For your education and enjoyment, we have:

— The discussion about the The New York Times, plagiarism and what linking more consistently could do about it.

— Some items in advance of this week’s SXSW conference, including geolocation announcements and a cool panel on context.

— Two pieces of advice for newspapers from tech bigwigs: “Burn the boats” and “Experiment, experiment, experiment.”

Lots more, too. Check it out. No, seriously, check it out.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism

The online news landscape defined: Much of the discussion about journalism this week revolved around two survey-based studies. I’ll give you an overview on both and the conversation that surrounded them.

The first was a behemoth of a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Here’s Pew’s overview and the full report.) The report, called “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” is a treasure trove of fascinating statistics and thought-provoking nuggets on a variety of aspects of the world of online news. It breaks down into five basic parts: 1) The news environment in America; 2) How people use and feel about news; 3) news and the Internet; 4) Wireless news access; and 5) Personal, social and participatory news.

I’d suggest taking some time to browse a few of those sections to see what tidbits interest you, but to whet your appetite, the Lab’s Laura McGann has a few that jumped out at her — few people exclusively rely on the Internet for news, only half prefer “objective” news, and so on.

Several of the sections spurred their own discussions, led by the one focusing on the social nature of online news. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram has a good summary of the study’s social-news findings, and Micah Sifry of techPresident highlights the sociological angle of news participation. Tech startup guy Dave Pell calls us “Curation Nation” and notes that for all our sharing, we don’t do much of the things going on in our own backyards. And Steve Yelvington has a short but smart take, noting that the sociality of news online is actually a return to normalcy, and the broadcast age was the weird intermission: “The one-way flow that is characteristic of print and electronic broadcasting is at odds with our nature. The Internet ends that directional tyranny.”

The other section of the study to get significant attention was the one on mobile news. PBS’ Idea Lab has the summary, and Poynter’s Mobile Media blog notes that an FCC study found similar results not long ago. Finally, Jason Fry has some hints for news organizations based on the study (people love weather news, and curation and social media have some value), and Ed Cafasso has some implications for marketing and PR folks.

—

A web-first philosophy for magazine sites: The Columbia Journalism Review also released another comprehensive, if not quite so sprawling, study on magazines and the web. (Here’s the full report and the CJR feature based on it.) The feature is a great overview of the study’s findings on such subjects on magazines’ missions on the web, their decision-making, their business models, editing, and use of social media and blogs. It’s a long read, but quite engaging for an article on an academic survey.

One of the more surprising (and encouraging) findings of the study is that magazine execs have a truly web-centric view of their online operation. Instead of just using the Internet as an extension of their print product, many execs are seeing the web as a valuable arena in itself. As one respondent put it, “We migrated from a print publication supplemented with online articles to an online publication supplemented with print editions.” That’s a seriously seismic shift in philosophy.

CJR also put up another brief post highlighting the finding that magazine websites on which the print editor makes most of the decisions tend to be less profitable. The New York Times’ report on the study centers on the far lower editing standards that magazines exercise online, and the editing-and-corrections guru Craig Silverman gives a few thoughts on the study’s editing and fact-checking findings.

—

Facebook patents the news feed: One significant story left over from last week: Facebook was granted a patent for its news feed. All Facebook broke the news, and included the key parts of Facebook’s description of what about the feed it’s patenting. As the tech blog ReadWriteWeb notes, this news could be huge — the news feed is a central concept within the social web and particularly Twitter, which is a news feed. But both blogs came to the tentative conclusion that the patent covers a stream of user activity updates within a social network, not status updates, leaving Twitter unaffected. (ReadWriteWeb’s summary is the best description of the situation.)

The patent still wasn’t popular. NYU news entrepreneur Cody Brown cautioned that patents like this could move innovation overseas, and New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson called the patent “lunacy,” making the case that software patents almost always reward derivative work. Facebook, Wilson says, dominates the world of social news feeds “because they out executed everyone else. But not because they invented the idea.” Meanwhile, The Big Money’s Caitlin McDevitt points out an interesting fact: When Facebook rolled out its news feed in 2006, it was ripped by its users. Now, the feed is a big part of the foundation of the social web.

—

What’s j-schools’ role in local news?: Last week’s conversation about the newly announced local news partnership between The New York Times and New York University spilled over into a broader discussion about j-schools’ role in preserving local journalism. NYU professor Jay Rosen chatted with the Lab’s Seth Lewis about what the project might mean for other j-schools, and made an interesting connection between journalism education and pragmatism, arguing that “our knowledge develops not when we have the most magnificent theory or the best data but when we have a really, really good problem,” which is where j-schools should start.

An Inside Higher Ed article outlines several of the issues in play in j-school local news partnerships like this one, and Memphis j-prof Carrie Brown-Smith pushes back against the idea that j-schools are exploiting students by keeping enrollment high while the industry contracts. She argues that the skills picked up in a journalism education — thinking critically about information, checking its accuracy, communicating ideas clearly, and so on — are applicable to a wide variety of fields, as well as good old active citizenship itself. News business expert Alan Mutter comes from a similar perspective on the exploitation question, saying that hands-on experience through projects like NYU’s new one is the best thing j-schools can do for their students.

—

This week in iPad tidbits: Not a heck of a lot happened in the world of the iPad this week, but there’ll be enough regular developments and opinions that I should probably include a short update every week to keep you up to speed. This week, the Associated Press announced plans to create a paid service on the iPad, and the book publisher Penguin gave us a sneak peek at their iPad app and strategy.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and tech writer James Kendrick both opined on whether the iPad will save magazines: Anderson said yes, and Kendrick said no. John Battelle, one of Wired’s founders, told us why he doesn’t like the iPad: “It’s an old school, locked in distribution channel that doesn’t want to play by the new rules of search+social.”

—

Reading roundup: I’ve got an abnormally large amount of miscellaneous journalism reading for you this week. Let’s start with two conversations to keep an eye on: First, in the last month or so, we’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on science journalism, sparked in part by a couple of major science conferences. This is a robust conversation that’s been ongoing, and it’s worth diving into for anyone at the intersection of those two issues. NYU professor Ivan Oransky made his own splash last week by launching a blog about embargoes in science journalism.

Second, the Lab’s resident nonprofit guru Jim Barnett published a set of criteria for determining whether a nonprofit journalism outfit is legitimate. Jay Rosen objected to the professionalism requirement and created his own list. Some great nuts-and-bolts-of-journalism talk here.

Also at the Lab, Martin Langeveld came out with the second part of his analysis on newspapers’ quarterly filings, with info on the Washington Post Co., Scripps, Belo, and Journal Communications. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum drills a bit deeper into the question of how much of online advertising comes from print “upsells.”

The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a provocative post contending that the distinction between creation and aggregation of news content is a false one — all journalism is aggregation, he says. I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion, but it’s a valid challenge to the anti-aggregation mentality of many newspaper execs. And I can certainly get behind Niles’ larger point, that news organization can learn a lot from online news aggregation.

