The paper is the 20,000-circulation Grand Island Independent (disclosure: I worked as a reporter there until April, just before this project was formally launched), and the service is called the giNetwork. Here’s how it works: Companies pay for The Independent’s web editor to set up their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, with synchronized posts between the two. Their posts are then aggregated  and displayed with a Twitter lists widget on The Independent’s homepage (about midway down) and on a dedicated giNetwork page. The deal includes on-demand social media consulting during business hours and a regular email newsletter with tips and success stories.

The giNetwork was added on top of an existing local search service developed by the newspaper that boosts local advertisers’ search results on Google and other search engines, as well as the paper’s own local business listings. The search service, FindNEthing.com, had been offered to businesses for $79 per month, and the giNetwork is now included in the FindNEthing package for a total of $99 per month. (Businesses are required to sign on for at least 12 months in order to prevent them from quickly parlaying the paper’s network support and free social media setup into their own independent social media campaign.)

The two services together give advertisers a strong presence on Google, Facebook and The Independent, the area’s most-visited website. “You get the two most popular sites in the world and the most popular site here — it’s what I call the holy trinity of ‘onlineliness,’” said The Independent’s new media director, Jack Sheard. “You can’t get it anywhere else. There’s no other product that’s going to give you all three of those things.”

Advertisers seem to be buying into Sheard’s pitch: The network launched this spring with about a half-dozen businesses and now includes 37 in the rural town of about 50,000 — this after FindNEthing had struggled and flatlined, Sheard said. Here are the project’s main selling points, and how they’ve worked in practice.

— It makes social media simple for businesses. When Sheard, web editor Stephanie Romanski and The Independent’s sales reps talked to local advertisers, they found that few of them knew how to set up Facebook fan page for their business, and even fewer understood Twitter. “A lot of them, when we talk to them, say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know I need to be a part of that, I just don’t have the time. I know the way things are going; I just don’t understand it,’” Sheard said. So the giNetwork makes it simple: The paper sets their account up, gives them a single place to put in messages (usually Facebook; sometimes Twitter for the smartphone-attached) and provides help and advice along the way.

Sheard said the network’s been much more popular among older business owners than younger ones, largely because older ones tend to be unfamiliar with the technology while their younger colleagues are skeptical of paying someone for something they’re capable of doing themselves. Romanski’s expertise — she runs The Independent’s creative social media efforts and has done consulting for others in the newspaper business — is a major draw for advertisers and an important part of the program. “If [the businesses] are not successful with this, then we just have a dead product, and we’re just spending money on something that doesn’t work,” Sheard said.

— It gives targeted access to devoted local audiences. The key to this selling point is the aggregation of the Twitter lists widget on the homepage and the giNetwork landing page. That widget expands the business’s audience beyond the business’s few hundred Facebook fans or few dozen Twitter followers to potentially include the paper’s thousands of unique visitors per week. And, of course, a streaming list of constantly updating local deals draws a much more interested audience than a banner ad. To that end, the paper is hoping to make the giNetwork the hub of local-deals-of-the-moment — a sort of shaggier Groupon — as the network grows, attracting a devoted following of bargain-hunters. Joining the network is the only way to gain access to that following.

— Other local businesses have used it to attract new customers. The paper has plenty of small success stories. The local franchise of the Mexican fast-food chain Qdoba reached nearly 500 Facebook fans in its first two weeks with a giveaway offer; it now uses its page to spread word of its regular promotions, like kids-eat-free Mondays. A local florist started with a special deal for customers who came in and said “I love my dog,” and was getting new customers from the promotion months afterward. A tire shop has drawn new customers with its regular oil change deals.

The most successful local social-media user is a grocery store that actually launched its Facebook page independently, as the giNetwork was in the planning stages. It quickly gained thousands of followers with deep daily discounts, though it limited the deal to Facebook fans, necessitating a messy system in which customers printed out proof of their Facebook fandom, then exchanged it for a voucher at the customer service desk.

