Blame for both the DOJ and journalists: The story of the U.S. Department of Justice’s seizure of news organizations’ phone and email records moved into “who knew what and when” stage, especially regarding the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen. Fox didn’t know Rosen’s phone records and emails had been taken until it became public last week, but The Wall Street Journal reported this week that its parent company, News Corp., was notified by the DOJ in 2010 but didn’t tell Fox.

News Corp. issued some mixed signals in response, initially saying it had no record of notification from the DOJ but eventually conceding that it didn’t dispute the DOJ’s claim that notification was sent. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put forward a theory as to why it’s in News Corp.’s interest to be more deferential to the Obama administration DOJ, but in Fox News’ interest to be more antagonistic. However, The Atlantic Wire’s Elspeth Reeve noted that Fox News doesn’t have a very good track record on advocating for journalists’ freedom in these cases.

The metastasizing issue — coupled with the DOJ’s seizure of what the Associated Press claims is “thousands and thousands” of its phone records — has led Attorney General Eric Holder to plan a meeting with the top representatives of several major news organizations to hash out guidelines for DOJ intrusion. Several news organizations, including The New York Times and AP, announced, however, that they wouldn’t attend the meeting because it’s set to be off the record. The Daily Beast’s Daniel Klaidman wrote a thorough piece on Holder’s regrets in these cases, saying that it’s not part of the progressive image in which he views himself, and Salon’s Alex Pareene explained why Holder’s likely to keep his job despite the outcry.

In a pair of stories, The New York Times reported on the remarkable scale of many of the Obama administration’s leak inquiries and journalists’ charges that such efforts are creating a chilling effect on investigative journalism on the federal government. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian expressed his dismay at journalists’ lack of action against the administration’s actions: In the current climate, he said, “it’s very difficult to imagine the US press corps taking any meaningful steps to push back against these attacks. And as long as that’s true, it’s very hard to see why the Obama administration would possibly stop doing it.”

At the same time, several others argued that the press’s self-defense reaction is a bit too knee-jerk in this case. Slate’s Fred Kaplan and The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus both argued that Rosen’s source was not a whistleblower exposing corruption but someone simply breaking the law and revealing harmful information. And Reuters’ Jack Shafer contended that Obama has not declared war on the press, as his crusade against leaks has been much more on the supply side than the demand side.

Still others, including Peter Sterne of the New York Observer and Matthew Cooper of the National Journal, were concerned that the proposed shield law wouldn’t do enough to protect journalists. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones tried to find a middle way between their concern for journalists and the objections of those such as Pincus.

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Facebook, hate speech, and censorship: Yet another debate over Facebook’s control over its users’ content simmered this week, though it was a bit different from the privacy flaps of the past. A coalition of feminist groups called Women, Action, and the Media wrote an open letter to Facebook last week urging it to remove content that trivializes or glorifies violence against women, noting that Facebook already moderates what it considers hate speech and pornographic content.

The groups also campaigned to Facebook’s advertisers, succeeding in getting several of them to pull their advertising until Facebook took some action. Facebook ultimately responded by posting a statement saying it hadn’t policed gender-related hate speech as well as it should have and vowing to take several steps to more closely moderate such content. The New York Times has a good, quick summary tying together the advertiser campaign and Facebook’s response.

While Valleywag’s Sam Biddle argued that all Facebook did was try to placate those protesting rather than commit to any real action, while Forbes’ Kashmir Hill and Reuters’ Jack Shafer noted that Facebook probably didn’t do this out of any morally consistent concern over content, but simply because of advertiser pressure. Hill concluded that “the procedure appears to be that they will draw the line when advertisers start complaining to them,” and Shafer argued that Facebook has only pushed this discourse underground, further away from the voices of reason and shame.

And while everyone seemed to agree that Facebook’s well within its rights to police speech on its own platform (and that it’s clamping down on a particularly heinous form of speech in this case), they also wondered about the precedent. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM wondered about the slippery slope of what Facebook considers hate speech.

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Newsweek on the block (again): Variety reported that IAC is attempting to sell Newsweek, a month after its chairman, Barry Diller, called his purchase of the magazine a “mistake.” IAC shut down Newsweek’s print edition at the end of 2012, turning it into a web-only publication. As Variety noted, most every indicator at Newsweek — subscriptions, traffic, cash flow — is trending downward.

Newsweek confirmed the attempted sale with an internal memo, saying that Newsweek is drawing resources away from its sister site, The Daily Beast. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici offered a more detailed explanation: Diller bought Newsweek thinking he needed a print publication to supplement its digital ad base, but since it’s failed at that, it’s become a mere distraction (and drag on the bottom line). Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan urged prospective buyers to stay away, though Mathew Ingram of paidContent offered some tips for its new owner: drop the paywall, aggregate, go deep on particular topics, develop a strong voice, and embrace mobile.

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Reading roundup: Despite the quiet week overall, there were several smaller stories to watch:

— Rob Fishman of BuzzFeed wrote a thoughtful piece questioning whether the social media editor might be an endangered species at news organizations, as engagement with social media becomes a deeper part of each journalists’ work and routines. Digital First’s Mandy Jenkins countered that many news organizations (especially smaller ones) still have a need for someone dedicated to newsroom-wide social media integration and gave some useful advice about how to do it. Elsewhere in social media, Twitter said it wants to partner with media companies rather than become one of them, and Jeswin and Jesse Koepke talked on Medium about how undo Facebook’s massification of online social interaction.

— One of the news’ most prominent social media editors, Anthony De Rosa, announced he’s leaving Reuters to join Circa, a startup that summarizes top news stories by breaking them down into “atomic units.” PaidContent’s Mathew Ingram explained what Circa’s up to, and Fast Company’s Anjali Mullany published a Q&A with De Rosa about his plans there.

— A few News Corp. pieces: It announced it will officially split into a publishing company (called News Corp.) and an entertainment company (21st Century Fox) on June 28. It introduced its retooled News Corp. logo, and the new News Corp.’s head, Robert Thomson, declared that it would have “relentless” cuts in store after the split.

— BuzzFeed announced a new YouTube channel featuring video through a partnership with CNN. The Wall Street Journal explained what’s behind both companies’ move deeper into online video.

— Finally, a couple of smart pieces on the native advertising phenomenon: J-prof Jeff Jarvis made the case against news orgs getting into native advertising, and Publish2′s Scott Karp laid out some of the difficulties of making native advertising scale.

Yahoo snaps up Tumblr: Yahoo approved a $1.1 billion deal to buy Tumblr over the weekend, giving the company, as The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham noted, a big stake in the current wave of simpler, more personal and expressive social media platforms. Yahoo pledged ”not to screw it up,” and its sources told All Things D’s Kara Swisher they’d take a hands-off approach to Tumblr. But it will make changes — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said it would introduce more ads to Tumblr’s dashboards.

A lot of people were immediately skeptical of Yahoo’s ability (or willingness) to keep Tumblr un-screwed-up, including GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, who noted, as many others did, that Yahoo was unable to do that with its prior purchases Geocities and Flickr. PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy pointed out that a lot has changed at Yahoo since then (particularly Mayer’s presence). Still, blogging pioneer Dave Winer warned that when you sell a company, your buyers can do what they want with it; promises don’t matter. YouTube’s Hunter Walk offered Yahoo some helpful tips from Google’s management of his own site.

Several other writers along with Lacy saw this move as a good one for Yahoo. Forbes’ Alex Konrad saw it as a success as long as Yahoo maintains a light touch, and Ingram said it made some sense as a desperation move. Reuters’ Felix Salmon said the deal looks good from both sides — it allows Yahoo better user data and advertising opportunities, and it lets Tumblr pawn off its profitability problems. Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment said the Yahoo deal will allow Tumblr’s founder and head, David Karp, to focus on design and user experience while offloading concerns about maintenance and money to Yahoo.

Business Insider’s Jay Yarow and Nicholas Carlson cited similar reasons in arguing that this deal works for Tumblr, and reasoned that it also helps Yahoo solve its mobile problem. Tech entrepreneur John Battelle said the key is Yahoo’s shift from traditional to native advertising, and Fast Company’s Sarah Kessler advised Yahoo to adopt Tumblr’s creativity in developing native ads.

Fortune’s John Saroff listed some reasons to doubt Tumblr’s effectiveness for advertising, however. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman argued that Yahoo is buying Tumblr for access to its young user base, which sees Yahoo as representing adults, and with them cluelessness and boredom. Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch asserted that Tumblr’s users will jump ship rather than go with it to Yahoo, and WordPress saw a jump in posts at the announcement, potentially (though not necessarily likely) suggesting a migration.

Business Insider’s Jay Yarow saw a troubling dip in traffic at Tumblr over the past few months, while Timothy B. Lee of The Washington Post saw Yahoo’s fixation on young, “cool” users as a sign that’s thinking too much like a media company, rather than a tech company. Paul Smalera of Reuters, meanwhile, argued that Yahoo and Tumblr’s fundamental clashes in philosophy could be greater than their shared strengths. The Guardian’s Michael Wolff was similarly skeptical, writing that the Tumblr purchase is fueled more by desperate investors than anything else: “nothing in Yahoo’s muddled experience and questionable competence suggests it knows anything about the social business or has any sensibility that has anything to do with cool.”

Finally, tech entrepreneur Anil Dash offered some thoughts about how Tumblr upended the conventional wisdom on blogging and furthered the form as a result, and Referly’s Danielle Morrill wrote that Tumblr could have had an even bigger windfall if it had figured out how to better monetize its user base.