Finally, two great guides to Twitter: One, a comprehensive list of Twitter resources for journalists from former newspaper exec Steve Buttry, and two, some great tips on using Twitter effectively even if you have nothing to say, courtesy of The New York Times. Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
2. What Facebook and small-town weeklies have in common: A value for social news
3. This Week in Review: Who’s responsible for local news, and Google plays hardball with China

A meter for the Times’ blogs: Plenty of stuff happened at the intersection of journalism and new media this week, and for whatever reason, a lot of it had something to do with The New York Times. We’ll start with the most in-depth piece of information from the Times itself: A 35-minute Q&A session with the three executives most responsible for the Times’ coming paywall (or, more specifically and as they prefer to call it, a metered model) at last Friday’s paidContent 2010 conference. No bombshells were dropped — paidContent has a short summary to go with the video — but it did provide the best glimpse yet into the Times’ thinking behind and approach to their paywall plans.

The Times execs said they believe the paper can maintain its reach despite the meter while adding another valuable source of revenue. Meghan Keane of Econsultancy was skeptical about those plans, saying that the metered model could turn the Times into a niche newspaper.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon started one of the more perplexing exchanges of the session (starting at about 18:10 on the video) when he asked whether the Times would put blogs behind its paywall. The initial response, from publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was “stay tuned,” followed shortly, from digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, by “our intention is to keep blogs behind the wall.” A Times spokeswoman clarified the statements later (yes, blogs would be part of the metered model), and Salmon blogged about his concern with the Times’ execs’ response. He was not the only one who thought this might not be a good idea.

My take: Salmon has some valid concerns, and, piggybacking off of the ideas he wrote after the paywall’s initial announcement, even the Times’ most regular online readers will be quite hesitant to use their limited meter counts on, say, two-paragraph blog posts on the economics of valet parking. Times blogs like Freakonomics and Bits are a huge part of their cachet on the web, and including them in the meter could do them significant damage.

—

The iPad and paid content: We also saw another aspect of the Times’ paid-content plans at a conference in Australia, where Marc Frons, the paper’s chief technology officer, talked about the Times’ in-progress iPad app. Frederic Filloux, another one of the conference’s speakers, provided a useful summary of publishers’ attitudes and concerns about creating apps for the iPad, including their expectation that Apple will provide some sort of news store built on the iTunes framework.

Two media vets offered a word of caution to news organizations excited about the iPad’s possibilities for gaining revenue for news: Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog said that “with their hands on none of the key technology and innovation levers online … media giants continue to be without even a pair sticks to rub together to make digital fire.” And citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor wondered whether news orgs “should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions” like the ones Apple’s been making for years.

For those following the future of paid news content, we have a few other new data points to consider: The stats-heavy sports publication The Sporting News will begin charging for its daily digital edition, and a small daily newspaper in Washington State says the first year of their paywall has been a tentative success, with less effect on traffic than expected. Also, Alistair Bruce of Microsoft has a thorough breakdown of who’s charging for what online in a slideshow posted last week. It’s a wonderful resource you’ll want to keep for future reference.

—

NYT, NYU team up on local journalism: The Times also had one of the week’s big future-of-journalism announcements — a partnership with New York University to create and run a news site devoted to New York’s East Village, where NYU has several buildings. NYU professor Jay Rosen has all the details you’ll need, including who’s providing what. (NYT: publishing platform, editorial oversight, data sources, inspiration. NYU: editor’s salary, student and faculty labor, offices.)

The partnership raised a few media-critic eyebrows, mostly over the issue of the Times using free (to them, at least) student labor after buying out and laying off 100 paid reporters. The Awl, BNET, The New York Observer, and Econsultancy all have short but acerbic reactions making just that point, with The Awl making a quick note about the professionalization of journalism and BNET speculating about the profit margins the Times will make off of this project.

—

Innocence, objectivity and reality in journalism: Jay Rosen kicked off some conversation in another corner of the future-of-journalism discussion this week, bringing his influential PressThink blog out of a 10-month hiatus with a post on a theme he’s been pushing hard on Twitter over the past year: Political journalists’ efforts to appear innocent in their reporting at the expense of the truth.

Rosen seizes on a line in a lengthy Times Tea Party feature on “a narrative of impending tyranny” and wonders why the Times wouldn’t tell us whether that narrative was grounded in reality. Journalistic behavior like this, Rosen says, is grounded in the desire to appear innocent, “meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.” That drive for innocence leads savviness to supplant reality in political journalism, Rosen said.

The argument’s been made before, by Rosen and others such as James Fallows, and Joey Baker sums it up well in a post building off of Rosen’s. But Rosen’s post drew a bit of criticism — in his comments, from the left (Mother Jones), from the libertarian right (Reason), and from tech blogger Stephen Baker. The general strain running through these responses was the idea that the Times’ readers are smart enough to determine the veracity of the claims being made in the article. (Rosen calls that a dodge.) The whole discussion is a fresh, thoughtful iteration of the long-running debate over objectivity in news coverage.

—

Where do reporting and aggregation fit?: We got some particularly valuable data and discussion on one of journalism’s central conversations right now — how reporting will work in a new ecosystem of news. Here at the Lab, Jonathan Stray examined how that new landscape looked in one story about charges of Chinese schools’ connections to hacks into Google. He has a fairly thorough summary of the results, headlined by the finding that just 13 of the 121 versions of the story on Google News involved original reporting. “When I think of how much human effort when into re-writing those hundred other unique stories that contained no original reporting, I cringe,” Stray writes. “That’s a huge amount of journalistic effort that could have gone into reporting other deserving stories. Why are we doing this?”

Also at the Lab, CUNY professor C.W. Anderson spun off of Stray’s study with his own musings on the definition and meaning of original reporting and aggregation. He concludes that aggregation/curation/filtering isn’t quite original reporting, but it does provide journalistic value that should be taken into consideration.

Two other interesting pieces on the related subjects of citizen journalism and hyperlocal journalism: PR/tech blogger Darren Barefoot raises concerns about citizen journalism’s ability to do investigative journalism, and J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer makes a strong case for the importance of entrepreneurs and citizen journalists in the new system of news.

—

Reading roundup: I’ve got two news developments and two thoughtful pieces for you. First, BusinessWeek reported on AOL’s efforts to build “the newsroom of the future,” a model largely driven by traffic and advertising data, not unlike the controversial Demand Media model, only with full-time journalists.

Editors Weblog raises some questions about such an openly traffic-driven setup, and media/tech watcher Tom Foremski says AOL should be focusing on creating smart news analysis. Social media guru Chris Brogan likes the arrangement, noting that there’s a difference between journalism and publishing.

The second news item is ABC News’ announcement that they’re looking to cut 300 to 400 of its 1,400 positions and move toward a more streamlined operation built around “one-man band” digital journalists. The best examinations of what this means for ABC and TV journalism are at the Los Angeles Times and the Poynter Institute.

The first thoughtful piece is theoretical: CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis’ overview of the evolution of the media’s “spheres of discovery,” from brands to algorithms to human links to predictive creation. It’s a good big-picture look at where new media stand and where they might be going.