When the store joined the giNetwork, Sheard eliminated the Facebook fan requirement over the initial objections of the store’s manager. The Facebook fan page was merely a means to an end — increased business, Sheard said. ”We’re not in the business to sell Facebook fans,” he said. “We will help you build them, and that’s great, but we are in the business of getting people in your door. That’s what the giNetwork does that Facebook, maybe, is limited on.”

In the newsroom

So what has this meant for The Independent? Despite the relatively meager revenue, it’s come out a plus in the paper’s cost-benefit analysis; the initial setup is simple, and the project requires even lower maintenance after that point. The paper had initially discussed a much more intensive program in which Romanski would actually run the social-media efforts for local businesses, but that idea was scrapped because of ethical (the newspaper’s web editor also being the online voice of numerous advertisers) and time issues. This project has struck a much happier balance, Sheard and Romanski said.

The network won an award this year for best new revenue idea in the online group of The Omaha World-Herald Co., The Independent’s owners, and The Hays Daily News in Kansas has picked up the idea after talking with Romanski.

But don’t expect the giNetwork to look the same a few months from now; the paper plans to keep incorporating new technologies and services into it, such as Foursquare and Shoutback, a Groupon competitor. In a late-adopting social media city like Grand Island, that means the paper itself plays a role in pioneering those new products — a refreshingly unfamiliar role for the local paper. And while the numbers are small, Sheard and The Independent’s executives are excited about the fact that they’re making real money directly from their social media efforts. “We’ve started, and that’s the key,” Sheard said.

Related posts:

1. Podcast: How social media works at one small newspaper
2. This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing
3. What Facebook and small-town weeklies have in common: A value for social news

Should Facebook be regulated?: It’s been almost a month since Facebook’s expansion of Open Graph and Instant Personalization, and the concerns about the company’s invasion of privacy continue to roll in. This week’s appalling example of how much Facebook information is public comes courtesy of Openbook, a new site that uses Facebook’s API to allow you to search all public Facebook updates. (Of course, you’ll find similarly embarrassing revelations via a Twitter search, but the point is that many of these people don’t know that what they’re posting is public.)

We also got another anti-Facebook diatribe (two, actually) from a web luminary: Danah Boyd, the Microsoft researcher and social media expert. Boyd, who spends a lot of time talking to young people about social media, noted two observations in her first post: Many users’ mental model of who can see their information doesn’t match up with reality, and people have invested so much time and resources into Facebook that they feel trapped by its changes. In the second post, Boyd proposes that if Facebook is going to refer to itself as a “social utility” (and it’s becoming a utility like water, power or the Internet, she argues), then it needs to be ready to be regulated like other utilities.

The social media blog Mashable has chimed in with a couple of defenses of Facebook (the web is all about sharing information; Facebook has normalized sharing in a way that users want to embrace), but the din has reached Facebook’s ears. The Wall Street Journal reported that the issue has prompted deep disagreements and several days of discussions at Facebook headquarters, and a Facebook spokesman said the company is going to simplify privacy controls soon.

Meanwhile, tech investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon posited that Facebook is going to use its web-wide Like button to corner the market on online display ads, similar to the way Google did with text ads. Facebook also launched 0.facebook.com, a simple mobile-only site that’s free on some carriers, leading Poynter’s Steve Myers to wonder if it’s going to become the default mobile web for feature, or “dumb” phones. But The New York Times argued that when it comes to social data, Facebook still can’t hold a candle to the good old-fashioned open web.

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Are iPad apps worth it?: The iPad’s sales haven’t slowed down yet — it’s been projected to outsell the Mac, and one in five Americans say they might get one — but there are still conflicting opinions over how deeply publishers should get involved with it. Slate Group head Jacob Weisberg was the latest to weigh in, arguing that iPad apps won’t help magazines and newspapers like they think it will. He makes a couple of arguments we’ve seen several times over the past month or two: App producers are entering an Apple-controlled marketplace that’s been characterized by censorship, and apps are retrograde attempts to replicate the print experience.