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Is investigative reporting being criminalized?: After last week’s revelation that the U.S. Department of Justice seized a broad swath of the Associated Press’ phone records in a leak investigation, we were hit with another case of the U.S. government snooping into journalists’ work in an effort to hunt down leak sources, as The Washington Post reported that the DOJ had named Fox News reporter James Rosen a criminal “co-conspirator” in the leak of classified information about North Korea as a means of getting search-warrant access to his personal emails. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon has a good overview of the developments in both cases; we’ll start with the AP then move to Rosen.

The AP continued its public outrage at the DOJ’s actions, with its CEO calling the move unconstitutional. The Los Angeles Times talked to a media law scholar who backed up the AP’s concern, as well as a prosecutor who said the seizure was pretty routine. The New York Times lined up six perspectives on the subject as well, with a couple of them defending the Obama administration.

The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone explored the complex relationship between the government and the press that the seizure illuminates, especially when it comes to national security. The president of the Society of Professional Journalists urged Congress to pass the media shield bill that President Obama advocated last week, though j-prof Chris Daly argued against it, calling for journalists to instead insist on the rights they already have under the First Amendment. Meanwhile, USA Today’s Devin Karambelas and David Schick noted that college newspapers often face similar heavy-handed (and often illegal) pressures from administrators.

Regarding the Rosen case, Fox’s Shepard Smith claimed that the government’s intrusion went further — that it “went into” Fox News’ servers without notifying the organization. The DOJ maintained, meanwhile, that naming Rosen as a co-conspirator in a subpoena doesn’t mean it ever wanted to charge him with a crime, and Obama said they don’t think journalists should be prosecuted for soliciting government information.

Still, just as they were last week, many observers were appalled at the DOJ’s treatment of Rosen. Fred Kaplan of Slate called it ”a quantum leap” in the Obama administration’s crusade against leakers, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald called it indefensible (and noted that the Obama administration has used this rationale before with WikiLeaks, though fewer journalists came to its defense), and The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank said it’s “as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration.” Mike Masnick of Techdirt said it’s clear this is more about waging war on investigative reporting than protecting national security.

The common argument was simple: This action criminalizes basic reporting in a way that seriously jeopardizes journalists’ First Amendment rights. The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Trevor Timm urged journalists to stand up for their rights.

On the other hand, Reuters’ Jack Shafer drew attention to Rosen’s faulty practices of keeping his sources secret (as well as the neglible value of the scoop). Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall said he was more shocked at Rosen’s ineptitude than the government’s actions. A group of former attorneys general (or deputies) defended the administration’s fight against leaks in The New York Times. Forbes’ Daniel Fisher explained a bit of the conflicted attitude toward leaks from the government’s perspective.

Others pushed back against the anti-leak attitude: The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza argued that leaks are essential for government to be kept accountable. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic made the point that leaks will always continue as long as public servants believe information should be public, but if the government goes hard after professional journalists, those leaks will go through less established channels, like WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

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Reading roundup: A few other bits and pieces this week amid the big stories:

— Scrollkit co-founder Cody Brown created a replica of The New York Times’ famous multimedia feature Snow Fall as a demo of his web design product, but The Times demanded he take it down, then demanded again that he remove any reference to their paper. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick defended Brown, while The Times’ spokeswoman defended the paper to Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon. The episode sparked a lengthy Twitter fight documented by the Columbia Journalism Review’s Sara Morrison, and prompted The Awl’s Choire Sicha to report that journalists secretly resent Snow Fall for being hyped as the “future of journalism” that everyone should be expected to pull off.

— ESPN laid off an estimated 300 to 400 employees this week. The company has been rolling in cash from cable and satellite subscriber fees, which might leave you scratching your head as to why these layoffs had to happen. Business Insider’s Tony Manfred and Forbes’ Chris Smith pinpointed ESPN’s skyrocketing rights fees to broadcast various live sports as the primary cause.

— Finally, a couple of interesting pieces at the Lab this week — j-prof Nikki Usher on the use of Twitter at the Miami Herald, and Jonathan Stray on some fascinating research on the evolution of objectivity toward contextual journalism.

Outrage at seizure of AP records: The journalism and media world was collectively seething in a way you don’t often see this week after the Associated Press revealed that the U.S. Department of Justice had secretly obtained more than two months of phone records from more than 20 of its journalists’ work and home lines. The government hasn’t publicly said what they’re looking for, but it’s widely believed to be part of their investigation into the leaker behind the AP’s story last year about a foiled Yemeni bomb plot. The two best explanations of the situation come from Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and Free Press’ Josh Stearns.

The DOJ has moved quickly to defend itself publicly (and to deflect some attention): It wrote a letter to the AP claiming it had the legal right to make the seizure, which drew an indignant response from the AP. Its head, Attorney General Eric Holder, held a press conference in which he emphasized the seriousness of the leak being investigated — and also told NPR he wasn’t sure how many times his department had seized such records of journalists. Holder also testified before Congress, and the White House pushed to revive a media shield bill that would require the government to notify news organizations before their records were seized, allowing them to fight it in court (with some exceptions).

New Yorker attorney Lynn Oberlander and Jeffrey Hermes of the Digital Media Law Project both reviewed the law behind the case, finding that while the DOJ might be able to argue for the legality of its actions, it probably violated its own (non-binding) policy for such seizures by not informing the AP beforehand or getting judicial review. This case, as Hermes argued, “called attention to the fact that the DOJ’s Media Policy has significant problems with transparency, accountability, and scope.” The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee marveled at the fact that the DOJ’s actions are probably completely legal, and warned of the implications for all cell phone and email users.

Other writers provided some historical context: The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple looked at a couple of past cases to illustrate the difference made when the government gives prior notice, and also examined the long-term effects of its 2001 seizure of an AP reporter’s records. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, meanwhile, noted how the DOJ has abused its supposedly careful process for record seizure in the past.

Journalists were virtually universally outraged, as The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson chronicled in a pair of posts. The DOJ’s actions were condemned as a violation of the freedom of the press in pieces from journalists and observers ranging from The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, Poynter’s Al Tompkins, Free Press’ Josh Stearns, and Slate’s Emily Bazelon. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, as is his wont, placed the seizure in the context of the Obama administration’s ongoing attacks on civil liberties, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sounded a warning to all of us about the privacy of the communication we entrust to third parties.

Marcy Wheeler of Salon broke down the administration’s rationale for the leak investigation, arguing that it was motivated by resentment at the AP for pre-empting a planned announcement, and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick concurred that it was driven more by embarrassment than national security concern.

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Snooping with Bloomberg terminals: The DOJ’s seizure wasn’t the only snooping story in journalism this week, though journalists were the offender rather than the victim in the other one. The financial news service Bloomberg came under scrutiny with reports that executives from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have confronted Bloomberg over reporters’ use of its terminals to track terminal usage by their companies’ employees. Reporters’ access to that information has since been cut off, but the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Treasury Department are all examining the situation. Not only that, but the Financial Times reported (paywalled; here’s The Verge summarizing it) that thousands of confidential terminal messages had inadvertently been available online for years, though they’ve now been taken down.

A bit of background on Bloomberg’s terminals: They’re everywhere in the financial services industry, and they’re by far the largest share of Bloomberg’s revenue. Their primary purpose is to track financial data and news, but they can also be used to send messages, and its users’ login and customer service data is available to Bloomberg reporters. Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler downplayed what information reporters have access to through the terminals, but noted that they’ve used that data as a feedback to tailor their reporting since the early days of the company.

The Wall Street Journal’s William Launder went into deeper detail on the historical intertwining between journalists and the terminals’ financial data, and Quartz’s Zachary Seward gave a fuller picture of exactly what Bloomberg reporters can see regarding the terminals’ users. BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria reported that a Bloomberg anchor had been disciplined in 2011 for making on-air comments about using terminal data to track a source, and The New York Times’ Amy Chozick reported that Bloomberg reporters did talk about using terminal data to help break news. Nitasha Tiku of Gawker gave some more details about how the terminals were used in reporting and the information Bloomberg reporters store and share about their sources.

Some observers debated about how big of a deal this snooping was. Both Adam Penenberg of PandoDaily and The Daily Beast’s Stuart Stevens compared it negatively to News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal, but the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum and The Guardian’s Heidi Moore noted that reporters couldn’t get that much information from the terminals, and, as Moore argued, were simply mining data for any minute advantage in the same way their clients were.

The most insightful piece on the issue came from Quartz’s Zachary Seward, who wrote that the ability to see customers’ data was an open secret, a feature rather than a bug for a company built on a borderline obsessive culture of external secrecy and internal “transparency.” “Data comes into the company—as much as possible, from wherever possible—but it doesn’t leave because, at Bloomberg, information is money,” Seward wrote.

Former Bloomberg reporter Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D also detailed how deeply ingrained this surveillance is at Bloomberg, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon argued that Bloomberg’s terminal system is essentially a social network, where, like Facebook, users trade their data for the value the network provides. The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin wondered if Bloomberg’s model is ripe for disruption, and The New York Times’ David Carr tied together the DOJ and Bloomberg scandals, noting that spying is more of a two-way street than journalists like to acknowledge.

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The struggle over online video: There were a few interesting developments on the online video front worth keeping an eye on this week: ABC announced that it would begin live-streaming its feed through its iPad and iPhone apps to users in the area of some of the local stations it owns. It’s the first time a network has offered any type of live mobile streaming, but it’s not as much of a step forward in accessibility as you might think: It’s only available to cable and satellite subscribers, despite the fact that it’s a free over-the-air signal.

GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers looked more closely at the technology behind live streaming and how it’s cleared the hurdles that have held it back in the past. He noted the ways in which the service contrasts with that of Aereo, the service that lets subscribers access streaming network TV on mobile devices, much to the consternation of media executives. Aereo, meanwhile, has simplified its price structure and is expanding from New York into Boston and Atlanta. CNNMoney’s Julianne Pepitone said despite the moves by ABC and Aereo, live online TV is still a ways off from becoming a reality for most people.

Elsewhere in online video, YouTube debuted its subscription channels last Friday, and as Peter Kafka of All Things D pointed out, it’s almost entirely devoid of both big-media players and YouTube-native stars. The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor questioned whether people will want to pay for what’s offered, and Janko Roettgers of paidContent argued that the key is finding content whose market neatly intersects with YouTube’s.

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A new Strongbox for leaks: The New Yorker this week launched Strongbox, a method of securely submitting sensitive information to the magazine, designed by recently deceased digital activist Aaron Swartz and former hacker and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. It’s a pretty complicated process, involving the anonymity network Tor, encryption, and multiple computers and thumb drives. Poulsen explained Swartz’s role in creating the underlying code for the process, known as DeadDrop.

The most useful analysis of Strongbox comes from Source, where several journalist/developers discussed its advantages and limitations, generally finding it to be a helpful tool that’s nonetheless not silver bullet for security, and which may be too complex for many people to use. You can also see some early optimism about Strongbox’s viability in posts by the Village Voice’s Sydney Brownstone and Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with Timm calling it the most promising leak submission system since WikiLeaks.

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Reading roundup: A few other stories to check out this week:

— Protests against the possible sale of the Tribune Co.’s newspapers to the conservative billionaire Koch brothers continued this week in Los Angeles, with another one planned for Orlando. Tribune Co. CEO Peter Liguori, however, tried to reassure employees that a sale of the papers wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi said stopping the Kochs from buying the papers is something unions should do, while Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon said the Poynter’s potential influence may be overblown.

— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported on surprising new research finding that 92% of the time spent consuming news is on legacy platforms — print, radio, TV — rather than computers or mobile devices. Mathew Ingram of paidContent contested the usefulness of the data in illustrating the current state of media consumption.

— At MediaShift Idea Lab, Brian Moritz gave four lessons for journalism students from his experiences at Syracuse working with the cutting edge of digital technology, such as drones, 3D printers, and immersive virtual reality tools.

— Finally, NYU j-prof Jay Rosen laid out a blueprint for a networked beat, focusing on how it might work at The Atlantic’s business news site Quartz. He also talked to paidContent’s Mathew Ingram about his ideas for how to rework the beat with the public at the center.

Kurtz’s rare accountability: Media critic Howard Kurtz’s status was pretty well settled by the end of last week after his disastrously erroneous column earlier in the week — he was fired by The Daily Beast, but still in good standing as host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Kurtz allowed himself to face a 2-on-1  grilling by NPR’s David Folkenflik and Politico’s Dylan Byers, summarized well at Mediaite.

Hardly anyone watched it, but a number of media observers found the Kurtz’s apology (he called his work “sloppy and inexcusable”) and interview significant — Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon offered a good rundown of some of their opinions. Several of them still had lingering questions after the episode: Sharon Waxman of The Wrap was unimpressed with what she saw as a thin response to questions, writing, “Merely repeating an apology and stressing one’s sincerity is not a ticket back to play on the journalism field.” Variety’s Brian Lowry found it jarring to see Kurtz immediately return to his perch as the media’s ethical cop, and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized him for refusing to apologize when his error was first found out.

The interview also addressed another aspect of Kurtz’s story — his role at the Daily Download, a little-known website which he mentioned and appeared on often. Before and after his firing, Daily Beast staffers voiced concerns that he was devoting too much energy to the site. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone said Kurtz downplayed his role at the site in the interview, in which he said he’s only a contributor. The Washington Post’s Wemple examined Daily Download founder Lauren Ashburn’s increasingly ubiquitous role on CNN, and both Calderone and j-prof Dan Kennedy questioned the Knight Foundation’s decision to award the site a grant in 2011.

Other saw something noble in Kurtz’s show on Sunday. Several commented on just how remarkable and rare it was to see  a critic and pundit willingly subject himself to such scrutiny: J-prof Jeff Jarvis hoped it would become an example for journalists who make high-profile mistakes, and Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times suggested that “as social media and the online world have made our errors more visible than ever, such directness just might make the difference in gaining and maintaining the public’s trust for the future.”

Salon’s Alex Pareene also marveled at the rarity of Kurtz’s questioning, but also contended that the extent of the consequences Kurtz will ultimately face is mere embarrassment, thanks to his elite status. Still, Time’s James Poniewozik saw the fact that Kurtz faced any sort of consequences as surprising, as he wished for other pundits to be held to similar public scrutiny when they get things wrong.

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Politico tries a paywall: Politico, one of the most influential non-legacy news orgs in the U.S., joined the paywall brigade this week with its announcement that it would test a metered pay plan for its site. Politico will test the plan out on readers in six states and outside the U.S. (sorry about that, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming), experimenting with various prices and meter limits.

The announcement emphasized that Politico’s leaders aren’t sold on the paywall model, but want to try it out because they believe their audiences are more likely to pay than they had previously thought. They also said it’s “highly unlikely” they’d try out a paywall in Washington, D.C., where their advertising-and-traffic-based model is working well. As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted, Politico also ventured into sponsored content on its homepage for the first time this week.

Elsewhere in paywalls, the Lab’s Justin Ellis reported on tweaks The Dallas Morning News is exploring its (currently relatively hard) paywall — possibly a metered model, or time-limited access. He also gave some details of how The Boston Globe used its free/paid two-site strategy to cover last month’s Boston Marathon bombing. And blogger Andrew Sullivan provided another update on his pioneering pay model, reporting that he’s expecting to fall short of his $900,000 annual goal and is brainstorming about new sources of income to add.

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Big guns line up against Kochs: The campaign to keep the conservative billionaire Koch brothers from buying the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other Tribune Co. newspapers has building over the last couple of weeks, and it came to a head this week. As The New York Times reported, 10 public employee unions sent a letter to the company’s largest shareholder, Oaktree Capital Management, threatening to press to withdraw Oaktree’s pension fund assets if the deal went through. The two top leaders of California’s legislature also objected to the sale.

The Guardian reported that more than 250,000 people have signed a petition, organized by the Courage Campaign and the liberal blog Daily Kos, to urge Oaktree not to sell to the Kochs. Public sentiment hasn’t been voiced nearly as strongly in Chicago, where only a couple dozen people turned out to protest Thursday in front of the Tribune’s offices, as Crain’s Chicago Business observed.

A number of conservatives, of course, saw the outrage over the Kochs’ potential ownership as myopic concern over a newspaper that hasn’t played it straight for quite some time: Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and the Washington Times’ Dorian Davis questioned what exactly constitutes objective coverage for those objecting to the Kochs. Zócalo’s Joe Mathews said that while he doesn’t support the Kochs, he thinks their ownership of the Times could be positive for the city, as it either provides a check against the city’s establishment or implodes and prompts L.A.’s most ambitious journalists to create better alternatives.

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Reading roundup: A few other stories going on during this slow week in media:

— News Corp. posted good results in its quarterly figures this week, though Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo said the numbers also emphasized why News Corp. is headed for a corporate split (helpfully diagrammed by Quartz’s David Yanofsky) later this year. Meanwhile, its New York Post is attempting to reduce 10% of its staff through buyouts, and News Corp. shareholders continued to call for Rupert Murdoch to resign.

— The Royal Charter that had been proposed to set up a stronger regulatory body for the U.K. press has been tabled while politicians talk to newspaper editors about their alternative proposals for the plan. The plans saw a breakthrough a few days later when the papers agreed to drop their right to veto appointments to the new commission.

— Gittip’s Chad Whitacre made some waves this week by requiring that journalists’ interviews with him be live-streamed and posted on YouTube. He blogged about the experience and the nature of collaborative journalism, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram wondered why more journalists don’t open up the interview process to the public. Meanwhile, Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark delineated the difference between journalistic transparency and translucence.

— A few great data journalism resources: PBS MediaShift often useful summaries from two data journalism events, one from Italy and the other from West Virginia. And j-prof and PolitiFact vet Matt Waite wrote a thoughtful post on turning stories into data, not just data into stories.

— An anonymous newspaper ad exec explained to Digiday just how much trouble the industry is in, and TVNewsCheck’s Randy Bennett offered newspapers’ woes as a caution for local TV.

— Finally, Texas j-prof Robert Jensen issued a thought-provoking call for a prophetic, apocalyptic journalism to fit our apocalyptic times.

Newspapers’ digital subscriptions jump: Newspapers’ biannual circulation reports came out this week, and there were a couple of ways to read them. The New York Times went the glass-half-full route, emphasizing that digital subscriptions are up, now accounting for 20% of total circulation figures. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici went glass-half-empty, pointing out that overall circulation is down, meaning that “publishers seem to be shedding print subscribers faster than they can replace them with readers of online, mobile or replica editions.”

The big news among individual papers was that The New York Times passed up USA Today as the second-largest newspaper in the U.S., behind The Wall Street Journal. Ad Age reported that the Times’ jump in digital subscribers since its paywall was introduced two years ago has come mostly from new digital subscribers, not print subscribers who added digital subscriptions. 10,000 Words’ Lauren Hockenson pointed out the slowdown of the Times’ paywall growth, though recently paywalled blogger Andrew Sullivan compared the Times’ situation favorably to the free (for the time being) Washington Post.

