— First off, this was the week real-time search officially took off. On Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital broke the news that Microsoft had reached an agreement to give its Bing search engine the ability to include Twitter and Facebook status updates. Four hours later, we found out that Google, too, had reached a similar agreement with Twitter (no Google-Facebook marriage, though — that would have been a surprise).

So now we have Twitter status updates available on Google and Bing, and Facebook updates on Bing as well. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a handy-dandy chart to help us keep all the companies’ search strengths and weaknesses straight. He and Adam Ostrow from the social media blog Mashable both note that Microsoft’s plan for Facebook search is dependent on Facebook’s ability to persuade its users to make their status updates at least semi-public — and Facebook users have a history of fiercely guarding their privacy.

There’s a few different ways to examine the impact of these deals: The New York Times has focused on money, noting that this is likely a huge part of Twitter’s answer to the ubiquitous “But how are you going to make money off of this?” question, and then, in turn, wondering, “How are Microsoft and Google going to make money off of this?”

Several others have been talking about the value of this data. Catharine Taylor at Social Media Insider thinks most of it is “simply unimportant,” which is, well, nuts. (You seriously can’t see how finding out what people are saying right now about a given topic might be slightly valuable?) TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld posits (rightly, I think) that the greatest value of this data will be at the aggregate, “firehose” level in the ability to refine search results to reflect real-time results — sort of like an integration of a far more sophisticated version of Google Trends.

Then, of course, there’s the journalism angle. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum asks the same question that I can just about bet Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley were asking when they heard about the deals: “If tweets are worth money to a search engine, why isn’t the news?” Meanwhile, tech pioneer Dave Winer, in the most insightful post I’ve seen on these deals, argues that we should be beyond thinking about what this means for traditional news organizations: Google, Microsoft and Twitter are now in the news business themselves.

This is the dawn of a system, Winer says, where all of our news “flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested.” And instead of jumping in on this while it’s beginning, the moguls of traditional media are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will just stop by and decide to pay them — not because they’ve provided any serious value in this new media ecosystem, but only because they’re complaining loud enough. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Just read Dave’s post.

— The other big development this week was a report released by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie and UC-San Diego/Columbia University journalism prof Michael Schudson, which was followed by an avalanche of reactions from journalism pundits and scholars. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fine summary of the report and the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a comprehensive roundup of the reaction, so I won’t duplicate their work here.

The aspect of the report that got the most attention was Downie and Schudson’s recommendation of several avenues for increased government funding for journalism, summed up nicely by Michele McLellan here. And that may be the most valuable thing to come out of this report — it’s the first proposal of expanding public funding for journalism to be engaged with seriously by many of The People Who Think About Journalism, probably because it’s the first proposal that deserves to be taken seriously.

I have my own deep skepticism about publicly funding journalism — though I’m slightly more amenable to starting up new initiatives under the public-media banner than to using subsidies or tax breaks to prop up flagging newspapers — but it seems that Downie and Schudson’s report has finally gotten us past the knee-jerk “Over my dead body!” response to publicly funded journalism, even if the right answer is “No way — but here’s why, and I’m still open to hearing some ideas from the other side.”

— This week included a watershed moment for the sports blogosphere, too. Deadspin, a Gawker Media blog that towers over the sports blogging world, launched a daylong offensive against ESPN after, according to Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, a PR rep for the network brushed aside his questions last month about a rumored affair and suspension by ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips. When the story turned out to be true and was broken by the New York Post last week, Daulerio retaliated by publishing reports of sexual misdeeds by a mid-level ESPN Radio host and an unknown-to-the-public marketing VP.

The reaction from the sports blogosphere was almost universally negative (though there were exceptions), which is notable because so many of those blogs generally operate with a very similar M.O. If you had to boil the sports blogosphere down to just a few of its defining characteristics, one of them would be its fixation on sexual scandals that only tangentially involve sports. Yet this week we found out that even regarding that, those blogs have a line. And when even the most powerful sports blog on the Web crossed that line, they heard it from their fellow bloggers. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this, the National Sports Journalism Center has a roundup of reactions, Midwest Sports Fans has an audio interview with Daulerio about the flap, and lawyer and former Deadspin associate editor Clay Travis uses the episode to give us a lesson on libel law.

— In the wake of the past few weeks’ adventures in news orgs’ social media guidelines, veteran journalist Gina Chen has an extremely helpful personal guide to the ethics of social media for journalists, complete with case studies. Over at MediaShift, meanwhile, Stephen Ward has some tips for news orgs crafting social media policies.

— The nation’s 12th-largest newspaper, Newsday on Long Island, has put a paywall around its online content. Newsday execs explain the move at Editor & Publisher, and news business expert Alan Mutter cautions that Newsday’s being owned by a cable company makes this move a tough one to replicate.

— Finally, two professors argue at SEED magazine that social media and the explosion of online publishing mean that soon, our society will be characterized not only by nearly universal literacy, but by nearly universal authorship as well. And if you’re a journalism student (or a working journalist, for that matter), Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has some helpful advice: Be great at one analog craft and one digital craft. Sounds about right.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Fort Hood, citizen journalism and Twitter lists
2. This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism
3. To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant

A predictable firestorm erupted, with national media taking notice, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez going into damage-control mode and Michigan’s already anti-Rodriguez fan base up in arms. But their pitchfork-wielding anger was directed not at Rodriguez, but at the Freep.