“They’re claustrophobic walled gardens within Apple’s walled garden, lacking the basic functionality we now expect with electronic journalism: the opportunity to comment, the integration of social media, the ability to select text and paste it elsewhere, and finally the most basic function of all: links to other sources,” Weisberg says. GQ magazine didn’t get off to a particularly encouraging start with its iPad offerings, selling just 365 copies of its $2.99 Men of the Year iPad issue.

A few other folks are saying that the iPad is ushering in fundamental changes in the way we consume personal media: At Ars Technica, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps notes that the iPad is radically different from what people say they want in a PC, but they’re still more than willing to buy it because it makes complex computing simple. (The term Forrester is using to describe the tablet era, curated computing, seems like a stretch, though.) Norwegian digital journalist John Einar Sandvand offers a similar take, saying that tablets’ distinctive convenience will further weaken print newspapers’ position. And the Lab’s Josh Benton says the iPad could have an effect on the way we write, too.

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Slipping through the Times’ and WSJ’s paywalls: New York Times editor Bill Keller gave an update late last week on the plans for his paper’s much-anticipated paywall — he didn’t tell us anything new, unless you count the news that the wall will start in January 2011, rather than just “next year.” But in reiterating the fact that he wasn’t breaking any news, he gave Media Matters’ Joe Strupp a bit of a clearer picture about how loose the Times’ metered model will be: “Those who mainly come to the website via search engines or links from blogs, and those who only come sporadically — in short, the bulk of our traffic — may never be asked to pay at all,” Keller wrote.

In the meantime, digital media consultant Mark Potts found another leaky paywall at The Wall Street Journal. Potts canceled his WSJ.com subscription (after 15 years!) and found that he’s still able to access for free almost everything he had previously paid for with only a few URL changes and the most basic of Google skills. And even much of that information, he argues, is readily available from other sources for free, damaging the value of the venerable Journal paywall. “Even the Journal can’t enforce the kind of exclusivity that would make it worth paying for—it’s too easy to look elsewhere,” Potts writes.

Another Times-related story to note: The paper’s managing editor for news, Jill Abramson, will leave her position for six months to become immersed in the digital side of the Times’ operation. The New York Observer tries out a few possible explanations for the move.

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Going all-in on digital publishing: Speaking of immersion, two publishers in the past two weeks have tried a fascinating experiment: Producing an issue entirely through new-media tools. The first was 48 Hours, a new San Francisco-based magazine that puts together each issue from beginning to end in two days. The magazine’s editors announced a theme, solicited submissions via email and Twitter, received 1,500 submissions, then put together the magazine, all in 48 hours. Several who saw the finished product were fairly impressed, but CBS’s lawyers were a little less pleased about the whole ‘48 Hours’ name. Gizmodo had a Q&A with the mag’s editors (all webzine vets) and PBS MediaShift and the BBC took a closer look at the editorial process.

Second, the Journal Register Co. newspaper chain finished the Ben Franklin Project, an experiment in producing a daily and weekly newspaper and website using only free, web-based tools. Two small Ohio newspapers accomplished the feat this week, and Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore took a look inside the effort. What she uncovered should be an inspiration for people looking to implement change in newsrooms, especially ones that might be resistant to digital media. A quote from the daily paper’s managing editor sums it up: “When we started out, we said, ‘We’re going to do what? How are we going to do this?’ Now we’re showing ourselves that we can operate in a world that, even six months ago, used to be foreign to us.”

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Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two developments and a handful of other pieces to think on:

— Yahoo bought the online content producer Associated Content for $100 million this week. News business analyst Ken Doctor examined what this deal means for Yahoo (it’s big, he says), and considers the demand-and-advertising-driven model employed by Associated Content and others like Demand Media.