Despite its continued drop in circulation, USA Today’s publisher, Larry Kramer, sent out a cheerful memo published by Jim Romenesko that noted that it’s relying on a different model — free and ad-based — than its competitors, which doesn’t give it the digital subscriptions to match up against theirs. J-prof Dan Kennedy also broke down the difference digital numbers are making among the Boston papers.

Mathew Ingram of paidContent, meanwhile, called BS on the whole exercise, pointing out that circulation figures allow newspapers to count someone who reads the paper in print, on the web, and on a tablet as three different readers. With numbers so inflated and open to interpretation, Ingram said, “The bottom line is that no one really knows what the ‘real’ readership numbers are for newspapers.” Media analyst Alan Mutter echoed his point, arguing that newspapers’ fuzzy digital circulation numbers are masking a collapse in print subscriptions over the past several years.

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More pushback against the Kochs: The news that the conservative billionaire Koch brothers are talking about buying the Tribune Co.’s newspapers (which include the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) came to the fore last week, and opposition to the move continues to bubble up. Kathleen Miles of The Huffington Post reported that in a show of hands at a recent meeting there, about half of the LA Times newsroom said they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper. The Times also reported on three LA city councilmen who threatened to pull city pension money from the investment firms who currently own the paper if they sell to the Kochs.

The Newspaper Guild-CWA called for the Times to only sell to a buyer that will commit to preserving the paper’s objectivity, while locals in south Florida have circulated an online petition against Koch ownership of a Tribune paper there. At the Times, David Horsey urged LA residents to rise against Koch ownership there. Craig Aaron of the media reform group Free Press called on readers of Tribune Co. papers to do the same across the country, but said the best (though extremely unlikely) solution would be breaking up the chain in favor of local ownership.

Forbes’ Daniel Fisher wondered why the Kochs might think the deal might work well from a business perspective (it won’t), while at USA Today, Michael Wolff did the same with their potential for political influence. Those papers’ influence would be limited to their cities, Wolff said, none of whom seem to be clamoring for a loud conservative media voice. “Other than a few editorials tilting to their views, it is hard to imagine how they get a new conservative national voice to rise from Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford and Baltimore — or in Spanish,” he wrote. Jack Shafer of Reuters offered a similar caution to the Kochs, while also contending that they’re not the hard-right loons they’re being painted as.

Elsewhere, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post gave some background on the Kochs’ dealings with the media — they generally refuse to talk until after an article about them is published, then complain loudly afterward. And Texas grad student Brian Baresch looked at some of the history of newspaper ownership driven by conservative ideology.

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Daily Beast fires Kurtz: Howard Kurtz, longtime Washington Post media critic and one of the web’s most prominent media writers, was fired yesterday by The Daily Beast. There were a couple of possible causes — one more immediate and another more general. Kurtz wrote an erroneous column earlier this week that was critical of Jason Collins, the NBA player who announced Monday he was gay. Kurtz accused Collins of hiding the fact that he used to be engaged to a woman, but Collins actually revealed that in the very Sports Illustrated column in which he made his announcement. The Daily Beast retracted the column Thursday morning and fired him later that day.

The other factor came in the form of a report by The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone on Kurtz’s heavy involvement with a little-known website called The Daily Download, which is increasingly the subject of his tweets and a publishing venue for his perspectives on media. Kurtz is on the board of the site but told Calderone he isn’t paid, so Calderone said his extensive work there is raising eyebrows at The Daily Beast.

Alex Pareene of Salon tied the two together, arguing that while his main flaw previously had been his blandness and subservience, this error was evidence that he’s spreading himself too thin. The question, then, was what role both played in his firing: Calderone reported that the Collins error was a last straw in a series of grievances, and hinted that Kurtz’s role at The Daily Download may be greater than what he has said publicly. The Washington Post and The New York Times both quoted a (very similar-sounding!) anonymous Daily Beast source who said the firing wasn’t just a reaction to the Collins story but was over problems that had accrued over time, and that Kurtz has had too many distractions from his work there.

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Stopping hacking on Twitter: A week after its hack of the Associated Press’ Twitter account, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked 11 Twitter accounts for the Guardian over the weekend, getting control of them through phishing emails. Twitter responded by sending a memo to journalists regarding security that, as Marketing Pilgrim’s Frank Reed wrote, didn’t exactly inspire confidence: As BuzzFeed’s John Herrman noted, Twitter is actually telling journalists “to stay off the internet on the computers they use for Twitter.”

At the Investigative News Network, Amy Schmitz Weiss had some good tips for journalists to keep their accounts and CMSes secure. Meanwhile, Twitter posted a job listing for a “head of news and journalism” to better manage its relationships with journalists.

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Reading roundup: A much quieter week this week than the last few, but still several interesting items worth noting:

— Politico owner Robert Allbritton sent a memo to the site’s staff announcing that he’s exploring selling his TV stations, though he was emphatic that he wouldn’t be selling Politico, which The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone posted with some background. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wondered whether Politico is truly as profitable as Allbritton asserts.

— Yahoo announced six new original web shows and a variety of TV parternships, which, as Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth argued, left the distinct message that it’s still a media company. Its proposed purchase of the French video-sharing site Dailymotion, meanwhile, was shot down by the French government.

— Two interesting conversations that developed this week: The New Republic’s Marc Tracy declared the death of blogs, and blogger Andrew Sullivan said it’s more likely magazines that are dying. And Northwestern journalism student Katie Zhu urged j-schools to rethink their approach to data and computer science, and journalist/developer Derek Willis chimed in with his own call for reform.

— Betaworks, which also owns Digg, bought the content-saving app Instapaper late last week, and The Atlantic looked at Betaworks’ quiet but increasingly significant role in the online news world.

— Twitter expanded its self-serve ad platform, which was launched last year and had been invite-only, to all businesses in the U.S. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine explained what it might mean for Twitter and for advertisers.

— Two thoughtful pieces to read through this weekend: Legendary sociologist Herb Gans argued that public opinion polls don’t actually measure public opinion, and The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen looked at the Internet giants’ control over online speech.

Stemming the misinformation epidemic: As The New York Times’ Brian Stelter pointed out, the media — both old and new — played as large a role in the manhunt that followed last week’s Boston Marathon bombing as it has in any major news story in recent history. There are a myriad of angles to this story, but we’ll start with misinformation on traditional media, then social media, then cover the Reddit-fueled crowdsourced investigative efforts.

First off, there was some fantastic reporting done on this story, led by the local media applauded by the Columbia Journalism Review and Mashable, as well as NBC’s Pete Williams. The New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, also praised her paper’s restraint. That kind of quality was the exception, though, as a parade of news orgs were skewered for reporting false information (as well as heaps of mindless speculation).

The AP chastised itself, but two other news orgs that didn’t were the subject of particular ridicule: The New York Post was savaged for misreporting the number of deaths and identifying the wrong suspects by Reuters’ Jack Shafer and Salon’s Alex Pareene, with the latter predicting its demise. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, tried to defend it. CNN was also singled out for its inept coverage, which was broken down well by The New York Times’ David Carr. (CNN did score some high ratings for its coverage, and former CNN anchor Ali Velshi argued that Twitter critics were excessively harsh toward it.)

So what exactly was at the root of this journalistic failure? The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple argued that the problem with the poor coverage on cable news is … cable news, specifically that its round-the-clock format encourages journalists “to find and tout breaking news all the time, even when it’s not breaking.” Farhad Manjoo of Slate said the problem can’t be tied to a particular medium, but that breaking news itself is broken, especially because we’re enticed to follow it too closely.

Traditional news orgs had their defenders as well. Jack Shafer of Reuters said errors have long been an accepted part of breaking news reporting, provided audiences knew journalists would acknowledge them, and Slate’s John Dickerson said we have to expect them as part of the speed we now demand from news. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin defended the type of incremental breaking-news scoop journalists were chasing last week, saying they can be critical to revealing bigger, deeper stories.

The other hub of confusion and misinformation was on social media, though, as Choire Sicha of The Awl pointed out, some of that “useless, misleading and random noise” was coming from the social media editors of traditional news orgs, too. Storyful’s Mark Little argued that the true problem isn’t so much social media as a “me-first” form of journalism. In its place, he called for journalism that can humbly pull a coherent narrative out of social media’s noise. And NPR social media editor Andy Carvin urged journalists to be less breathless and more transparent and proactive in helping readers understand rumors and the process of reporting breaking news.

BuzzFeed’s John Herrman and Ben Smith took a similar tack, advising journalists to acknowledge that online readers are going to see rumors and misinformation anyway, and to focus on contextualizing it. Reuters’ Felix Salmon countered that journalists shouldn’t let misinformation set the news agenda, even if it’s being widely distributed online. The Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan collected some principles from a variety of perspectives at a Columbia panel on breaking news reporting.

A particularly smart strain of advice came from j-profs Jeff Jarvis and Mike Ananny. Jarvis posited that in times of breaking news, the best way for journalists to add value is to tell the audience what they don’t know, and Ananny made a thoughtful case for the role of silence in journalism, explaining the trust implicit in it and offering some practical principles for when it’s appropriate. “Instead of assuming that more speech is always better,” he wrote, “it might be a bigger public service to speak and consume attention only if you have a clear and defensible reason for doing so.”