The second is more practical: In a Q&A, Howard Owens of the award-winning upstate New York hyperlocal startup The Batavian gives an illuminating glimpse into life in hyperlocal journalism. He touches on everything from advertising to work hours to digital equipment. Building off of Owens’ comments of the personal nature of online news, Jason Fry muses about the uphill battle that news faces to win our attention online. But if that battle is won, Fry says, the loyalty and engagement is so much greater online: “I chose this. I’m investing in it. This doesn’t work and wastes my investment — next. This does work and rewards my investment — I’m staying.”

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
2. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism
3. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

Building news apps for the iPad: The buzz from the tech crowd about Apple’s iPad has died down, but the iPad is beginning to get more interesting for the journalism world. That’s because we’re starting to see news organizations unveil their iPad apps: Wired showed off its app — being developed with Adobe — this week, and as this Advertising Age article points out, we’ve already seen what will likely end up being iPad apps for magazines like GQ, Esquire and Sports Illustrated (in the form iPhone apps, in the former two cases).

We saw The New York Times’ iPad app, of course, at the iPad’s introduction last month. But this week, Gawker reported rumors of a battle within the Times over the app’s control and price: The print folks want see it as another way to distribute the paper and want to charge up to $30 a month, while the digital side says it’ll be designing the interactive content anyway and wants to price it at $10 a month. (Gawker also explained how this all relates to the Times Reader.) Color Apple-watcher John Gruber and former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg unimpressed.

The Lab has two thought-provoking posts on different aspects of the iPad: First, John-Henry Barac, who designed the iPhone app for the leading British newspaper The Guardian, has some fascinating thoughts about news design for the iPad. He sees the element of touch as being particularly important, describing it as a more focused, physically direct means of obtaining information. “I think you don’t want it to feel just like a great big PDF that you’re dragging around,” Barac says.

Second, former newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld examines the business impact of the iPad on publishers, concluding that the iPad will “bring an enormous increase in online shopping.” He has several practical tips for publishers on building strategies for the iPad era, focusing on creating new types of content for mobile devices and personalizing advertising to create new mobile-based revenue streams. As Ken Doctor put it, “The tablet is not a repurposing platform, to regain the old business. It’s a great, new opportunity to reinvent the business.”

—

Google backtracks on Buzz: Much of the talk online this week was once again about Buzz, Google’s new real-time social media platform. Since that talk didn’t have much to do with journalism, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on it, but here’s the light-speed wrap-up to keep you up to speed: Buzz came out last week with a lot of problems — it was called awkward, confusing and, most commonly, an invasion of privacy.

Google quickly announced some changes based on that negative reaction, and acknowledged that it probably wasn’t tested enough before being released “in the wild.” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, downplayed the privacy issue, saying Buzz had harmed no one. If you want the details, Silicon Alley Insider has a quick timeline of Google’s various responses.

One thoughtful take I want to highlight, particularly for those interested in theory: Software engineer Kevin Marks compares the theoretical structure of Buzz to that of Twitter, noting in particular that Buzz can’t match the subtle effectiveness of Twitter’s “overlapping publics,” thereby leaving Buzz conversations dominated by people we don’t necessarily want to hear.

—

Plagiarism’s online migration: For the second straight week, we saw a primarily web-based journalist resign after being caught plagiarizing: New York Times DealBook reporter Zachery Kouwe had plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters and resigned after an internal investigation, a week after Daily Beast investigative reporter Gerald Posner’s plagiarism of the Miami Herald was uncovered.

I mention this not because two back-to-back cases of plagiarism are necessarily related to the future of journalism per se, but because a worthwhile conversation about ethics and plagiarism in the internet journalism era has sprung up around Posner’s and Kouwe’s responses. Posner in particular blamed “the warp speed of the net,” and Kouwe referred to the speed with which he felt compelled to blog for the Times in his rationale.

The Columbia Journalism Review sees in all this the danger of increasing news productivity demands, not just in ethical lapses but in the lack of quality — “what’s not getting out because it doesn’t pass the time/productivity stress test.” After Posner’s resignation last week, True/Slant’s Michael Roston noted that you’ll seldom see plagiarizing bloggers because they “don’t need to” — the ethic of the link that reigns in the blogosphere makes it easy for bloggers to make points by openly building off of others’ work while giving appropriate credit. Finally, Poynter’s Kelly McBride offered some web-oriented tips for writers and editors on avoiding plagiarism.

—

A win for citizen journalism: We saw what may be a first in the journalism-prize world this week with the prestigious George Polk Awards when the award in a new category, videography, went to an anonymously produced video of the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, during protests last summer. The video went viral on the web, getting millions of views and helping spark worldwide support for the Iranian resistance movement.

Polk Awards curator John Darnton considered it a statement on the power of citizen journalism: “This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news,” he told The New York Times. NPR’s David Folkenflik still gave credit to professional journalists for verifying, curating and sifting through video like this and establishing its newsworthiness.

Former Wall Street Journal online reporter Jason Fry compared the Neda video to two other famous new videos shot by “ordinary citizens” — the Zapruder film and Rodney King video. The biggest difference in what the Neda videographer did, Fry argues, was not so much in the video’s shooting, but in its distribution: Both Zapruder and George Holliday needed gatekeepers to disseminate their videos, but Neda’s videographer needed none. That difference is a radical one, Fry says — it ”changes not just how news is found and made, but how it is shared and therefore defined.”

—

Google opens Living Stories to the masses: Another quiet development that could prove to be monumental in the long run: Google News opened up the code to its Living Stories format to anyone on the web. The project was launched in December with The New York Times and The Washington Post, but this move will allow any news organization to incorporate Living Stories into its site.

Living Stories allows readers to follow a large story with lots of developments in one place, sort of like a “personalized RSS feed reader, but customized to pay attention to just that one story,” as ReadWriteWeb put it. We’ve been seeing calls, particularly in the last several months, for news organizations to make these “explainers” central to the way they communicate news, and this could be a key tool in making those types of pieces more accessible to news orgs everywhere. At O’Reilly Radar, Mac Slocum urges news sites’ developers to start incorporating Living Stories immediately.

—

Reading roundup: I’ve got four pieces that are well worth your time this week. First, in a lecture at USC, Columbia professor Michael Schudson offered a thorough historical case that journalism in many areas is getting better, not worse. This is not naive, Pollyanna-ish optimism; this is a sensible, studied survey of why the future of journalism is fundamentally a hopeful one.

Second, a French journalism site proposed a vision for a “Google newsroom” — a newsroom divided into halves focusing on creation and curation of journalism. It’s a great starting point for discussion about what the newsroom of the future should look like.

Third, speaking of curation, this Robin Good post has a pretty comprehensive look at what it looks like in journalism — Good calls curating journalists “newsmasters.” The post is a little unwieldy, but it offers a good overview of what news curation is all about.