— If you follow NYU professor Jay Rosen on Twitter, you’ve heard a ton about fact-checking over the past couple of months. A couple more interesting tidbits on the subject this week: Fact-checks are consistently the AP’s most popular pieces online, and Minnesota Public Radio has unveiled PoliGraph, its own fact-checking effort.

— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds compares two of the more talked-about local news startups launching this summer, Washington D.C.’s TBD and Hawaii’s Honolulu Civil Beat. He’s got some great details on both. Poynter also put together a list of 200 moments over the last decade that transformed journalism.

— If you’re up for a quick, deep thought, the Lab’s Josh Benton muses on the need for news to structure and shrink its users’ world. “I think it’s journalists who need to take up that challenge,” he says, “to learn how to spin something coherent and absorbing and contained and in-the-moment and satisfying from the chaos of the world around us.”

— And once you’re done with that, head into the weekend laughing at the Onion’s parody of newspapers’ coverage of social media startups.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
2. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed
3. This Week in Review: Facebook’s privacy tweak, old and new media’s links, and the AP’s new challenger

Facebook simplifies privacy control: After about a month of loud, sustained criticism, Facebook bowed to public pressure and instituted some changes Wednesday to users’ privacy settings. The default status of most of the data on Facebook — that is, public —hasn’t changed, but the social networking site did make it easier for users to determine and control their various privacy settings. For some social media critics, the tweaks were enough to close the book on this whole privacy brouhaha, but others weren’t so satisfied with Facebook. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber seized on the theme of “control” in Facebook’s announcement, arguing that the company is acknowledging that online sharing is as much individual and self-interested as it is communal and selfless.

Before rolling out those changes, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg penned a Washington Post op-ed that served as a defense of Facebook’s privacy policy masquerading as an apology. “If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected,” he wrote. The reaction was swift and negative: It was called “long on propaganda and short on news,” “disingenuous” and “missing the point” by several media and tech critics.

Their comments were part of continued attacks on Facebook’s privacy stance that began to shift from “Facebook is evil” to “So what do we do now?” Facebook’s new, more private rivals escalated their efforts to provide an alternative, while social media researcher Danah Boyd argued that leaving Facebook would be futile and instead urged users to “challenge Facebook to live up to a higher standard.” Several legal and web thinkers also discussed whether the government should regulate Facebook’s privacy policies, and the Harvard Business Review’s Bruce Nussbaum made the case that Facebook has alienated the generational principles of its primary user base of millennials. (Mathew Ingram of GigaOm disagreed.)

But amid all that, Facebook — or at least the sharing of personal information — got another defender: The prominent tech thinker Steven Johnson. In a thoughtful essay for Time, He used the example of media critic Jeff Jarvis’ public bout with prostate cancer to argue that living in public has its virtues, too. “We have to learn how to break with that most elemental of parental commandments: Don’t talk to strangers,” Johnson wrote. “It turns out that strangers have a lot to give us that’s worthwhile, and we to them.” Of course, Johnson argues, being public or private is for the first time a decision, and it requires a new kind of literacy to go with it.

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Paywalls and the links between old and new media: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study examining the way several big news topics were discussed across several online news platforms, and as usual, it’s a whole lot of discoveries to sift through. Among the headlines that Pew pointed out in its summary: Twitter users share more technology news than other platforms, the traditional press may be underemphasizing international news, blogs and the press have different news agendas, and Twitter is less tied to traditional media than blogs. (Mashable has another good roundup, focusing on the differences between the traditional media and the blogosphere.

The study did take some heat online: TBD’s Steve Buttry took issue with the assertion that most original reporting comes from traditional journalists, and the Knight Digital Media Center’s Amy Gahran dug into the study’s methodology and argued that Pew selected from a list of blogs predisposed to discuss what the traditional media is reporting, and that Pew’s definition of news is shaped by circular reasoning.