I’m not so much interested in the specifics of this story as the trend it illuminates. As former Ann Arbor News sportswriter Jim Carty observed:

The most striking thing about this week was how openly and aggressively most of the media moved to reject the Free Press story out of hand and get down to the business of attacking Mike Rosenberg and the paper.

Carty called the episode a perfect example of “faith-based” coverage, which “sees sports as a diversion, something to be enjoyed and embraced and not examined journalistically the way city hall or a labor union should be.” Carty then examines the rise of this perspective among the media covering Michigan sports, with sports blogs rising to prominence and making significant inroads into the establishment media — and the sports information department’s good graces.

This general trend isn’t anything new — the emergence of the voice of the fan is probably the story of the decade in sports media — but it seems to have been particularly pronounced around Michigan athletics. And last week, we saw a few of its less appealing effects: A perfectly reasonable story (though, as Carty notes, a flawed one) is dismissed out of hand because its author is perceived to have a grudge against the coach, an idea that simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

I can’t help but relate the rise of fan-based coverage of sports with the simultaneous rise of ideologically based political journalism — as in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. I think a quick comparison between the two might be helpful in shedding light on where fan-based sports coverage is prone to falling short.

First, both have provided a refreshing (and necessary) corrective to the dominant “objective” view of news. Partisan journalism has exploded on both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum because people were tired of journalists using the tired “he-said, she-said” strategy and acting as though the truth therefore somehow automatically landed in the middle, when in actuality, truth is hardly ever politically neutral. The voice of the sports fan has provided a counter to professionals’ formulaic, emotionless “no cheering in the press box” journalism that gradually but surely divorced itself from the fan’s perspective. It’s difficult to view these changes as anything but fundamentally good for the areas they’re covering.

Second, both forced those traditional spheres to change as a result. When you see someone pressuring the establishment political media to abandon a “neutral” characterization of an issue in favor of one that’s simply more factually accurate — as in the definition of torture or the “death panels” scare — the vast majority of that pressure is usually coming from the conservative or liberal blogosphere. And they’re starting to wear the hated “MSM’ down. Likewise, mainstream sportswriters have begun to realize that they are writing for fans who want a more human voice than they’re getting, and you’re seeing people who reflect that realistic voice flourish.

Third, both provide a valuable communal space for like-minded people who had previously gone unconnected. As Clay Shirky argues in “Here Comes Everybody,” this has been one of the fundamental societal shifts enacted by the Internet as a whole over the past decade or so. It’s been especially valuable in both these arenas. Both sports fans and political junkies seem to have a particularly strong desire to gather and share thoughts with other like-minded people, and the Internet allowed both to connect with those people far beyond the geographical surroundings to which they were previously limited. It’s incredibly empowering to discuss politics within a cohesive community, and especially convivial (or cathartic) to follow sports among one, too.

Fourth — and here’s the distinctive difference — the political partisans have shown they’ll do investigative journalism, while the sports fans haven’t. Let’s illustrate this with a thought experiment: What if the “objective” establishment media reporting regularly on politics and sports all disappeared? (And from what Carty describes, it’s not that far away in Michigan football.) Would investigative journalism — the practice of digging up something the powers that be don’t want people to know — still exist? In politics, the answer is unequivocally yes: The conservative blogosphere would dig up dirt on liberals and vice versa. How do we know this? Because they’re already doing this. They’re highly motivated to dig into the area they’re covering, because they’re essentially covering their opponents.*

*Whether the American people would choose to trust these sources is another matter. But the work would get done.

But in a solely fan-driven sports media world, investigative reporting would be in big trouble. (The establishment isn’t doing much of that anyway, but I’m comparing fans to their political counterparts right now, not sportswriters.) Why the heck would a Michigan fan or booster go through weeks or months of work to dig up something like the Freep did? Or even with a simpler story like this one, why would they broadcast it within their community? (Don’t believe me? Look at what Michigan fans did to someone who did try to do that.) And there’s no way an Ohio State blog would go through the work to expose it, either: They’re too busy debating about the health of their own backup halfback.

While political partisans are covering their opposition, fans are covering institutions they love. Yes, fans have long shown they’re more than willing to criticize those institutions, but they haven’t shown willingness to devote significant time and resources to find out something (probably negative) that the public doesn’t already know. (To be fair, generalist fan sites like Deadspin have been plenty willing to bring negative stories to light, though those stories often fall on the gossip side of the aisle and usually have to be dropped in their laps.)

That’s a problem, because sports is big business, and especially in college sports, there are plenty of shady dealings going on in just about every corner of the country. While I don’t buy into the “Journalism will die when newspapers are gone! Who will cover the city council meetings? Who?!?” hysteria, I think we have more of a reason to be concerned in sports coverage down the road than in most other areas. Fans may be asserting themselves as the engine that drives sports coverage, but we don’t necessarily want them steering the entire way.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: A mobile aggregation dustup, journalists and the link, and fan-based local sports