Finally, a Time foreign correspondent Jeff Israely gives 11 valuable lessons from a year working on an in-progress news startup in a post here at the Lab. It’s a must-read for anyone thinking about going into a new journalism venture — which, these days, might include a lot of ex-print journalists.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Plagiarism and the link, location and context at SXSW, and advice for newspapers
2. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
3. This Week in Review: The Times’ blogs behind the wall, paid news on the iPad, and a new local news co-op

Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was about Google Buzz, a real-time program for sharing status updates, links and media through Gmail’s platform. You can find helpful summaries of how Buzz works at The Official Google Blog, O’Reilly Answers, Mashable and Search Engine Land. A theme that’s clear especially from the Google blog and Search Engine Land: Google sees Buzz as a big part of its effort to organize the “torrent” that is the web’s social information with the help of the same algorithms that gave Google its search primacy.

The most important stuff first: As for Buzz’s implications for journalism, the two best quick guides are by Will Sullivan at Poynter and Google-watcher Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Jarvis sees Buzz as a major step toward the “hyperpersonal news stream” that Google’s been visualizing and magnifies the value of voice and local news. Sullivan focuses largely on Buzz’s impact on adding the element of location to news and advertising. (The local media site Lost Remote touches on this, too.) By the way, I’m with Sullivan on this — I think Buzz’s greatest impact on journalism may be as an incremental step in the development of mobile news, a sort of early bud in the ecosystem of location-based news.

The initial response from the tech crowd tended to be negative. RSS and blogging pioneer Dave Winer declared it a dud, and PR exec Steve Rubel called it “Google Wave light, a non-starter.” Others saw major privacy issues with Buzz revealing your email contacts to the world, though Google gave us a fix Thursday afternoon.

Much of the discussion around Buzz, though, was about which social network it will or won’t tear into. Before it launched, it was called a “Twitter-killer,” and DigitalBeat countered that it wouldn’t kill Twitter, while telling us what role itwould play. (Meanwhile, Dave Winer opined on what a social-media platform would have to have in order to kill Twitter.) Several others noticed its similarity to Facebook, and in a smart post at The Big Money, Chris Thompson explained where it might have an advantage. And at the tech blog ReadWriteWeb, Frederic Lardinois has a great list of improvements Buzz could make.

—

Demand’s plan for publishers: Four months after Wired brought the business model of online content producer Demand Media to light, the conversation about the company remains on a slow burn. We’ve been hearing lately from several Demand execs; most newsworthy is the revelation that Demand is experimenting with several major publishers and plans to move into the business of selling their original content to supplement publishers’ websites.

Why does this have people worried? Because Demand Media is being held up as the poster child for so-called “content farms” that flood the web with content of dubious quality and pay their freelance writers a pittance to do it. (Last week, news business expert Alan Mutter stirred the pot by telling freelance journalists to refuse to work for so little, and j-prof C.W. Anderson noted that just because someone will work for that kind of money doesn’t make it right.

Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt and Steven Kydd both defended themselves against those charges in interviews with GigaOM and Beet.TV, respectively. A bit more surprisingly, they got some support from New York Times media columnist David Carr, who quoted several Demand Media freelancers who said, among other things, “Demand has been as close to a safety net as anyone gets in this business.” As for consumers who are frustrated by the lack of quality content, Carr says, “ignore the loudmouth and ask someone else.”

—

Are people paying for news — or relationships?: There was no single major news item on the paid-content front this week, but we did get a handful of interesting pieces of news and conversation on the subject. First, on the newsier side: An exec with the recently bankrupt newspaper chain MediaNews told Poynter’s Steve Myers they plan on rolling out their new paywall at two papers in the next few months, and gave him a loose description of what it will look like. (Summary: A metered model, like the Financial Times or The New York Times’ plans; breaking news and multimedia will be free; enterprise reporting, columns and reviews will be behind the paywall.) Another exec in the paid-content business, Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz, says the unnamed publishers they’re working with are also leaning toward metered models.

On the discussion side, two sharp pieces were written this week about what will sell online. First, CUNY j-prof and web guru Jeff Jarvis tells us what won’t sell: Scarcity. In media, Jarvis says, that means content and information aren’t scarce and can’t be sold as such. Instead, he advises news orgs to base their business on relationships with readers and marketers, saying, “We must also align our interests with those of the community … helping them do what they want to do, adding value and recognizing it that way.”

Second, PBS MediaShift’s Chris O’Brien notes that quite a few people are spending $1 to buy each other virtual beers on Facebook and wonders what it might mean for news. He theorizes that it indicates that true value lies “not in the thing itself, but in something adjacent to the thing, some feeling you have about it, or something you can do with it in terms of expressing yourself.” In a brilliant post, former McClatchy exec Howard Weaver takes the idea a step further, arguing that what people value is the community that they’re helping enrich and sustain by buying the virtual good. News orgs, he says, need to nurture the consumption of news as a social act, to create “an ecology where caring about the news becomes satisfying and rewarding social behavior.”

—

Gauging Facebook’s expansion: Last week’s discussion about Facebook’s potential power as a news and information source spilled over into this week, spurred on by reminders of Facebook’s furious rate of expansion: Sharing on it has quintupled in the last six months; it’s developing webmail to compete with Gmail; it’s creating its own targeted display ad system; and it’s hoping that Facebook Connect will become the web’s universal login. (As an added bonus, the latter article also has a wildly entertaining comment thread of people who thought they were logging into Facebook instead of commenting on a tech blog.)

Steve Rubel gives a vision of where Facebook might be headed next — business networking, helping developers build mini-sites within its networks, and ramping up search — and sums it up with a sweeping statement: “Facebook is becoming the web for millions and millions of people. … Facebook is unstoppable. They aren’t just the next Google. They’re the next web.”

—

Reading roundup: We’ve got quite a few (mostly short) miscellaneous items that are well worth a read this week. I’ll give them to you in no particular order:

— Here at the Lab, Martin Langeveld breaks down the 2009 fourth-quarter results from several of the nation’s largest newspaper companies, discerning a few interesting trends (advertising revenue and total revenue are down, but profits are generally up).

— Missouri j-prof Clyde Bentley lays out a step-by-step three-year plan for newspapers to prepare for a world in which mobile Internet access is the modus operandi, rather than PCs. It’s a great jumping-off point for newsroom innovation.

— The new director of BBC Global News challenged the network’s reporters and editors to deepen their engagement with social media and other web tools. Meanwhile, USC j-prof Robert Hernandez advises journalism students that the most essential 21st-century journalism skills are still the basics.

— Two interesting studies: A Penn study of The New York Times’ most-emailed list provides some clues to what kind of news people most like to share online, and research by social media consultant Jamie Beckland hints that in Portland, at least, policy-oriented journalism is thriving more in the local blogosphere than traditional media.

— Finally, UT-Dallas j-prof David Parry turns some keen observations of his students’ media habits into an insightful argument that “new media” aren’t all that new — in fact, they’re now “a fundamental part of our cultural, legal, and social institutions. It is time we started treating them as such.”

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency
2. This Week in Review: Who’s responsible for local news, and Google plays hardball with China
3. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few incremental happenings that proved to be interesting, and several of them involved Google. We’ll start with those.