There were also some technical solutions proposed: Masdar Institute researchers introduced a platform to verify information on social media, and Wired’s Mat Honan suggested a Twitter function that would allow users to edit or correct tweets, which would allow it to re-pop up in the streams of everyone who saw the original. Josh Stearns of Free Press also started a discussion on developing norms to indicate accuracy and validity of information on Twitter.

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Reddit and crowdsourcing bad info: Reddit users were particularly prolific (and reckless) in sharing information as the search for suspects went on, coordinating their own attempts to identify those suspects. It played a key role in misidentifying a missing man named Sunil Tripathi as a suspect, in what was probably the most potentially damaging reporting error in the bombings’ aftermath. Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic traced the development of the false information, and Reddit general manager Erik Martin apologized for a “witch hunt,” while the creator of the subreddit in question talked to The Atlantic Wire about its role.

The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield noted that what especially drew the news media’s attention to Tripathi was Reddit users doing something Reddit deeply frowns on — naming names and personal information, also known as doxxing. The redditors’ behavior drew broad condemnation: Media analyst Alan Mutter saw it as further evidence of the great damage that can result when “untrained, undisciplined or even unscrupulous people can say anything that comes to mind,” and The Guardian’s Charles Arthur and The New York Times’ Nick Bilton expressed similar sentiments.

Reddit had plenty of defenders as well. The Guardian’s Fruzsina Eordogh said Reddit didn’t need to apologize, because several mainstream news orgs made similar errors without apologizing for them. Alex Fitzpatrick at Mashable argued that Reddit can’t be considered a single community to blame as a whole (Jesse Brown of Maclean’s made a similar point), and its users shouldn’t be considered journalists. Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco also pointed out that Reddit’s most reliable information tended to be given the most visibility from its users.

In a pair of posts, Mathew Ingram of paidContent mounted a fuller defense of Reddit, arguing that news organizations could learn from the successes of Reddit users’ open verification practices instead of simply dwelling on its failings. Canadian student Jeff Cho also praised its transparency, while the London School of Economics’ Charlie Beckett said journalists and contributors to sites like Reddit need to pay attention to each other in order to improve their own practices. Meanwhile, the Seattle Times’ Monica Guzman urged us to take responsibility for the fact that we are now a “self-informing public,” and The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki suggested some improved crowdsourcing methods for Reddit.

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Newspapers as conservative political tool: Following up on an initial LA Weekly report a month ago, The New York Times reported that the politically influential conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering buying the eight newspapers of the recently bankrupt Tribune Co., including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun. The move would be an explicitly political one, the Times reported, aimed at supplementing the Kochs’ political organizing by giving conservative causes a more prominent mainstream voice.

The Kochs don’t currently own any traditional media properties, though as the Columbia Journalism Review reported, they’re the top donors to the nonprofit group that funds the state government-focused Watchdog.org sites, which CJR profiled. In a strong analysis of the possible deal, the Lab’s Ken Doctor also looked at U-T San Diego as a cautionary tale of ideological ownership. The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson said a straw poll of LA Times journalists revealed many of them planned to leave if the Kochs took over. He cautioned the Tribune Co.’s board not to see a sale to the Kochs as a purely financial move, but as a political move with potentially disastrous implications.

Forbes’ Tim Worstall argued that the potential political influence of Koch-owned newspapers was being overstated, however, because newspapers’ political views are inevitably determined by those of their audience. “Proprietors do not mould the views of the readers. They chase them instead,” he wrote. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta made a similar point, saying that big cities make their papers liberal, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias (a liberal himself) saw Koch-owned major papers as a possible boon for the country, as a way to improve the anemic state of conservative journalism.

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Leadership style and sexism at the Times: Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, was the subject of a scathing feature by Dylan Byers of Politico based on anonymous quotes from staffers who characterized her leadership style as difficult and demanding. Tom McGeveran of Capital New York provided much of context and history that was missing in Byers’ piece, describing some of the history of Times editors’ perceptions within the newsroom and recent office politics there.

The backlash to the story was fierce. As Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon noted, not only was the case Byers and his sources made pretty thin, but it also reeked of sexism toward the Times’ first female top editor. Times reporter Brian Stelter said the piece didn’t ring true to him, Slate’s Hanna Rosin pointed out that while many top executives, especially in newsrooms, are difficult to work with, we’re often quite willing to see past that when they’re men. (She also got Abramson’s charmingly nonplussed reaction via email.)

Former GOOD editor Ann Friedman illustrated how the story might have been written if Abramson was a man, while former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell lamented the deep-seated sexism within journalism, where “a woman’s character traits are central to a critique of she does the job. Men, who are equally awful in just as many ways, are judged more on output and success.” Byers issued a reply to Bell’s critique, arguing that Abramson shouldn’t be immune to personal criticism simply because she’s female.

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The AP’s Twitter hack: We had more problems with misinformation on social media early this week, when the AP’s Twitter account was hacked and a tweet about explosions in the White House was posted, causing stocks to momentarily plummet. In the aftermath, Wired’s Mat Honan reported that Twitter is working on two-step authentification, which requires to have not just a password, but a previously registered device. VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly explained, though, that two-step authentification wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the AP’s hack, and National Journal’s Brian Fung said the blame for this is on the AP, not Twitter.

Both Dan Gillmor at The Guardian and David Cohn of Circa drew the same lesson from the incident: Journalists need to practice a slower approach regarding information from social media, even if it’s from trustworthy organizations like the AP. The Committee to Protect Journalists also provided some tips for journalists and news orgs that get their accounts hacked.

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Reading roundup: There was actually quite a bit of media news this week even beyond the big stories outlined so far. Here’s a quick sampling:

— The New York Times Co. issued its quarterly earnings report, with a drop in income fueled by a double-digit drop in ad revenue. The company will also roll out lower-priced Times subscriptions, as well as a higher-priced “extras” package and more conferences, games, and e-commerce. Media analyst Ken Doctor has a good, quick breakdown of the news, and Quartz noted the slower growth of the Times’ paywall.

— After five months without an ombudsman, ESPN has hired the successor to Poynter at the position — longtime sports journalist (and ESPN critic) Robert Lipsyte. The Gawker sports blog Deadspin was excited about the move, and Lipsyte talked to The New Republic, Poynter, and The Nation about the gig. Notably, he’s taking The New York Times’ Margaret Sullivan as his inspiration for a web-friendly style.

— Reuters fired its deputy social media editor, Matthew Keys, this week, a month after he was charged with helping Anonymous hack into news websites in 2010. He was apparently fired not for the charges, but for his tweeting of the Boston news last week, as The Atlantic Wire explained. Keys gave his account of the firing on his Tumblr.

— Twitter has been busy lately as it prepares for a potential IPO, hiring its first data editor, announcing a video partnership with BBC America, and forming a partnership with one of the largest ad buyers on TV.

Social media skepticism about breaking news: As has become the norm following large-scale tragedies, the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed two and injured more than a hundred sparked a lively discussion about social media, journalism, and the value of simply getting information right during crisis situations. The attacks spurred some remarkable journalism — most notably by the Boston Globe and Boston Herald — but it also launched a mess of misinformation and hasty conclusions. We’ll cover the misinformation on social media first, then get to the traditional media accuracy issues.

Guardian journalist Simon Ricketts aptly documented many of the falsehoods floating around Twitter after the bombing, arguing that Twitter has become more unwieldy during crises as so many people tweet out of a need to “feel involved, concerned, part of the conversation.” Mathew Ingram of paidContent said that this is the way news flows now, for better or worse, and that it’s better to ask journalists to verify information than the platforms themselves.

Here at the Lab, Hong Qu argued that it’s a mistake to pit journalistic norms against social media behavior, because the two complement each other. Poynter’s Jason Fry wrote a thoughtful post on how news orgs can bridge those two domains, proposing that while having reporters “on the ground” is still the core of covering breaking news, they should also have an “eye in the sky” gathering, filtering, and making judgments about a wide range of information, then presenting the best of it to readers. News orgs have long had this role internally during big breaking stories, he said, but it’s now shifted to an external one.

Others saw more restraint on Twitter this time around than during past tragedies. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple took note of all the Twitter users urging caution about believing and disseminating information, and PandoDaily’s David Holmes called the greater skepticism a small step in the right direction as more circumspect news orgs separate themselves from more irresponsible ones. Journalism prof Dan Gillmor wondered if we’re starting to see a “slow news” mentality start to catch on.

Slate’s Jeremy Stahl and 10,000 Words’ Karen Fratti both offered helpful guides for journalists on how to tweet during a tragedy — don’t pass on speculation, don’t shame others for doing so, don’t try to score political points, don’t let any tone-deaf scheduled or off-topic posts get through. Wired’s Mat Honan had good advice for all of us on social media during times like that: Resist the urge to chime in with me-too tweets and simply stay silent unless you have something truly meaningful to say.

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CNN and the New York Post’s prominent failures: Traditional media sources were hardly blameless in reporting this story, either. Their worst day was Wednesday, when several news orgs, led by CNN, reported that an arrest had been made in the case, only to be refuted by law enforcement officials (and other news orgs) later in the day. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and Mallary Jean Tenore put together a good Storify documenting the confusion on Twitter, and Salon’s Daniel D’Addario summarized CNN’s misinformation on Twitter, while Talking Points Memo chronicled its about-face on the air. Hilary Sargent of Chartgirl explained who reported what about an arrest in chart form, and Jon Stewart ripped CNN on Wednesday night.