Gahran was looking at what turned out to be the most attention-grabbing statistic from the study: That 99 percent of the stories blogs link to are produced by the mainstream media, and more than 80 percent come from just four news outlets — the BBC, CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post. DailyFinance media columnist Jeff Bercovici used that statistic to caution that the Times may be giving up a valuable place as one of the top drivers of online news discussion by implementing its paywall next year. Reuters’ Felix Salmon echoed that warning, adding that if the Times is truly keeping the doors to its site open to bloggers, it should be trumpeting that as loudly as possible. And wouldn’t you know it — the next day the Times did just that, reiterating that links to their site from blogs won’t count against the limit of free visits.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper the Times and Sunday Times unveiled plans for its soon-to-be-erected paywall, including the fact that all of the sites’ articles will be blocked from all search engines. The Times and New York Times’ paywalls were almost tailor-made for being contrasted, and that’s exactly what the Lab’s Jason Fry did, using them as examples of an open vs. closed paradigm regarding paid content.

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A challenger to the AP’s model: We found out about a fascinating news innovation this week at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, where the online news sharing company Publish2 revealed News Exchange, its new content-sharing service for publishers. Essentially, News Exchange is a way for media outlets, both online-only and traditional, to send and receive stories to each other for publication while retaining control of what they share and with whom.

If that sounds like a free, open version of The Associated Press, it’s because that’s exactly what Publish2 sees it as. At the conference, Publish2’s Scott Karp came out against The Associated Press with both guns blazing, calling it “a big enemy of newspapers” and “an obsolete, inefficient monopoly ripe for destruction.” Publish2’s goal, he said, is to “Craigslist the AP.” (In a blog post, Publish2’s Ryan Sholin went into some more detail about why and how.)

Publish2’s bold idea was met with mixed reactions among both the tech and media crowds: A few of TechCrunch’s panelists wondered whether print publications were worth building a business around, but they were impressed enough to advance it to the final round of the conference’s startup competition anyhow. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen called it “an extension into print of ‘do what you do best and link to the rest,’” and CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson said he was thrilled to watch Publish2 take on an irrational system but concerned that the tangle of CMS’s could trip it up. But media consultant Mark Potts noted that much of what the AP transmits is news it reports and produces, something Publish2 isn’t going to try to do. It’s rare that we see such a bold, explicit attempt to take down such an established news organization, so this will doubtless be a project to keep a close eye on.

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A disappointing iPad app and an open-web debate: A couple of iPad-related developments and debates this week: While publishers cautiously awaited the iPad’s international release this week, Wired magazine released its iPad app this week — an eagerly awaited app in tech circles. The app is $5 per month, significantly more than the $10 per year that the magazine charges subscribers. Gizmodo Australia’s John Herrman called it “unequivocally, the best magazine for the iPad,” but still wasn’t entirely impressed. It’s too expensive, takes up too much space, and doesn’t deliver the reinvention of the magazine that we were expecting, he said. Lost Remote’s Steve Safran was harsher — calling it a magazine dropped into an app. “Simply taking your existing magazine and sticking in some video does not make it a more attractive offering; it makes it a website from 2003,” he said.

The New York Times Magazine’s Virginia Heffernan ruffled a few feathers this week with a short essay on “The Death of the Open Web,” in which she compared the move into the carefully controlled environs of Apple’s products like the iPhone and iPad to white flight. Web writers Stowe Boyd and Tim Maly refuted Heffernan’s argument, pointing primarily to the iPhone and iPad’s browser and arguing that it keeps the door open to virtually everything the web has to offer. And blogging pioneer Dave Winer said the phrase “death of the open web” is rendered meaningless by the fact that it can’t be verified. In a final quick iPad note, the journalism and programming site Hacks/Hackers hosted a conference in which attendees built an impressive 12 iPad apps in 30 hours.

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Reading roundup: This week, we’ve got two news items and a handful of other thoughtful or helpful pieces to take a look at.

— The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit local news site based in San Francisco, launched this week. The San Francisco Bay Guardian took a look at the challenges in front of the Bay Citizen, Poynter used it as a lens to view four trends among news startups, and the Chicago Reader examined the Chicago News Cooperative, another nonprofit news startup that also provides stories to The New York Times. The Lab’s Laura McGann also gave some tips for launching a news site the right way.