— The Google story that could prove to be the biggest over the long term actually happened last week, in the midst of our iPad euphoria: Google unveiled a beta form of Social Search, which allows you to search your “social circle” in addition to the standard results served up for you by Google’s magic algorithm. (CNN has some more details.) I’m a bit surprised at how little chatter this rollout is getting (then again, given the timing, probably not), but tech pioneer Dave Winer loves the idea — not so much for its sociality but because it “puts all social services on the same open playing field”; you decide how important your contacts from Twitter or Facebook are, not Google’s algorithm.

— Also late last week, several media folks got some extended time with Google execs at Davos. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger posted his summary, focusing largely on Google’s faceoff with China. “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis posted his summary, with lots of Google minutiae. (Jeff Sonderman also further summarized Jarvis’ summary.) Among the notable points from Jarvis: Google is “working on making news as compelling as possible” and CEO Eric Schmidt gets in a slam on the iPad in passing.

— Another Google feature was launched this week: Starring on Google News stories. The stars let you highlight stories (that’s story clusters, not individual articles) to save and return to them later. Two major tech blogs, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch, gave the feature their seal of approval, with ReadWriteWeb pointing to this development as the first of many ways Google can personalize its algorithm when it comes to news. It’s an intriguing concept, though woefully lacking in functionality at this point, as TechCrunch notes: I can’t even star individual stories to highlight or organize coverage of a particular issue. I sure hope at least that feature is coming.

Also in the Google-and-news department: Google economist Hal Varian expressed skepticism about news paywalls, arguing that reading news for many is a worktime distraction. And two Google folks, including Google News creator Krishna Bharat, give bunches of interesting details about Google News in a MediaShift interview, including some conciliatory words for publishers.

— Meanwhile billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban officially jumped on the Google-News-is-evil train, calling Google a “vampire” and urging news organizations not to index their content there. Not surprisingly, this wasn’t well-received in media-futurist circles: GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, a former newspaperman himself, said Cuban and his anti-Google comrade, Rupert Murdoch, ignore the growing search traffic at news sites. Several other bloggers noted that Cuban has expressed a desire in the past to invest in other news aggregators and currently invests in Mahalo, which does some Google News-esque “sucking” of its own.

— Finally, after not carrying AP stories since December, Google struck some sort of quasi-deal that allows it to host AP content — but it’s still choosing not to do so. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan wonders what it might mean, given the AP and Google’s icy relations. Oh yeah, and Google demoed some ideas of what a Chrome OS tablet — read: iPad competitor — might look like.

—

What the iPad will do (and what to do with it): Commentary continued to trickle out this week about Apple’s newly announced iPad, with much of talk shifting from the device’s particulars to its implications on technology and how news organizations should develop for it.

Three most essential pieces all make similar points: Former McClatchy exec Howard Weaver likens the iPad to the newspaper in its physical simplicity and thinks it “will enrich human beings by removing technological barriers.” In incredibly thoughtful posts, software developers Steven Frank and Fraser Speirs take a programming-oriented tack, arguing that the iPad simplifies computing, bringing it home for normal (non-geek) people.

Frank compares it to an automatic transmission vs. the traditional manual one, and Speirs says it frees people from tedious tasks like “formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS” to do the real work of living life. In another interesting debate, interaction designer Sarah G. Mitchell argues that without multitasking or a camera (maybe?), the iPad is an antisocial device, and developer Edd Dumbill counters that it’s “real-life social” — made for passing around with friends and family.

Plenty of folks have ideas about what news organizations should do with the iPad: Poynter’s Bill Mitchell and news designer Joe Zeff both propose that newspapers and magazines could partially or totally subsidize iPads with subscriptions. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt says that wouldn’t work, and Zeff gives a rebuttal. Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has an idea for a newsstand app for the iPad, and Frederic Filloux at The Monday Note has a great picture of what the iPad experience could look like by next year if news orgs act quickly.

And of course, Robert Niles of The Online Journalism Review and BusinessWeek’s Rich Jaroslovsky remind us what several others said (rightly, I think) last week: The iPad is what content producers make of it.

—

Facebook as a news reader: Last Friday, Facebook encouraged its users to make their own personalized news channel by creating a list of all the news outlets of which they’ve become a fan. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb — which has been remarkably perceptive on the implications of Facebook’s statements lately — noted that while a Facebook news feed couldn’t hold up to a news junkie’s RSS feed, it has the potential to become a “world-changing subscription platform” for mainstream users because of its ubiquity, sociality and accessibility. (He makes a pretty compelling case.)

Then came the numbers from Hitwise to back ReadWriteWeb up: Facebook was the No. 4 source of visits to news sites last week, behind only Google, Yahoo and MSN. It also accounts for more than double the amount of news media traffic as Google News and more than 300 times that of the web’s largest RSS program, Google Reader. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a note that most news-site traffic still comes through search, and offered a challenge to Facebook to “encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family.”

—

This week in (somewhat) depressing journalism statistics: Starting with the most cringe-inducing: Rick Edmonds of Poynter calculates that newspaper classified revenue is down 70 percent in the last decade. He does see one bright spot, though: Revenue from paid obituaries remains strong. Yup, people are still dying, and their families are still using the newspaper to tell people about it. In the magazine world, Advertising Age found that publishers are still reporting further declines in newsstand sales, though not as steep as last year.

In the world of web statistics, a Pew study found that blogging is steady among adults and significantly down among teens. In other words, “Blogging is for old people.” Of course, social media use was way up for both teens and adults.

—

A paywall step, and some suggestions: Steven Brill’s new Journalism Online paid-content service has its first newspaper, The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era in Pennsylvania. In reporting the news, The New York Times noted that the folks behind both groups were trying to lower expectations for the service. The news business expert Alan Mutter didn’t interpret the news well, concluding that “newspapers lost their last chance to hang together when it became clear yesterday that the wheels seemingly have come off Journalism Online.”

In a comically profane post, Silicon Valley veteran Dave McClure makes the strangely persuasive argument that the fundamental business model of the web is about to switch from cost-per-click ads to subscriptions and transactions, and that because people have trouble remembering passwords, they’ll login and pay through Gmail, iTunes or Facebook. (Mathew Ingram says McClure’s got a point.) Crowdfunding advocate David Cohn proposes a crowdfunded twist on micropayments at news sites.

—

Reading roundup: Two interesting discussions, and then three quick thought-provoking pieces. First, here at the Lab, future Minnesota j-prof Seth Lewis asks for input about what the journalism school of the future should look like, adding that he believes its core value should be adaptability. Citizen journalism pioneerDan Gillmor gave a remarkably thorough, well-thought-out picture of his ideal j-school. His piece and Steve Buttry’s proposal in November are must-reads if you’re thinking about media education or involved in j-school.

Second, the discussion about objectivity in journalism continues to smolder several weeks after it was triggered by journalists’ behavior in Haiti. This week, two broadsides against objectivity — one by Publish2’s Paul Korr calling it pathological, and another by former foreign correspondent Chris Hedges saying it “killed the news.” Both arguments are certainly strident ones, but thoughtful and worth considering.

