, 2010.]

The Times has the Pulse (briefly) pulled: Last week, I noted one of the more interesting iPad news apps: The Pulse Reader, designed by two Stanford grad students, is a stylish news aggregator. But on Monday, the app was pulled from the iTunes store based on a claim that it infringes on The New York Times’ copyright after some Times folks saw the paper’s own blog post about the reader. The app was reinstated the next day, but the debate over copyright, aggregation and mobile apps had already taken off.

The central point of the Times’ argument was that the $3.99 app was an illegal attempt to make money off of the Times’ (and the Boston Globe’s) free, publicly available RSS feeds. (The paper also objected to app’s placement of the Times’ content within a frame on the iPad.) The Citizen Media Law Project’s Kimberley Isbell helpfully broke down the Times’ claims and the Pulse Reader’s possible fair-use defenses, noting the Times articles’ free accessibility and the relatively small article portions displayed on the reader.

Reaction on the web weighed overwhelmingly against the Times: Wired contended that every piece of paid software used to access the Times’ site would be outlawed by the paper’s logic, while Techdirt’s Mike Masnick argued that Pulse was selling its software, not the Times’ feeds. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wondered whether the Times was declaring war on news aggregators, and the Sydney Morning Herald reasoned that if the Times is offering its RSS for free, it can’t complain when someone designs a reader to view it. Blogging and RSS vet Dave Winer had the harshest response in a post arguing that the Times is in the business of news production, not distribution: “Look, if the Times is depending on stopping those two kids for its future, then the Times has no future.“

The reader’s creators were just as baffled as anybody about why the app was reinstated, a Times’ spokesman apparently tried to pass off the complaint as a mistake, though that response doesn’t exactly square with the Times’ Martin Nisenholtz’s reiteration of the paper’s case to paidContent’s Staci Kramer. As for whether this claim would apply beyond the Pulse Reader, Nisenholtz said it would be handled “on a case by case basis.”

We had plenty of other iPad news this week, too — Jobs made a number of mostly iPhone-related announcements at a conference on Monday, and the Lab’s Josh Benton explained what they mean for mobile news. A few highlights: Apple’s not too concerned about app-banning controversies, but it is moving decisively on ebooks and its iAd mobile advertising platform. The AP reported that publishers are seeing encouraging early signs about wringing advertising dollars out of the iPad, but Ken Doctor went on a wonderful little rant against publishers that are slow to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson slammed news orgs’ repurposed “crapps” and talked, with the Journal’s Les Hinton, about his paper’s own iPad strategy. And the iPad faced its first major security issue, as the email addresses of its 114,000 owners were exposed by hackers.

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The purpose of the link: A Nicholas Carr post last week ignited a spirited discussion about the relative values of the link, and that conversation continued this week with twin Wall Street Journal columns by Carr and web scholar Clay Shirky debating whether the Internet makes us smarter. Carr said no, using a similar argument to the one he laid out in his earlier post (it’s also the central point of his new book): The Internet encourages multitasking and bite-size information, making us all “scattered and superficial thinkers.”Shirky said yes, arguing that the Internet enables never-before-experienced publishing and connective capabilities that allow us to put our cognitive surplus to work for a better society. (That’s also the central point of his new book.) Quite a few people, led by GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, posited that both writers were right - Carr in the short term, Shirky in the long term.

Here at the Lab, Jason Fry weighed in on the delinkification debate, giving a useful classification of the link’s primary purposes — credibility, readability and connectivity. Credibility has become a vital function in today’s web, Fry said, though he conceded Carr’s point that the link adds to the cognitive load when it comes to readability. Based on Carr’s original post, the web design firm Arc90 added an option to its browser extension to convert hyperlinks to footnotes.

The Lab also ran a fantastic three-part series on links by Jonathan Stray exploring four journalistic purposes of the hyperlink (it’s essential, he says), examining the way news organizations talk about links (they’re a bit muddled) and studying how much those news organizations actually link (not a whole lot, especially the wire services). It’s a tremendously helpful resource for anyone interested in looking at how linking and journalism intersect.

