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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

— 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

— The biggest news in new media this week was probably the launch last Monday of Google Fast Flip, which allows you to flip through articles across the web while viewing them on their own pages, sort of like a scrollable set of screenshots. According to Google, there are two major (related) goals behind this: To speed up web browsing by eliminating slow load times, and to restore some of the magazine-style experience of flipping through pages online.

A quick review of the reviews: The New York Times’ David Carr, who saw an in-progress version last summer, loves it, calling it “a back-to-the-future moment where readers can once again experience the thrill and serendipity of flipping their way through pages to amusing or enlightening ends.” Between this and Google’s micropayment idea, he says it’s time to take Google’s efforts to help news organizations seriously. Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog couldn’t agree less, calling Fast Flip an opportunistic joke on a panicking news industry. Alan Warms of Silicon Valley Insider says he also gets a back-to-the-future vibe — in a bad way. Simply put, he says, there’s not enough links, and it’s driven by publishers instead of consumers.

Carr has some company in his rave review, though: Steve Outing — like many others, I’m sure — loves that Google is sharing revenues with publishers. And Publish2 co-founder Scott Karp likes that Google is attempting to create a new user interface for news, rather than just trying to figure out how to charge for it.

My take: I’m not sure where to stand on whether to take Google’s efforts to help publishers seriously. We don’t know the split of ad revenue, and until we do, we have no idea whether this a bona fide collaborative attempt to solve a problem or just a way to wring a few more dollars from a desperate news industry.

As for the product itself, color me unimpressed. The content simply seems far too haphazardly thrown together. Right now, the “recommended” stories in FastFlip are a Washington Post Date Lab, a New York Times article on Amazon, news from the BBC on dementia, a Slate piece on Stephen Baldwin, a demo conference on Fast Company, and the worst dressed Emmys of all time on Us. Huh? Isn’t Google’s job as the king of search to bring some order to the chaos that is the web? The “Recommended” tab might as well be titled “Browse random articles from three dozen publishers. Hope you like one of them.” One person’s serendipity is another’s jumbled mess.

— In ideas, this week has to start with Nieman Reports’ massive fall issue on journalism and social media. There’s tons of great stuff here and I’ve barely started to dig into it all, but I already love Matt Thompson’s manifesto on the value of Wikipedia or “Giant Pool of Money”-style explainers in news. (Elsewhere, the report gives a great picture of how it works in practice for one paper.) The Nieman Journalism Lab has been highlighting various articles from the report all week, and I plan to have some more thoughts on at least one of them up for you later this week.

— The political media world has been abuzz about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’ expose of ACORN, and as C.W. Anderson and others have noted, it seems to be the sequel to Mark Bowden’s Atlantic article I wrote about last week. The Columbia Journalism Review picks up where Bowden left off, lamenting the separation of the public into “different fact universes” and notes that the mainstream media should continue the “standard strategy” of giving “balanced” context to stories, trying to in some sense referee the conflict. Meanwhile, The Daily Beast’s Conor Friedersdorf (hardly a conservative himself) uses the episode to argue for the government to allow anyone to record any elected official or anyone else who is paid with any public money.

— On the paid content front, the must-read piece this week is PBS MediaShift’s fantastic two-part debate on micropayments between David Carr and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. It functions as a great primer for the arguments on both sides, which are articulated by two sharp, eloquent spokesmen. I have to say Masnick got the better of this one, and his description of micropayments as “putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there’s no specific benefit for paying the toll” is the most fitting analogy I’ve seen yet of the issue. (He also takes down the idea of an antitrust exemption for newspapers along the way.)

Meanwhile, Steve Outing ponders the tangibility issue of paying for news I noted in the comments section last week, and says the right paradigm might be found in mobile phone apps. Editor & Publisher’s indefatigable Joe Strupp brings us up to date on newspapers’ plans to charge for content online, Ken Doctor sees some real changes signified in several under-the-radar news business moves, and Alan Mutter has good news about a lower ideal pay wall fee and bad news about inflated web traffic stats.

— Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik offers seven ways to make news sites more social, and Steve Yelvington gives seven more steps to nurturing that online community. (Thanks to the wonderful Stephanie Romanski, I’m happy to say my paper has most of Mashable’s list covered.)

— This week in depressing journalism industry graphs: BusinessWeek has some awful-looking graphs of jobs in traditional media industries, but Jeff Jarvis wonders if it’s as bad as it looks, given that journalism is becoming so decentralized.

— Joshua Michele-Ross of Radar has a short but profound read on why news organizations have been so slow to adapt to change: Because they’re institutions. I would guess that any journalist working for a traditional media organization could readily vouch for him here; I know I would.

— Finally, the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry offers two indispensable resources for journalists and j-school students — one incredibly comprehensive list of resources on journalism ethics, and another slightly intimidating yet inspirational list of ways to make yourself a better journalist. These things are golden.

Related posts:

1. This holiday week in media musings: Year-end reviews, and great advice for local newspapers
2. This week in media musings: Advocacy journalism’s (bogus) failings and more paywall options
3. This week in media musings: Shirky speaks, and three new projects to watch