The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone gave some explanation as to how CNN might have screwed up the story — possibly misinterpreting a source’s “got him” to mean someone had been arrested, rather than simply ID’d as a suspect. And Erik Wemple of The Washington Post noted that CNN’s breakdown was as much reporting that a “dark-skinned man” had been arrested as it was reporting the arrest in the first place. On the other end of the spectrum, at least one organization, Breaking News, the social media-oriented breaking news operation owned by NBC News, explained how it balances speed with verification, then fleshed it out with an example illustrating why they decided to hold off on the arrest story.

The other news org that performed particularly poorly on this story was the New York Post, which reported that there were at least 12 people killed in the bombings, while the number of confirmed deaths (which virtually every other news org reported correctly) turned out to be just three. Gawker’s Tom Scocca documented the Post’s adherence to its faulty information despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Poynter’s Craig Silverman lamented the press’s unwillingness to own up to its major reporting errors.

A few other angles to mention: As copy editor Charles Apple pointed out, the New York Daily News doctored a photo of the blasts to make an injury appear less gruesome, with a spokesman telling the Post’s Wemple that “Frankly, I think everybody in the media should have been this sensitive.” The New York Observer reported on another graphic photo that was prompting mixed decisions over whether and how to run. Meanwhile, Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out that coverage of this event followed the disaster-journalism formula to a T, and Poynter’s Al Tompkins provided a great basic guide to reporting the aftermath of a disaster.

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Pulitzer underdogs and shutouts: The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday afternoon (just minutes before the Boston bombing, actually), and many of the winners were the usual array of national giants like The New York Times (which won four awards) and strong regional newspapers. There was one small web-based organization that caught people’s attention, though — InsideClimate News, which won the national reporting Pulitzer for its work on lax oil pipeline regulation.

As Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo noted Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler saying, InsideClimate News is probably the least well-known news org ever to win a Pulitzer. It may also be the smallest: It has just seven full-time employees, and most of them don’t work in the same office. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici both profiled the six-year-old site, detailing its nonprofit structure and its rise from its mostly derivative early journalism to more in-depth work now. Bercovici noted their key to doing top-notch work with such a small staff is simple — they focus on just one thing, 24/7. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard explored its reporting on the oil pipeline story in particular.

Another notable Pulitzer was the Times’ win in feature writing for its much-acclaimed “Snow Fall” multimedia feature. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon asked a few critical questions about the Pulitzers in general, including one about the fact that The Wall Street Journal hasn’t won for its reporting since Rupert Murdoch took over in 2007. (It did win for commentary this year.) Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review tied the Journal’s Pulitzer drought to Murdoch’s antipathy toward longform stories and any sort of higher calling for its journalism. “This is about creating a healthy news culture with the public interest at its core and having everything else radiate out from that. Do that, and the Pulitzers will take care of themselves,” he wrote.

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Joining forces in longform publishing: Medium, the not-a-microblog-not-quite-a-blog publishing platform run by Evan Williams (of Blogger and Twitter fame), announced it was buying Matter, a longform journalism site focusing on science and technology. Matter was launched last year with $140,000 through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. It publishes one in-depth story a month available to subscribers who pay 99 cents a month.

The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon have some background on the acquisition — Matter and Medium both say not much will change with the site, other than some cross-posting. PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie interviewed Matter co-founder Jim Giles about its creative efforts to sell individual stories, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon expressed his optimism that the pairing will work well.

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Reading roundup: This week was dominated by the terrible news from Boston (and, to a lesser extent, the terrible news from Texas), but there were a few other media stories going on elsewhere:

— At Poynter, Tom Rosenstiel wrote a smart post on the need to reorient the conversation about journalism education by looking at other experiments beyond the “teaching hospital” model. Social media manager and grad student Patrick Thornton urged journalism students to take risks and innovate while they’re involved in college media, rather than seeing it as “a minor league for professional news organizations.” And Forbes’ Lewis DVorkin gave some useful information in his recounting of a Q&A session with Mississippi journalism students.

— The Guardian launched a free app called GuardianWitness that would allow users to send video, photos, and text straight to the paper’s content management system. The Next Web’s Paul Sawers had a good explanation of what it looks like and what it might mean.

— Felix Gillette wrote an illuminating feature for Bloomberg Businessweek on Rupert Murdoch’s ability to skate away from News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal cleanly.

— Finally, two thoughtful pieces on possible paths forward through journalism’s present state: Reuters’ Reg Chua on the role of stories in making sense of data, and here at the Lab, Nicco Mele and John Wihbey discussed reorienting within news orgs to focus on individual talent and smaller, more passionate audiences.

Big talk from the TV suits: The TV startup Aereo drew some significant threats from the industry’s giants this week. The major broadcasters have a lawsuit pending against Aereo, which charges subscribers to watch over-the-air TV online by giving them remote access to their own tiny antennas. Unlike cable companies, Aereo doesn’t pay broadcasters retransmission fees, which is why they’re trying to shut Aereo down in court. In an article on Aereo’s threat to the TV business, Reuters noted the drastic option that two broadcasters are reportedly considering: Going off the air entirely and becoming a cable channel instead.

The next day, one of those broadcasters made its threat public, as News Corp.’s Chase Carey said in a speech that his company may move Fox to cable if Aereo is allowed to survive. The heads of Univision and CBS quickly joined the threat. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter has the best explanation of the threats and the surrounding economic situation, and Poynter’s Taylor Miller Thomas has a good piece on Aereo’s background, while The Wall Street Journal’s Shalini Ramachandran reported on the threats to Aereo itself.

The immediate response from most TV industry watchers was an eye-roll (the words “saber rattling” were thrown around a bit). The Los Angeles Times’ Joe Flint explained why Aereo doesn’t present as big of a threat as the broadcasters think — the chances of it teaming up with a cable company to get around retransmission fees are almost nil. And as he and others like The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield and The Verge’s Greg Sandoval pointed out, going to cable would be an incredibly laborious process, requiring permission from many of its contractual partners, such as the NFL and MLB.

John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge and Mike Masnick of Techdirt both argued that the networks’ ultimatum simply reveals how arbitrary and anachronistic their current model is. As Masnick wrote, Aereo doesn’t affect (and may actually help) their ad model; it just interrupts the gravy train of cable retransmission fees: “So, an artificial situation came up that let them get lots of money, and now that it might go away (and reality is that it won’t go away for a long long time) they’re threatening to take their ball and go home?”

Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici countered that the networks’ statements aren’t just idle threats, but real possibilities to be taken seriously, and Peter Kafka of All Things D noted that while it may not be likely to see them jump to cable, the networks’ investors love the idea.

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Slightly less bad news for newspapers: The Newspaper Association of America issued its annual report on the financial state of the newspaper industry, and for a business that’s been battered nearly beyond recognition over the past decade, this year’s report of a 2 percent decline in revenue almost felt like good news. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi laid out the basics — print advertising is still in freefall, but circulation revenue was up for the first time since 2003, thanks to digital subscriptions.

Industry analyst Ken Doctor has a remarkably thorough review of the report, concluding that while we’re seeing a bit of business-side innovation, the pace of progress is agonizingly slow. He also noted that much of the digital subscription growth is coming not from online-only subscriptions, but from print-online “all access” bundles. Erik Wemple of The Washington Post and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds were a bit bullish on the report, pointing out newspapers’ new forms of non-advertising, non-circulation revenue that, as Edmonds emphasized in particular, hadn’t previously been measured.

But others emphasized that the picture regarding advertising is still an ugly one. PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie called the uptick in circulation revenue an unsustainable one-year jump and said newspapers are still worryingly ad-dependent. And industry analyst Alan Mutter explained why the digital advertising situation is still so dire for the industry: “Though publishers from time to time have blamed Google for taking advertising away from them, the fact is that newspapers, magazines and broadcasters never developed products to compete with Google,” he wrote.

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BuzzFeed and the rise of native ads: New York magazine’s Andrew Rice went deep on BuzzFeed this week, looking particularly closely at the site’s advertising strategy, which centers on creating “native advertising” content that’s just as viral as — and often virtually indistinguishable from — its own editorial content. Drawing on Rice’s piece, The Atlantic Wire’s Philip Bump suggested that what sets BuzzFeed apart from other sites trying native advertising is its upbeat content and its belief (and sales pitch) that it’s unlocked the formula to making something go viral.

Mathew Ingram of paidContent, on the other hand, pointed out the hurdles BuzzFeed faces in making its ad strategy sustainable: Some companies are skeptical of its style of content, some of its content falls flat, it’s often expensive, and the similarity between editorial and advertising threatens to undermine readers’ trust. The New York Times, meanwhile, published a broader trend piece on native advertising, in which Mashable editor Lance Ulanoff insisted the ads were “pure editorial,” unlike the old newspaper “advertorials.”

Reuters’ Felix Salmon had some thoughtful analysis of native ads, arguing that they’re far more disruptive than Rice gives them credit for: “a native ad is something that consumers read, interact with, even share — it fills up their attention space, for a certain period of time, in a way that banner ads never do.”The question, he said, is whether they’ll scale. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici argued that Google needs to reconsider its antipathy toward native ads in its search results, urging it to follow users’ lead instead.

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Defending reporters and anonymous sources: Fox News reporter Jana Winter faced the prospect of going to jail to protect an anonymous source, but got a reprieve from a judge this week. The case involves the trial of the man accused of killing a dozen people in last year’s Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting.

Winter got a notebook Holmes mailed to a psychiatrist describing the killing, but the judge delayed a ruling on Winter in order to determine whether the notebook would be admissible evidence in court. Fox News and the Denver Post have good overviews of the situation, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Sara Morrison talked to Winter’s attorney about it.