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Debate over Newsweek’s bidders: We found out about three bidders for Newsweek last Thursday, so last Friday was the time for profiles and commentary, much of it centered on the conservative news site and magazine Newsmax. Newsmax’s CEO, Christopher Ruddy, told the Washington Post that it has a number of non-conservative media projects, so Newsweek wouldn’t have to adopt a conservative viewpoint to be part of Newsmax’s plans. “Newsmax’s success is in its business model, not just its editorial approach,” Ruddy said. Newsweek employees were worried about the prospect of a Newsmax-owned Newsweek, but the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, himself a conservative, said Newsmax’s influence could be just the nudge Newsweek needs to hit its sweet spot in America’s heartland. Chicago magazine profiled another bidder, venture capitalist Thane Ritchie, while the Washington Post reported that audio equipment exec Sidney Harman is considering a bid, too.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz devoted a column to the publicly acknowledged bidders, exploring the question of why no major players have emerged as bidders and concluding that the lack of interest “amounts to a no-confidence vote not just on the category of newsweeklies, which have long been squeezed between daily papers and in-depth monthlies, but on print journalism itself.” Newsweek, via its Tumblr, ripped apart the work of its Washington Post Co. colleague, taking to task for a lack of evidence and disputing his claim that the re-envisioned Newsweek is a flop. (That Tumblr is written by Newsweek social-media guru David Coatney, who got a New York Daily Intel Q&A a couple of days later.) Meanwhile, New York Times columnist David Carr proposed eight ways to revive Newsweek.

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A sports blog network goes local: ESPN has been making a well-documented and initially successful local sports media play over the past year, but this week, a very different sports media company is making a push into what used to be local newspapers’ territory. SB Nation, a network of more than 250 fan-run sports blogs founded in 2003 by Tyler Bleszinski and Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, began rolling out 20 city-specific sports media hubs. Until now, the company has focused on team-specific (or sport-specific, in the case of some less prominent sports) blogs, but the new sites will aggregate real-time sports news mixed with fan-generated conversation and commentary.

In a New York Times feature, SB Nation’s Jim Bankoff said that while his company is trying to provide a ground-up alternative to traditional sports coverage, he’d be happy to collaborate with local newspapers. Former ESPN.com columnist Dan Shanoff echoed that perspective, saying that SB Nation’s brand of sharp fan analysis is ripe for media partnerships because “it is something that local newspapers and local cable-sports networks can’t or won’t do well.” Shanoff proposed that SB Nation become a piece of a larger media company’s local media strategy, suggesting Comcast as an ideal fit.

Here at the Lab, Bankoff gave Laura McGann a handful of lessons media organizations could learn from the SB Nation model, including tightly focused subject matter and maximizing repeat visitors. SB Nation’s team-specific focus seems to be a major component in its success, and could have some ready implications for news organizations, as Bankoff noted: “We’re not fans of sports — we’re fans of teams. We’re not fans of television. We’re fans of shows.”

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Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two news items, a few interesting pieces of commentary and one set of tips.

— Advertising Age reported that AOL is planning to hire hundreds of journalists for a major expansion into news production. At the local media blog Lost Remote, Cory Bergman, who owns a local news network himself, noted that AOL’s hyperlocal outfit Patch is making 300 of those hires and wondered what it will mean for local news.

— Los Angeles Times media writer James Rainey wrote a piece on the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that has poured legal resources into stopping people who use its content without permission. The Times’ Mark Milian also provided a quick guide to what’s OK and what’s not when reposting.

— Publish2’s Scott Karp wrote an intriguing essay on the concept of a Content Graph, in which media organizations collaborate through distribution to enhance their brand’s value.

— News business guru Alan Mutter sensed a theme among news startups — too much focus on news, not enough on business — and wrote a stiff wakeup call.

— Two journalism/tech folks, Jeff Sonderman and Michelle Minkoff, wrote a bit about what journalism school is — and isn’t — good for. Both are worthwhile reads.

