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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Information wants to be free.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Our readers know more than we do.”

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

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

“The people formerly known as the audience”

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

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

“The sources go direct.”

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

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

“Transparency is the new objectivity.”

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

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

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Postman argued that the phrase was indicative of a mindset in which every single segment being shown is a completely separate event, divorced in “content, context and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it.” It’s the rejection of news as contextualized information and the embrace of news as pure entertainment.

Since Postman’s book was published (1985), the phrase “Now … this” has all but vanished from the broadcast vocabulary — probably at least in part because of TV journalists’ self-consciousness after Postman’s reprimand. But the spirit lives on, as the phrase seems to have been replaced by the word “Well.” It works like this: As they begin reading stories, anchors often slip in the word “Well,” as in, “Well, the governor’s veto of a popular seat belt law caught many legislators by surprise today.”

It’s usually slipped in so quickly that it’s difficult to notice, but once you’re listening for it, you hear it everywhere. I didn’t have to look hard to find a few examples from Nebraska TV stations.

So why do news anchors use the word so much, and what are they communicating? Just about the only other time we start statements with “well” is when we’re answering a question or responding to a statement. (In some cases, it’s an implied question: If you’re meeting a friend after taking a big test, you might start by saying, “Well, I didn’t exactly ace it,” a pre-emptive response to the question she would inevitably have asked.) Used to open a statement, the word “well” is always apropos of something.

Merriam-Webster’s sums up this usage of the word aptly, defining it as being “used to indicate resumption of discourse or to introduce a remark.” And while the latter might seem to be an easier explanation for the way TV folks use it, the former is actually far more accurate and illustrative. In that use, “Well” serves to continue a thought that’s already been brought up. In this way, the word is the natural embodiment of the post-”Now … this” mindset. Like “Now … this,” it introduces a story with an implicit acknowledgement that “what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see,” but unlike that phrase, “Well” is a (probably subconscious) attempt to create the illusion of logical continuity and context where none actually exists.

“Now … this” made no effort whatsoever to conceal the fact that the images or events that preceded and followed it had no inherent connection to each other. It was absurdly naked in its acknowledgement of that reality. But “Well” is the product of a less arrogant time — it almost seems apologetic in its desire to make you, the viewer, feel as though you’re not being jerked back and forth between wildly disparate ideas. The message to the audience is: “Here, let me try to make these stories feel connected for you.”

But, of course, these stories aren’t connected: That’s the fundamental quality that hasn’t changed since Postman’s era. It’s still the same bang-whiz-pow parade of shootings, crashes, animals, children and celebrities it’s always been. If “Well” is indeed indicative of an effort to bring some logical coherence to our half-hour news shows, it’s a tiny, superficial one in a sea of distraction.

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