Finally, two interesting concepts: At the Huffington Post, MTV’s Maya Baratz calls for newspapers to think of themselves as apps, commanding them to “Be fruitful and multiply. Elsewhere.” And at the National Sports Journalism Center, former Wall Street Journal journalist Jason Fry has a sharp piece on long-form journalism, including a dirty little secret (“most of it doesn’t work in any medium”) and giving some tips to make it work anyway.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed
2. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism
3. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35

The iPad’s big reveal: Apple unveiled its new tablet — the unfortunately named iPad— on Wednesday, a week before the Super Bowl, and the buzz was as least as big: The Internet practically broke under the weight of the hype for Apple’s latest product. Rather than bury you in opinions about the specs and perks of the iPad, I’ll focus on what people are saying about the gadget’s potential impact on print and online media, especially journalism. Here goes:

Let’s start with the runup. Print media folks had high hopes that the iPad would revolutionize their industries — even, as The New York Times put it, giving old media “a chance to undo mistakes of the past. In three smart posts, the tech sites TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Wired said the iPad could be a tool to change publishing, but, as Jason Kincaid in TechCrunch wrote, “someone will need to deliver the content.” Then there were the pre-emptive debunkers, who argued that the iPad would be “just another distribution platform,” merely a circulation tool for journalism, and a “massive distraction” for newsrooms.

After the announcement, the overwhelming reaction from the tech world was one of disappointment. The Guardian has a roundup, and you can itemized lists of iPad beefs by the web giants Mashable, Gizmodo and Gawker, as well as new-media-watcher Steve Yelvington. But there were a lot of people wowed and encouraged by the iPad announcement: A lot of them were old media people — publishers, as this MediaWeek roundup especially shows. As MediaCritic’s Scott Rosenberg observed, the iPad demo played largely to the delight of those who want to mimic the paper experience, but those who see the web as bringing in a new relationship with news seemed to expect more.

Wired and The Big Money gave us a medium-by-medium look at the iPad’s potential impact, and neither was blown away by its possibility for newspapers and magazines. Between the roundups of Poynter and Alan Mutter and the thoughts of Nieman Journalism Lab director Joshua Benton, we have a pretty good spectrum of sensible takes from media-watchers from a variety of backgrounds.

A few points in the discussion worth highlighting: A number of tech writers — Twitter engineer Alex Payne, Rafe Colburn and j-prof C.W. Anderson — have noted that the iPad is fundamentally a closed platform, designed more to secure market share for Apple than to perpetuate the web’s openness. (They’ve got a point.) Second, quite a few others have pointed out that the iPad is a content consumption device, not a content creation one. This has several implications: It appeals to a different audience than most new tech products (the casual, “lean-back” user, says Jason Fry; the content-inhaling youth of the world, says David Carr). It makes content creation critical (see TechCrunch and Wired), and, as NYU professor Jay Rosen put it, it turns the nature of the Internet from the “read write web” back into the “read only” web.

Ultimately, the iPad’s utility for journalism is going to come down to the quality of content that news organizations create for it. Is that content going to be regressive, trying to recreate a print experience and neutering the power of a new tool? Or is it going to be rich, web-native and innovative, giving users an experience and value they haven’t had until now? (Will Bunch, Judy Sims and Alan Jacobson make similar points quite succinctly and eloquently.)

—

How leaky will the Times’ paywall be?: The biggest topic in journalism B.T. (Before Tablet) was The New York Times’ proposed paywall, and specifically, parsing the impact of Times execs’ statement that anyone coming to a Times article through “another Web site” will get free access to that article, without it counting toward their metered tally of page views. NYU professor Jay Rosen was the first to draw attention to the implications of that provision, concluding, “That looks a lot less like a pay wall to me. It isn’t a metered system if I can access the Times via the link economy without limit.”

In that case, Reuters’ Felix Salmon argued, online subscribers would be paying not for the Times’ content, but for how they got to it. Or, as Josh Young put it, the Times is “charging for being ignorant of all doors but the front.” (Some more great back-and-forth on why the Times would want such a flimsy paywall can be found in the Notes and comments of Rosen’s piece.)

Silicon Valley Watcher Tom Foremski and Times contributor Robert Wright acknowledged the paywall’s leakiness, too: Foremski proposed getting linkers to run the Times’ ads, and Wright wanted to add micropayments to the paywall. Steve Yelvington pointed out another big hole in the Times’ metered model: cookies.

Felix Salmon and Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder did the math and found it doesn’t look good for the Times; The Big Money’s Frederic Filloux was more optimistic about the numbers, provided the Times only charges the heaviest users. (Salmon is also disappointed that the Times has given up on the dream of being so essential that it can make big bucks from a free site.) If you want to do some number-crunching of your own, the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Jonathan Stray has a nifty little tool for you.

—

Newsday’s 35 online subscribers: Based on sources from an internal meeting, The New York Observer reported the number of subscribers of Newsday’s website since the Long Island newspaper — the nation’s 11th-largest newspaper by print circulation — put up a paywall three months ago, and the tally shocked a lot media observers: 35. MediaDailyNews detailed Newsday’s overall decline in numbers since the wall went up in late October.

Several people — not least Newsday’s own execs — quickly noted the paper’s unique case: It’s owned by Cablevision, and subscribers of the print edition or Cablevision’s cable or broadband access get free access to the site. (The paper estimates that amounts to 75 percent of Long Islanders.) As Steve Yelvington noted and Newsday hinted to paidContent, the paywall is much more about giving a free perk to cable and Internet subscribers than actually netting paid website customers. So it doesn’t make much sense to apply this scenario to other similar-sized papers. That being said, 35 is an astonishingly low number, to say the least.

—

Foursquare’s possibilities for news orgs: Foursquare — a fast-growing, mobile-based social network based on sharing your location — announced its partnership with the free daily paper Canada Metro, the company’s first partnership with a news organization. Metro will add location-specific coverage to Foursquare users, who could receive alerts when they’re near those spots.

On the social media blog Mashable, Jennifer Van Grove described Metro’s Foursquare content as a travel guide book that “unlocks the best a neighborhood has to offer. She calls the relationship symbiotic (mobile utility for Metro, print exposure for Foursquare and local businesses). With mobile news access exploding, this could be part of a future-of-journalism recipe: The tech blog ReadWriteWeb has an intriguing vision of the type of location-aware news and tips that might be possible through services like Foursquare.

Last week, Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau said that Foursquare can allow journalists to map out pertinent facts about their communities and help residents explore their neighborhoods. And Sean Blanda advised The New York Times (and other news organizations) to learn from Foursquare’s system of rewarding users.