— Forbes bought the personal publishing site True/Slant, whose founder, Lewis Dvorkin, is a former Forbes staffer. Dvorkinexplained his decision to sell, and Felix Salmon expressed his skepticism about True/Slant’s future.

— Longtime journalists Tom Foremski and Caitlin Kelly both wrote thoughtful posts on what happens when pageviews become a high priority within news organizations. They’re not optimistic.

— Two pieces to bookmark for future reference: Mashable has a thorough but digestible overview of five ways to make money off of news online, and TBD’s Steve Buttry gives some fantastic tips for landing a job in digital journalism.

— Finally, NewsCred’s Shafqat Islam has a wonderful guide to creating effective topic pages for news. This one should be a must-read for any news org looking seriously at context-driven news online.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Facebook circles the wagons, leaky paywalls, and digital publishing immersion
2. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed
3. This Week in Review: Facebook’s big move, the iPad’s news app control, and a future for hard reporting

Google’s attempt to save the news: There weren’t a whole lot of newsy events around journalism to report this week, so we’ll start off with the most significant think piece: James Fallows’ opus in The Atlantic on Google’s efforts to come to the news industry’s aid.

Fallows, a veteran journalist and media critic, spent the last year talking to Google engineers and execs about their relationship with the news media, and he came out remarkably optimistic. In a 9,000-word piece, Fallows examines the news industry’s struggles from Google’s perspective, outlines their principles for a way forward — distribution, engagement and monetization — and briefly highlights five of their recent news-oriented projects: Living Stories, Fast Flip, YouTube Direct, online display ads and paid-content logistics. He concludes by noting a few of Google’s paradoxical stances, which he calls “major and encouraging developments” for the news business:

“The organization that dominates the online-advertising world says that much more online-ad money can be flowing to news organizations. The company whose standard price to consumers is zero says that subscribers can and will pay for news. The name that has symbolized disruption of established media says it sees direct self-interest in helping the struggling journalism business.”

Reaction on the piece for future-of-journalism folks ran the gamut, from “absolute must-read” endorsements to groans at the article’s years-old concepts. And in a way, both sides are right: To those closely following the journalism-in-tradition scene, there’s really no news in this piece. The Google officials’ perspectives on why the news is broken and what needs to be done about it are familiar enough to have become conventional wisdom among people thinking about journalism and technology. (Fallows even acknowledges this in a few spots.) But at the same time, Fallows summarizes that relatively new conventional wisdom in a comprehensive, readable way, making the piece a brilliant primer on where the news on the web stands right now. For the insider, this is ho-hum stuff; for everyone else, this is an ideal introduction to the subject.

Journalism prof and digital media expert Jeff Jarvis, who’s written his own book on Google, is in the ‘must-read’ camp, citing Fallows’ impressions as evidence that Google is a friend to the news business. Jason Fry and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka are more skeptical, questioning Google’s ability to actually turn the industry around.

Fry notes that publishers are unorganized and tentative, making industry-wide solutions difficult to implement, and Kafka says that even with Google’s help, online ads aren’t likely to be valuable enough to support substantive newsgathering. The Awl’s Choire Sicha makes a similar point, while using Google’s statistics to point out the folly of news organizations’ editorial cuts over the past few years.

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Mediocre reviews for iPad apps: It’s been a month and a half now since the iPad was released, and we’re starting to get beyond the “first impressions” phase of the reviews of news organizations’ iPad apps. News business guru Alan Mutter combed through the reviews and ratings at Apple’s app store to evaluate the 10 most popular news apps, and found that apps by European outlets and broadcasters are most well-liked, and pay apps aren’t too popular.

If you want to succeed on the iPad, he said, you have to go beyond the look and feel of your legacy product and offer some more value, especially if you’re going to charge: “Consumers are smart enough to tell when a publisher slaps a premium price on recycled print or web content – and they won’t go for it.”