— Finally, British journalism David Higgerson has 10 ideas for building good hyperlocal websites. Most of his (very practical) ideas are useful not just for hyperlocal journalism, but for online news in general.

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 4, 2010.]

The FTC’s ideas for journalism: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has spent much of the last year listening to suggestions about how they might change antitrust, copyright and tax laws in order to create the best possible climate for good journalism, and this weekend it posted its “discussion draft” of policy proposals to “support the reinvention of journalism.” It’s a 47-page document, so here’s a quick summary of their ideas:

— Expand copyright law to protect news content against online aggregators, including “hot news” legislation, further limits to fair use and mandatory content licenses.

— Allow antitrust exemptions for news organizations to put up paywalls together and develop a unified system to limit online aggregators.

— Enact direct or indirect government subsidies through a variety of possible means, including a journalism AmeriCorps, more CPB funding, a national local news fund, tax credits to news orgs for employing journalists, university investigative journalism grants, and newspaper and magazine postal subsidies. These subsidies could be paid for through taxes on broadcast spectrum, consumer electronics, advertising, or ISP-cell phone bills.

— Tax code changes to make it easier for news organizations to gain tax-exempt status.

— Pass various FOIA-related laws to make government data easier to access and search.

It’s worth noting that the FTC isn’t explicitly endorsing these proposals; the draft reads more as a list of possible proposals that might be worth exploring further. Still, j-prof and new media pundit Jeff Jarvis saw a perspective of old-media protectionism running through the draft, as he tore it apart point by point. The FTC is defining journalism through established news organizations and looking to prop them up instead of supporting visionary startups, he wrote. “If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here.”

Jarvis’ charges were seconded by two newspapermen, the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott and the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm, who likened the proposals to the government trying to save the auto industry by reviving the gas guzzlers of the 1960s. Steve Buttry of the new Washington news site TBD chimed in, too, homing in on the assertion that newspapers provide the overwhelming majority of our original news.

Free Press’ Josh Stearns responded by cautioning against “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” noting a few of things that he liked about the FTC’s proposals. And at the Huffington Post, Alex Howard praised the FTC’s open-government proposals. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen chipped in his own tweet-length proposal for the FTC: “Subsidize universal broadband; fight for sensible net neutrality.”

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Steve Jobs’ pitch for paid news: The folks from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital interviewed Apple chief Steve Jobs on stage this week as part of their D8 conference, and Jobs had a few words for the news industry: Yes, he wants to help save journalism, because, as he put it, ““I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself.” But if they’re going to survive, news organizations should be more aggressive about getting people to pay for content, Jobs said, like Apple did in helping raise e-book prices earlier this year.

As it turned out, there was something for everybody to pick apart in that exchange: Ex-Saloner and blogging historian Scott Rosenberg took issue with Jobs’ “nation of bloggers” jab, and Steve Safran of the local-news blog Lost Remote said that what Jobs really wants to save is paid, professional journalism. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram argued that an “iTunes for news” model that Jobs proposed might benefit Jobs, but probably won’t work for news outlets. And here at the Lab, Laura McGann pointed out a statement Jobs made elsewhere in the interview that rejected Apple app applicants (sorry, couldn’t resist) should simply resubmit their apps, unchanged.

Meanwhile, we got another diatribe about Apple’s app censorship from Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco, and a few other interesting pieces of app news: Statistics showing just how big game apps are on the iPhone and iPad (though content apps aren’t doing bad on the iPad), lessons for iPad news apps from Hacks/Hackers’ recent app-creating binge, and a cool iPad news reader designed by Stanford students.