—

Taking action in Haiti: Last week’s discussion about whether reporters in Haiti should become involved in the story they’re covering (in this case, particularly reporters serving as doctors) continued into the weekend. The Society of Professional Journalists reiterated its stance that journalists should “avoid making themselves part of the stories they are reporting.” This prompted a barrage of angry Twitter posts by Jeff Jarvis. Tyler Dukes listed them and fired back at Jarvis, while Gazette Communications’ Steve Buttry joined Jarvis’ attack on SPJ. NPR’s “On the Media” brought in a few more takes, and St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans proposed a middle way: It’s OK to help, but turn the cameras off when you do it.

—

Reading roundup: If your head isn’t already spinning from the loads of iPad commentary I’ve thrown at you, there are a few pieces from the past week that are well worth a read: First, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the British newspaper The Guardian, deftly outlined the state of journalism and argued against paywalls for news orgs in a lecture on Monday. Here’s the summary, the full text (it’s long) and a smart response by Jason Fry questioning Rusbridger’s anti-paywall argument.

Second, The New York Times’ Nick Bilton points out how ingrained sharing, filtering and aggregating have become in the way we live on the web. It’s one of those short, simple pieces that neatly captures a concept that many of us had noticed but hadn’t sharply articulated yet.

Finally, the Knight Digital Media Center’s Michele McLellan — also a fellow at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute — has a mind-blowingly thorough taxonomy of local news organizations across the country. This is definitely a post you’ll want to save for future reference.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: The New York Times’ paywall plans, and what’s behind MediaNews’ bankruptcy
2. This Week in Review: The Times’ blogs behind the wall, paid news on the iPad, and a new local news co-op
3. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s how it’ll work: you can view an as-yet-unidentified number of articles for free each month before the Times requires you to pay a flat, unlimited-access fee to see more; this is known as a metered system. (If you subscribe to the print edition, it’ll be free.) Two Times execs answered questions about the plan, including whether you can still email and link to articles (you can) and why it’s different from TimesSelect, the abandoned paid-content experiment it tried from 2005-07. Gabriel Sherman of New York’s Daily Intel, who broke the rumor on Sunday, has some details of the paywall debate within the Times.

There’s been a ton of reaction to the Times’ plan online, so I’ll tackle it in three parts: First, the essential reading, then some other worthwhile opinions, and finally the interesting ephemera.

Four must-reads: It makes sense to start with New York Times media critic David Carr’s take on the plan, because it’s the most the thorough, cogent defense of the Times’ paywall you’ll find. He argues that Times execs “have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times,” giving the site another flexible revenue stream outside of advertising. If you’re up for a little algebra, Reuters’ Felix Salmon has a sharp economic analysis of the paywall, arguing that the value of each article will become much greater for subscribers than nonsubscribers. For the more theoretical-minded, CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has some fascinating thoughts here at the Lab on how the paywall turns the Times into a niche product and what it means for our concept of the “public.” And as usual, Ken Doctor thoughtfully answers many of the practical questions you’re asking right now.

Other thoughtful opinions: Poynter’s Bill Mitchell poses a lot of great business questions and wonders how the Times will handle putting the burden on its most loyal online-only users. Steve Yelvington reminds us that we’re not going to learn much here that we can apply to other papers, because “the Times is fundamentally in a different business than regional dailies” and “a single experiment with a single price point by a single newspaper is just a stab in the dark.” Before the announcement, former Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing, Forrester Research’s James McQuivey, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon gave the Times advice on constructing its paywall, almost none of which showed up in the Times’ plans. Two massive tech blogs, TechCrunch and Mashable, think the paywall won’t amount to much. Slate’s Jack Shafer says people will find ways to get around it, NYU’s Jay Rosen echoes C.W. Anderson’s thoughts on niche vs. public, and CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis doesn’t like the Times’ sense of entitlement.

The ephemera: The best stuff on Twitter about the announcement was collected at E&P In Exile and the new site MediaCritic. Steve Outing and Jason Fry don’t like the wait ’til 2011, and Cory Doctorow is skeptical that that’s even true. Former E&Pers Fitz & Jen interview a few newspaper execs and find that (surprise, surprise) the like the Times’ idea. So does Steven Brill of Journalism Online, who plans to roll out a few paywalls of his own soon. Dan Gillmor wants the Times to find out from readers what new features they’d pay for, and Jeff Sonderman makes two good points: “The major casualty of NYT paywall is sharing,” and “Knowing the ‘meter is running’ creates cautious viewing of the free articles.”

—

Apple’s tablet to go public: Apple announced that it will unveil its “latest creation” (read: its new tablet) next Wednesday. Since the announcement came a day after word of the Times’ paywall plans broke, it was only natural that the rumors would merge. The Daily Intel’s Gabriel Sherman, who broke the story of those Times plans, quoted Times officials putting the Times-tablet-deal rumors to rest. The Wall Street Journal detailed Apple’s plans for the tablet to do to newspapers, magazines and TV what the iPod did to music. Meanwhile, Columbia j-student Vadim Lavrusik and TechCrunch’s Paul Carr got tired of the tablet hype — Lavrusik for the print industry and Carr for tech geeks. (The Week also has a great timeline of the rumors.)

—

MediaNews goes bankrupt: Last Friday, MediaNews Group — a newspaper chain that publishes the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury-News, among others — announced it would file for bankruptcy protection. (A smaller chain, Morris Publishing Group, made the same announcement the day before.) For the facts and background of the filing, we’ve got a few sources: At the Lab, MediaNews veteran Martin Langeveld has a whole lot of history and insight on MediaNews chief Dean Singleton. News business analyst Alan Mutter tells us about the amazing fact that Singleton will come out of the filing unscathed but Hearst, which invested in MediaNews to save the San Francisco Chronicle, stands to lose $317 million in the deal. And MinnPost reports that the St. Paul Pioneer Press was the only MediaNews paper losing money.

Looking at the big picture, Ken Doctor says that bankruptcies like these are just a chance for newspapers to buy time while adjusting their strategy in “the fog of media war.” Steve Outing takes a glass-half-full approach, arguing that the downfall of old-media chains like MediaNews are a great opportunity for journalism startups to build a new news ecosystem.

—

How much do Google News users read?: An annual study by research firm Outsell and Ken Doctor on online and offline news preferences made waves by reporting that 44 percent of Google News users scan headlines without clicking through to the original articles. PaidContent noted that Outsell has a dog in this fight; it openly advocates that news organizations should get more money from Google. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan was not impressed, giving a thorough critique of the study and its perceived implications. Syracuse j-prof Vin Crosbie also wondered whether the same pattern might be true with print headlines.

In a similar vein, BNET’s David Weir used comScore numbers to argue that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft support big newspapers, and Jeff Jarvis made one of his favorite arguments — in defense of the link.

—

Heartbreak in Haiti: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the journalism and media connections to the largest news story in the world for the past two weeks — the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Several sites noted that Twitter led the way in breaking news of the quake and in raising money for relief. The money aspect is new, but as Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan noted last June, Twitter came of age a long time ago as a medium for breaking global news. That’s what it does. The coverage also provided an opportunity for discussion about the ethics of giving aid while reporting.