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen took a more thorough look at iPad apps, releasing a 93-page report on a few dozen apps from media companies and elsewhere. His summary is pretty illuminating: He found that designers have tried to outdo themselves with clever interaction techniques, leading to a whole lot of confusion about how to navigate apps. (New York Times designer Alexis Lloyd disagreed with Nielsen’s emphasis on simplicity, arguing that experimentation is more important right now.) Nielsen also concluded, like Mutter, that designers are relying too much on a print-based concept revolving around the “next article” idea, which he argued doesn’t make sense on mobile media.

After fiddling around with the iPad for a few weeks, the Lab’s Jason Fry discovered that the iPad’s killer app may not be its apps at all, but instead its lightning-fast, easy-to-use browser. That might put news orgs in an awkward spot, Fry wrote, after hanging their hats on apps: They still can’t compete with their own (free) websites on the iPad.

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Dissecting Newsweek’s downfall: Commentary continued to roll in on last week’s news that The Washington Post Co. will try to sell Newsweek, starting with a column by Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. He defended the magazine against its doomsayers, pointed out that it hasn’t closed and arguing that if the economic climate were better, it would be profitable.

He also made a case for Newsweek’s continued existence, saying it “means something to the country” and represents an opportunity to bring a large number of otherwise fragmented Americans together to focus on common topics. The magazine’s task now, he wrote, was to find a business model to sustain that role. (Journalism prof Jay Rosen was not impressed.)

Others continued to chime in with their opinions about why Newsweek failed: Blogging pioneer Dave Winer said it was a lack of innovation stemming from a corporate mindset, and Harvard Business Review writer (and former Newsweek staffer) Dan McGinn said the demise of U.S. News & World Report as a rival hurt, too.

Forbes’ Trevor Butterworth and blogger Greg Satell both hit on a different idea: There was no there there. Butterworth made a striking comparison of the amount of content in an issue of Newsweek and the Economist, and Satell compared Newsweek with Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic, two magazines whose upscale readership Meacham has coveted. “The notion that offering a magazine consisting mainly of one-page opinion pieces would attract a better quality audience than reporting flies in the face of any apparent media reality,” Satell wrote.

Meanwhile, the discussion of possible buyers began to build. Yahoo’s Michael Calderone shot down media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Philip Anschutz and Carlos Slim Helu as options and raised the possibility of a bid by Michael Bloomberg. A few days later, The New York Observer revealed that Thomson Reuters and Politico owner Allbritton Communications were interested, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Univision owner and billionaire investor Haim Saban is interested, too.

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Facebook privacy fury builds: An update on the ongoing consternation over Facebook’s latest privacy breach: IBM developer Matt McKeon and The New York Times’ Guilbert Gates provided striking visual depictions of Facebook’s advances against privacy and the hoops its users have to jump through to maintain it. Facebook (sort of) answered users’ privacy questions at The New York Times and held an internal meeting about privacy Thursday.

But the cries about privacy violations continue unabated. GigaOm’s Liz Gannes said Facebook’s Times Q&A wasn’t sufficiently conciliatory, and All Facebook called for Instant Personalization to become opt-in, rather than opt-out. Others went further, quitting Facebook and calling for an open alternative. Four NYU students were happy to oblige them, becoming almost literally an overnight sensation and raising $100,000 this week for a decentralized Facebook alternative called Diaspora* on the back of a New York Times profile and plenty of tech-blog hype.

Jeff Jarvis offered a smart analysis of why Facebook is rubbing so many people the wrong way: It’s confusing the public sphere (the type of public we usually think of when we think of the word “public”) with the “publics” we create for ourselves when we build networks of our friends and family on Facebook.

Jarvis explains the difference well: “When I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.“

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Reading roundup: A few quick hits on pieces you should make sure to catch this week:

— The Wall Street Journal is one of the first newspapers to try to do some significant location-based news innovation with Foursquare, and the Lab’s Megan Garber has a good overview of what they have going.