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To link or not to link?: Author Nicholas Carr, who’s about to release a book about how the Internet is hurting our ability to think, highlighting one of the points from that book in a blog post this weekend: The link, Carr argues, hurts our ability to concentrate and follow an argument, and in some cases we may be better off without them. He calls links a high-tech version of the footnote, like little distracting textual gnats buzzing around our heads. “Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters.” Carr approvingly noted a couple of experiments in leaving links to the bottom of articles.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a thoughtful look at the purpose of links, wondering if they really might be better off at the end of articles, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum was sympathetic to Carr’s point as well: “It’s not a trivial question to ask what the Internet is doing to our attention spans,” he wrote. “I know mine, for one, is shot to hell.”

Carr, who’s had his runins with the Internet cognoscenti in the past, predictably caught some flak for his post too, including from Mathew Ingram, who argued that links are at least as much an intellectual discipline for the writer as the reader. The Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson noted that links are part of a long academic tradition that includes footnotes and inline citations: “Do they distract? Of course they do. … But it’s distraction through addition, if done well.” And author Scott Berkun brings up a few variables that others missed, including the skill of the author, web design, and the “open in new tab” function.

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‘The Twitter of news’: The link-sharing site Digg gave a preview of its new version, which will implement some Twitter-like features and emphasize the news links that the people you follow have shared, rather than just the top overall links. The net effect is an attempt to become, as GigaOm’s Liz Gannes put it, “the Twitter of news.” That, of course, raises the question, “Isn’t Twitter already the Twitter of news?” But Digg’s advantage, founder Kevin Rose says, is that it does away with the status updates and Justin Bieber memes and gives you purely socially powered links and news.

Tech pioneer Dave Winer was intrigued by the concept, and The Next Web’s Zee Kane lauded Digg for integrating more deeply with Twitter. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s, bashed Rose for “just re-implementing features from other websites,” and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington knocked both Rose and Ohanian down a peg in response.

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Bidders for Newsweek: Wednesday was The Washington Post Co.’s deadline for formal expressions of interest in buying Newsweek, and it received three offers: OpenGate Capital, a private equity firm that bought TV Guide for $1 in 2008; hedge fund manager and failed Chicago Sun-Times bidder Thane Ritchie; and conservative magazine and website Newsmax. On Twitter, Jeff Jarvis called the bidders “tacky” and wondered whether Newsweek would be better off dead.

Earlier in the week, The New York Times’ David Carr offered an explanation for why Newsweek and other magazines seem to be worth so little to potential buyers: “In the current digital news ecosystem, having ‘week’ in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.” At its Tumblr blog, Newsweek responded by arguing that while everyone seems to have the perfect idea of what Newsweek should have done, no one can change the simple business reality that Newsweek is no longer alone in its niche for readers and advertisers.

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Reading roundup: A couple of updates on stories from last week, plus a bunch of interesting articles and resources.

— There wasn’t much new said in the continuing argument over Facebook and privacy, but Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a couple more interviews defending its privacy policy and last week’s changes to NPR, All Things Digital and Wired, the latter of which included the revelation that Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, Facebook’s open-source startup competitor. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also defended Facebook’s privacy stance, and Jay Rosen took him to task for it.

— An addendum to last week’s Publish2 News Exchange launch: Publish2’s Ryan Sholin told the Lab’s Megan Garber that it only intends to disrupt the AP, not kill it. The exchange is aimed at the content distribution side of the AP, not the production end, he said. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds gave some more explanation of Publish2’s plans.

— The New York Times announced it will host Nate Silver’s political polling blog FiveThirtyEight, one of the web’s top operations at the intersection of data and journalism. Yahoo News’ Michael Calderone examined the fact that Silver’s been open about his liberal political views and asks how that will work out at the Times.

— Several smart, thought-provoking analyses here: journalism researcher Michele McLellan surveyed online local news publishers, news business expert Alan Mutter looked at Yahoo’s hints at a challenge to local newspapers, search guru Danny Sullivan examined a case of traditional media stealing his blog’s story; and media analyst Frederic Filloux explained why online advertising is so lousy.

— Finally, a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ for a couple of aspects of digital journalism: MediaShift’s Roland LeGrand gives journalists the reasons they should learn computer programming, and Poynter’s Jeremy Caplan has a great list of tips for crowdsourcing in journalism.