Winter’s plight had been covered in the conservative media (particularly Fox News itself) last week, but it was propelled into the mainstream by a BuzzFeed article that questioned whether her case wasn’t getting attention simply because of the reputation of her employer. Others asked the same question, including New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli and CNN’s Jake Tapper, and within a few days, Mediaite’s Noah Rothman argued that Fox News had successfully shamed the rest of the media into covering the story.

John Cook of Gawker, on the other hand, argued that while Winter deserves to be defended, the fact that she hadn’t been is a function of her bosses’ ongoing fight against the legitimacy and First Amendment rights of the rest of the profession. Meanwhile, Poynter’s Kelly McBride gave her test of whether to use an anonymous source (which she said Winter passed): “Is your story significant enough that you’re willing to spend six months in jail?”

Reading roundup: Other smaller stories to check out this week:

— Just a year after it was created, Tumblr dissolved its editorial unit, which ran under the name Storyboard, this week. BetaBeat reported that three employees were laid off, TechCrunch opined that Storyboard’s less lucrative goals fell to the wayside as Tumblr pushes to make its first profit, though Gawker noted that the small unit isn’t costing much anyway. PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie wasn’t convinced of the value of Storyboard’s editorial mission.

— WikiLeaks released a set of 1.7 million diplomatic “Kissinger” cables from the 1970s — more cables than their famous November 2010 release — but this was quite different from their previous publications. It wasn’t a leak at all, but documents that have been public for years. In this case, WikiLeaks turned them into a searchable database. Gawker saw it as a potentially valuable service — possibly more for attracting leaks than readers. The Guardian’s James Ball, meanwhile, emphasized the relative smallness of WikiLeaks’ new mission.

— On the open-access front, the academic reference manager and social network Mendeley was bought by giant scientific publisher Elsevier in a long-rumored deal. Mendeley has been built around open access and collaboration, something Elsevier has often fought against, which has many academics (like danah boydand David Weinberger) dismayed. Mathew Ingram of paidContent chronicled the backlash.

— Bill Adair, founder and editor of the Tampa Bay Times’ pioneering fact-checking site PolitiFact, announced last week he’s leaving to teach at Duke. You can check out exit interviews with him by the Columbia Journalism Review’sBrendan Nyhan and the Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan.

— Two other interesting Q&A’s to take a look at: MinnPost talked with New York Times media critic David Carr, and The European talked with NYU digital media prof Clay Shirky.

— Finally, two other longer pieces to read this weekend: New York magazine’s Frank Rich on the state of the news business, and BuzzFeed’s John Herrman’s proposal to kill the headline online.

Facebook Home, content, and messaging: Facebook has long been rumored to be developing a phone, and when it finally unveiled Facebook Home this week, it didn’t release a phone per se, but it may have as significant an impact on the mobile industry as if it had. As Engadget explained in its succinct walkthrough of Home’s features, it’s a suite of apps and a home-screen replacement for Android phones. It’s somewhere between app and operating system — “apperating system,” as Wired’s Alexandra Chang put it.

All Things D’s Mike Isaac described the Cover Feed — a nonstop, full-screen flow of Facebook photos and status updates — as Home’s key feature, as it puts its content constantly front and center for its users. (Later on, that will also include, crucially, ads.) Richard Nieva of PandoDaily, on the other hand, saw Chat Heads, an interface that allows users to message others continuously as they move into and out of apps, as the central element. As he argued, this puts the focus on messaging, a key component of a truly mobile-first strategy. Gregory Ferenstein of TechCrunch saw Chat Heads as crucial to Facebook’s efforts to “own the conversations of text-obsessed teens.”

Many observers, such as Fortune’s Miguel Helft, saw Home as Facebook’s attempt to make a run at Google’s mobile market, as it displaces Google Search as the home screen for many Android phones. Tim Carmody of Wired detailed Google and Facebook’s tension-filled, passive-aggressive relationship. Some surmised that Home would have a relatively small impact overall: GigaOM’s Eliza Kern said it wouldn’t go much beyond the Facebook app for many users, John Herrman of BuzzFeed pointed out that demand for a Facebook phone appears tepid, and Forbes’ Robert Hof noted a few other factors that will limit Home’s impact.

Still, Mat Honan of Wired — in the sharpest analysis posted yesterday — said that Home’s mediocrity may be the key to its value for many users. “For many people, Facebook is the Internet, just as AOL was before it,” he wrote. For those people, “Facebook Home is going to be the best way for those people to experience the Internet on a phone.” Wired had the other indispensable piece on this announcement — Steven Levy’s lengthy interview with Mark Zuckerberg on the strategy and philosophy behind Home.

Another angle to take note of: As with any Facebook announcement, there are, of course, privacy concerns. The Next Web’s Ken Yeung said its biggest impact may be in its data collection abilities, and Om Malik of GigaOM warned that Home will erode whatever’s left of its users’ privacy.

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Dropping “illegal immigrant”: The Associated Press made what could be a landmark decision this week when it announced it would no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.” As it explained in its post on the move, the AP has looked at nixing this term before, but had held off on changing it until a decent alternative emerged. The AP still hasn’t found an alternative, but decided it’s time to abandon “illegal immigrant” anyway.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan noted that The Times is also considering a formal change in their policy on that term, to be announced as soon as this week. She doubted it would be banned altogether, but expected the paper’s aversion to “undocumented immigrant” to soften. She also noted that she had changed her own stance to oppose “illegal immigrant.” Poynter’s Taylor Miller Thomas pointed out that the San Antonio Express-News dropped the term back in 2008 and dropped “immigrant” altogether in 2010.

As The Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince reported, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has talked about eliminating the term since the 1980s. The NAHJ and the National Association of Black Journalists both praised the decision, as did former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who has been a leader in the push to drop the label. Vargas told Poynter’s Thomas and Andrew Beaujon he hopes The AP’s decision starts conversations in newsrooms across the U.S.

Roy Peter Clark of Poynter also approved of the change, even with the AP’s rather clunky suggestions for alternatives. “To find and depict our common humanity requires more reporting, not less; more language, not less; more thinking, not less,” he wrote.

Buried in the partisan political reaction were a few interesting points: Mark Krikorian of the National Review wondered whether the AP would drop the word “illegal” as a descriptor in other contexts, as well as nominalized adjectives for other groups of people. On the other hand, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum saw some usefulness in labels, and lamented the fact that the AP hasn’t chosen an alternative.

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Alternatives to the metered model: Virtually every week for the past year or so, we’ve seen a significant news org adopt an online pay plan. And most of those plans are remarkably similar — variations on the same “metered model” that allows readers a certain number of free views before prompting them to pay up. This week, though, the Orange County Register instituted a paywall (and yes, it’s definitely a wall) that differs drastically from that cookie-cutter approach, in some intriguing ways.

The Lab’s Ken Doctor has the most thorough breakdown of the plan, which allows almost no unpaid access to any local news content less than two weeks old. It also charges the same amount for digital access as for print, and online access literally matches print access — if you have a Sunday print subscription, you can access the website only on Sundays. The paper is also giving its subscribers perks, like free tickets to the Los Angeles Angels.

Doctor was intrigued but skeptical: “It doesn’t matter how clever you are; readers don’t like running into walls.” In a pair of posts, free-news advocate Mathew Ingram of paidContent took a similar view as he emphasized the Register’s plans to focus exclusively on creating content for subscribers, rather than online readers or advertisers. “Spitz and Kushner aren’t trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and hoping that they can be both web-native and print-focused at the same time,” he said. “That deserves some respect.”

A few other interesting data points from a variety of paywalls bubbled up this week: A yet-to-be-launched online Dutch publication has raised €1 million from subscribers, bypassing advertisers and focusing on in-depth “slow journalism.” Metered model pioneer The Financial Times talked with Mashable’s Lauren Indvik about the centrality of user data to their online subscription plan, and Business Insider had a lengthy interview with Andrew Sullivan about his attempt to charge for his blog and his aims to “reinvent the magazine online.”

Felix Salmon of Reuters talked with influential paywall firms Mather Economics and MediaPass and found that even they aren’t sold on meters because of concern that it treats all readers equally, when all readers aren’t equally likely to pay. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur said the key isn’t necessarily the style of paywall, but determining what’s the unique, core offering worth charging for. And Michael Wolff argued that paywalls aren’t going to solve any of newspapers’ deeper existential problems, while Jeff Israely of the news startup Worldcrunch argued that charging readers for news isn’t simply another kind of subsidy, but an affirmation of the real value in news orgs’ core product.

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Reading roundup: The other stories to catch up on from a relatively quiet week:

— Roger Ebert, the legendary film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, died yesterday of cancer at age 70. You can read the Sun-Times and New York Times obits, a brilliant 2010 Esquire profile, and some personal reflections on Ebert by Will Leitch from 2010. Ebert was also a pioneer in turning a personal brand into paid online content, as Poynter documented in 2011. Ebert’s 2010 blog post about Twitter also helps give a good idea of his approach to digital media.

— The Cleveland Plain Dealer announced it would cut home delivery down to three days a week (it’ll still print all seven days). It’s expected to cut at least a third of its newsroom staff, according to The New York Times. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon has the requisite background, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman criticized the print- and cost-cutting strategy of Advance Publications, the Plain Dealer’s publisher.