—

Reading roundup: In addition to being out in front of the whole New York Times paywall story, Gabriel Sherman authored a nice, long think piece for The New Republic on the difficulties of one of America’s other great newspapers, The Washington Post. For what it’s worth, Post patriarch Donald Graham thought it was “not even a molehill.”

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan uses the economic concept of stock and flow to describe the delicate balance between timeliness and permanence the world of online media. It’s a brilliant idea — a must-read.

Finally, a promising new site named MediaCritic, run by Salon veteran Scott Rosenberg, citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor, and Lucasfilm’s Bill Gannon, had its soft launch this week. It looks like it’s going to include some nifty features, like Rosenberg’s regular curation of Twitter commentary on big media subjects.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
2. This Week in Review: The Times’ blogs behind the wall, paid news on the iPad, and a new local news co-op
3. This Week in Review: Google’s Buzz buzz, Demand Media’s plans, and turning relationships into revenue

Who reports local news?: Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study Monday that aimed to find out “who really reports the news that most people get about their communities?” In studying the Baltimore news media ecosystem for a week, the study found that traditional media — especially newspapers — did most of the original reporting while new media sources functioned largely as a quick way to disseminate news from other places.

The study got pretty predictable reactions: Major mainstream sources (New York Times, AP, L.A. Times) repeated that finding in perfunctory write-ups. (Poynter did a bit more with it, though.) It inspired at least one “see how important newspapers are?” column. And several new media thinkers pooh-poohed it, led by CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis, who said it “sets up a strawman and then lights the match.” Steve Buttry (who notes he’s a newspaper/TV exec himself) offered the sharpest critique of the study, concluding that it’s too narrow, focuses on stories that are in the mainstream media’s wheelhouse, and has some damning statistics for traditional-media reporting, too. Former journalist John Zhu gave an impassioned rebuttal to Jarvis and Buttry that’s well worth a read, too.

(A couple of interesting tangential angles if you want to dig deeper: New York Times media critic David Carr explains why blogs aren’t geared toward original reporting, and new media giant Gawker offers a quick can’t-we-all-just-get-along post saying web journalism needs more reporting and newspapers need to get up to speed.)

My take: I’m with CUNY’s C.W. Anderson and USC’s David Westphal. Of course traditional media organizations report most of our news; this finding is neither a threat to new-media folks nor ammunition for those in old media. (I share Zhu’s frustration here — let’s quit turning every new piece of information into a political/rhetorical weapon and start working together to fix our system of news.) Clay Shirky said it well last March: The new news systems won’t come into place until after the old ones break, not before. Why would we expect any different now? Let’s accept this study as rudimentary affirmation of what already makes sense and keep plugging away to make things better.

—

Google talks tough with China: Citing attacks from hackers and limits on free speech, Google made big news this week by announcing it won’t censor its Chinese results anymore and is considering pulling out of the country altogether. The New York Times has a lucid explanation of the situation, and this 2005 Wall Street Journal article is good background on Google/China relations. Looking for something more in-depth? Search engine maven Danny Sullivan is your guy.

The Internet practically blew up with commentary on this move, so suffice it to say I’m only scratching the surface here. (GigaOm has a nice starter for opinions outside of the usual tech-blog suspects.) Many Google- and China-watchers praised the move as bold step forward for freedom, like Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?”; China/IT expert Rebecca MacKinnon (twice); New York Times human rights watchdog Nicholas Kristof; and tech guru Robert Scoble, to name a few.

TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy was more cynical, saying this was a business move for Google. (Sullivan and Scoble rebut the point in the links above.) Global blogging advocate Ethan Zuckerman laid out four possible explanations for the decision. The Wall Street Journal and Wired had some more details about Google’s internal arguments over this move, including their concerns about repercussions on the China employees. The China-watching blog Imagethief looked at the stakes for Google, and the Atlantic’s James Fallows, who got back from China not too long ago, has a quick take on the stakes from a foreign-relations standpoint.

Jarvis also took the opportunity to revisit a fascinating point from his book: Google has become an “interest-state,” an organization that collaborates and derives power outside of the traditional national borders. Google’s actions this week certainly seemed very nation-like, and the point is worth pondering.

—

Fox News ethics: Fox News was the subject of a couple of big stories this week: The biggest came Monday, when the network announced that it had signed Sarah Palin to a multiyear deal as a contributor. Most of the online commentary has focused on what this move means from Palin’s perspective (if that’s what you’re looking for, the BBC has a good roundup), but I haven’t found much of substance looking at this from the Fox/news media angle. I’m guessing this is for two reasons: Nobody in the world of media-thinkers is surprised that Fox has become a home for another out-of-office Republican, and none of them are taking Fox very seriously from an ethical standpoint in the first place.

Salon founder and blogging expert Scott Rosenberg found this out the frustrating way when he got an apathetic response to his question of how Fox will cover any stories that involve her. As I responded to Rosenberg on Twitter, I think the lack of interest in his question are a fascinating indication of media watchers’ cynicism about Fox’s ethics. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Fox News would be a shill for Palin regardless of whether she was an employee, simply by virtue of her conservatism. Regardless of whether you think that attitude is justified (I do), it’s sad that that’s the situation we’re in.

Fox News was also involved in a strange chain of events this week that started when The New York Times published a front-page profile of its chief, Roger Ailes. It included some stinging criticism from Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, British PR bigwig Matthew Freud. That led to speculation by The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff that Ailes’ days were numbered at Fox, with Wolff actually asserting that Ailes had already been fired. Then the L.A. Times reported that Ailes was still around and had News Corp.’s full support. Um, OK.

—

Facebook says privacy’s passé: In a short interview last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a sort-of explanation for Facebook’s sweeping privacy changes last month, one that ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick recognized as a dramatic break from the privacy defenses Zuckerberg’s given in the past. Essentially, Kirkpatrick infers, Zuckerberg is saying he considers us to now be living in an age where privacy just doesn’t matter as much to people.

Kirkpatrick and The Huffington Post’s Craig Kanalley give two spirited rebuttals, and over at the social media hub Mashable, Vadim Lavrusik says journalists should be worried about Facebook’s changes, too. Meanwhile, Advertising Age media critic Simon Dumenco argues that we’re not getting enough out of all the information we’re feeding Facebook and Twitter.

—

Reading roundup: These last few items aren’t attached to any big media-related conversations from this week, but they’re all worth a close read. First, in the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles made the bold argument that there is no revenue model for journalism. Steve Buttry filed a point-by-point rebuttal, and the two traded counterpoints in the comments of each other’s posts. It’s a good debate to dive into.

Second, Alan Mutter, an expert on the business side of the news industry, has a sharp two-part post crunching the numbers to find out how long publishers can afford to keep their print products going. He considers a few scenarios and concludes that “some publishers may not be able to sustain print products for as long as demand holds out.”

And finally, Internet freedom writer and activist Cory Doctorow explains the principle “close enough for rock ‘n’ roll,” and how it needs to drive our new-media experimentation. It’s a smart, optimistic yet grounded look at the future of innovation, and I like its implications for the future of journalism.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
2. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed

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.

No related posts.