— The online currency Bitcoin had a roller-coaster week this week, as its currency value rocketed to a record high before falling back down. As BetaBeat lamented, much of this was a result of Cyprus residents trying to put their money into something stable amid their country’s financial crisis, though the report that one of its biggest exchanges went down after a DDOS attack also exacerbated the problem. Reuters’ Felix Salmon gave the best analysis of the situation, comparing Bitcoin to offline and online currencies and the threats to its long-term health. The Financial Times’ Izabella Kaminska’s analysis is also insightful.

— NPR announced that it’s cancelling Talk of the Nation, its 21-year-old public-affairs call-in show, this summer. As The New York Times reported, NPR’s replacing it with Here and Now as part of its effort to develop a midday newsmagazine show along the lines of Morning Edition and All Things Considered. NPR’s account of the move noted that TOTN has been a pioneer in the format of call-in shows.

— Poynter’s Kelly McBride shed some light on BuzzFeed’s substantial efforts to do serious journalism, while Alex Kantrowitz of PBS MediaShift looked at its native ad network. Mathew Ingram of paidContent wondered why we’re so reluctant to take BuzzFeed seriously.

— A couple of interesting pieces of Twitter data: The Awl’s Choire Sicha tallied the “work” tweets of staffers at Gawker, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider, and research consultant Nick Diakopoulos looked at the correlation between newspapers’ circulation and Twitter followers.

— Finally, Evgeny Morozov’s Baffler critique of Tim O’Reilly is also a thoughtful analysis of the culture of Web 2.0. It’s quite long, but has been getting rave reviews.

Big paywall announcements in U.K.: As seems to happen pretty much every week now, a few more big paywall dominoes fell this week — two of the U.K.’s biggest papers, The Sun and The Telegraph, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle here in the States. The Telegraph’s pay plan is a metered model, which has become the standard in the U.S. and Canada. But as Roy Greenslade of The Guardian pointed out, The Telegraph is the first general-interest U.K. newspaper to adopt a metered model. (The British business paper The Financial Times pioneered the model.)

Econsultancy’s Graham Martin was skeptical about using the paywall for general content like The Telegraph’s, as opposed to The Financial Times’ specialized content. But Patrick Smith of The Media Briefing was optimistic about The Telegraph’s chances given the loyalty of its readership, but questioned why The Telegraph and others are moving so slowly toward pay plans. Digital media consultant Martin Belam said the pay plan is loose enough that it should only catch heavy users and industry types, both of whom will be likely to pay up.

News Corp.’s Sun, Britain’s largest paper, also announced plans for a paywall this week, though it’s not scheduled to come until later this year. The Guardian reported that it’s penciled in to start September, when the Sun’s valuable rights to show clips of English Premier League football/soccer kick in.

The San Francisco Chronicle also instituted a paywall this week, launching a second, paid site, SFChronicle.com alongside its longtime free one, SFGate.com. The two-site model is patterned after that of The Boston Globe, which has had its paywall in effect since 2011. SF Weekly’s Rachel Swan gave some historical context to the decision, while the San Francisco Appeal’s Rita Hao said the Chronicle is putting the wrong kind of news on its paywalled site: She’d rather pay for news she needs (like city hall coverage) than news she wants. (Meanwhile, Chronicle staffers have been protesting a cut to healthcare benefits.)

As all these paywalls go up, The Media Briefing’s Jasper Jackson outlined the various models being used, and his colleague, Patrick Smith, profiled the free model of Britain’s Mail Online, the most popular newspaper on the web. Journalism.co.uk’s Rachel McAthy, meanwhile, examined the influence of the New York Times’ paywall, launched two years ago this week.

PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy described these paywalls as an attempt to cling to high-cost, high-quality content as reality sets in that the online ad model just doesn’t work. And Reuters’ Felix Salmon described newspapers’ big-picture online strategy: “first get people used to the idea of paying at all, and then, slowly, raise the amount that you ask them to pay over time.” He predicted that newspapers, through consultants, would use each other for A/B testing how much customers will be willing to pay.

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Yahoo’s deals in mobile and user content: Yahoo made (or is reportedly about to make) a couple of acquisitions this week that provide some clues to where it’s headed as a content company. The deal that was actually completed was the purchase of Summly, a news-reading app that summarizes long-form stories for mobile readers. The deal made headlines not so much because of Summly’s technology, but because of its founder, Nick D’Aloisio, who’s just 17.

Yahoo will hire D’Alosio and two other at Summly, shut the app down and incorporate its algorithm into its own mobile technology. Kara Swisher of All Things D reported that the deal was worth $30 million, and while she called it a very high price, she said Yahoo is paying for D’Aloisio to become the face of its efforts to be seen as a mobile-first company.

Swisher wasn’t the only one who saw the price as high, or the move as a publicity grab. Slashdot’s Nick Kolakowski wondered if this was a sign of a tech bubble, and Origami founder Vibhu Norby said the deal made no sense to him. Kevin Roose of New York magazine, on the other hand, said that if you view the deal as a recruiting move rather than a technically strategic one, it makes plenty of sense.

Jack Shafer of Reuters cautioned that the image of Summly as sole work of a 17-year-old isn’t exactly an accurate one — the company’s gotten plenty of help from veteran executives and PR professionals and an all-star list of investors. Cornell prof Emin Gün Sirer downplayed Summly’s work, saying it was merely “bolt-on engineering” based on core technology licensed from another company. NPR’s Steve Mullis said that Yahoo is essentially paying millions for an algorithm — “It bought math” — and worried about an inflated value that kind of product.

The Wall Street Journal also reported last week (in a paywalled article) that Yahoo is in talks to buy Dailymotion, a Europe-based YouTube-esque site. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson reiterated this week that the deal is as good as done, and reported that Dailymotion is part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan to eliminate content creation costs and replace that material with user-generated content and partnership deals, focusing on personalizing consumption for users. Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily didn’t see that as cause for alarm, arguing that Yahoo’s always been more of an aggregation-based media company anyway. “Mayer isn’t dismantling some gem of original content. She’s turning her back on Yahoo’s long-unrealized potential,” she wrote.

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Flipboard turns the user into editor: The social news app Flipboard introduced a major redesign this week that includes a few significant changes — a new bookmarklet that allows users to add any content on the web outside the app, commenting, and an extensive content search. The biggest development, though, is the ability for users to create and share their own magazines, turning Flipboard from a consumption tool to something more potentially creative. Walt Mossberg of All Things D has a good review of the new editing feature.

Jeff Sonderman of Poynter said the new Flipboard looks like it could drastically remake mobile news discovery. As Sonderman and Time’s Harry McCracken noted, the obvious comparison is Pinterest, though as McCracken pointed out, Flipboard is still distinct-looking. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said that while the sharing isn’t new, the ability to edit content ”picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off.”

Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed characterized Flipboard’s aims as much higher than that. It’s vying with companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to replace the traditional homepage as the gateway to the web. Austin Carr of Fast Company reported that Flipboard doesn’t see itself as a social network like those platforms, but as a “content network.” In a second article, Ingram suggested some innovative avenues Flipboard could go down with its new format regarding advertising and revenue-sharing deals. At The Guardian, Stuart Dredge also looked at the revenue factor, as well as several other aspects of Flipboard’s changes, including scale and the balance between humans and algorithms.

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Who’s hurt by Google Reader’s death: A few lingering points being made from the now two-week-old plug-pulling of Google Reader: Ed Bott of ZDNet argued that the real victims in the Google Reader story are not its users, but the companies that Google has muscled out of the RSS market over the past eight years. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman and The Economist’s Ryan Avent both argued that the best way to treat Reader and many of Google’s other services may be as public infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the competitors continue to court Reader users — Digg hinted this week that its Reader replacement will go well beyond RSS — but TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wondered what will happen if RSS dies, particularly for the sites that depend so heavily on its traffic. Instapaper’s Marco Arment made a similar point, saying that RSS’s demise would most hurt smaller, low-volume sites in particular. “Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off,” he wrote. Dave Winer also proposed an open Twitter as an RSS replacement.

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Reading roundup: Lots of other stuff going on in media and tech this week:

— The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a column detailing the almost absurd level of secrecy surrounding the trial of WikiLeaks informant Bradley Manning, though j-prof Jeff Jarvis said news orgs shouldn’t be let off the hook for not covering the case as extensively as they should. Meanwhile, some in journalism are expressing concern at the reports of impending indictments of top Obama officials for leaking information to the press. New Columbia j-school dean Steve Coll talked to Foreign Policy’s Thomas Ricks about the case, while AEJMC, the organization representing America’s j-schools and j-profs, condemned the crackdown.

— One important story from late last week that didn’t make last week’s review: A federal judge ruled in the Associated Press’ favor in its copyright suit against Meltwater, a company that summarizes stories for corporate clients. PaidContent’s Jeff John Roberts explained the ruling, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation called very troubling.

— With the Columbia Journalism School announcing its new dean, Steve Coll, Michael Wolff ripped the school as irrelevant, calling instead for a system based on teaching entrepreneurship values and skills. Columbia student Jihii Jolly explained why she’s going there, and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie defended the school, and also contended that its dean having never tweeted isn’t a strike against it. (Coll has since begun tweeting.)

— The New York Times’ Daniel Victor went after Twitter hashtags in a Lab post this week, arguing that they usually aren’t useful and are aesthetically damaging. Digital First’s Steve Buttry Storified some of the ensuing conversation about hashtags on Twitter.

— In a Q&A at the Lab, ProPublica’s Amanda Zamora discussed some her org’s innovative efforts to develop deeper participation and engagement across the web.

— Finally, a thoughtful, provocative piece from Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, in which he argues that much of what we’re calling plagiarism isn’t actually plagiarism, and we need to quit getting so worked up about it.