— The Huffington Post turned five this week, and The Columbia Journalism Review put together five reflections on its impact to mark the occasion. CJR also published a lengthy examination of the state of nonprofit investigative journalism, focusing on California Watch and The Center for Public Integrity.

— Columbia professor Michael Schudson, who co-authored a major study of the state of journalism published last fall, talked some more about several aspects of “the new news ecosystem” in a Q&A with The Common Review.

— Finally, a piece I missed last week: Longtime Salon writer Scott Rosenberg gave a speech at a Stanford conference that thoughtfully delineates a 21st-century definition of journalism. Here’s the one-sentence version: “You’re doing journalism when you’re delivering an accurate and timely account of some event to some public.”

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism
2. This Week in Review: Newsweek on the block, Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall rumblings
3. This Week in Review: Who’s responsible for local news, and Google plays hardball with China

Has Newsweek’s time come?: This week was a relatively quiet one until Wednesday, when The Washington Post Co. announced that it’s trying to sell Newsweek, which it’s owned since 1961. A possible sale doesn’t always signal the demise of a news organization, but in this case, as the folks at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital noted, this move was the equivalent of “hastily scrawling out a ‘Going Out of Business–Name Your Price’ sign and plastering it on the front window.” The New York Times has the details, including a j-prof’s pronouncement that “the era of mass is over, in some respect.”

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer talked to Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham, who boiled Newsweek’s profitability problems to one telling statistic: Newsweek’s staff split its time about evenly between print and digital last year, but print brought in $160 million in revenue, while the digital side drew $8 million. Newsweek’s digital operation was good, Graham said — just not good enough to stand out from the hundreds of other news sites out there. Still, he was confident the Post would find a buyer (though he hasn’t talked with anyone seriously), and that Newsweek and newsweeklies in general would live on.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham talked to the New York Observer, saying he’s going to see if he can save the magazine, possibly by rounding up bidders to buy it. Meacham’s conversation with Jon Stewart the day the news broke was laced with both optimism and gallows humor, and New York magazine examined Meacham’s decision to try to make Newsweek the American equivalent of The Economist.

In a well-written piece, The New York Times’ David Carr summed up two bits of conventional wisdom about Newsweek’s downfall: The economics of weekly publishing simply aren’t feasible anymore, and the Washington Post Co.’s Slate, with its snarky, knowing tone, has taken Newsweek’s place. MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman suggested that the Post combine the two. Slate’s Jack Shafer said it wasn’t the Internet that killed Newsweek, but instead an ongoing game of musical chairs that someone had to lose. (Slate and Time, for example, seem to be doing just fine, thanks.) Meanwhile, Derek Powazek, who’s edited several web magazines, gave his recipe for newsweekly success in the digital age.

The next question, of course, is who will buy Newsweek. News business analyst Ken Doctor examined two possibilities: TV-based news orgs like ABC, CBS and NBC looking for a print distribution point, and “firebrand owners” like media moguls Mort Zuckerman or Marty Peretz. Either way, Doctor said, Newsweek will probably be all but extinct before long. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, Media Alley and Mediaite all throw out some combination of Zuckerman, Meacham, Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch. as possibilities.

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Committing journalism with Twitter: Many of Twitter’s users have understood and used it as a medium for breaking, spreading and consuming news for quite a while now, but some research presented within the past week adds some backbone to that idea. Four Korean researchers collected all of Twitter’s data over a month’s time last year and released their research on it — the first quantitative study of the entire Twitterverse.

What they found, according to PC World, was that both the structure of Twitter (with its asymmetrical following system, creating a world with some incredibly influential users and many other more peripheral ones) and its messages (85 percent are about news) give it more of a resemblance to a news medium than to its fellow social networks online.

MIT’s Technology Review zeroed in on two particularly interesting findings illustrating the breadth of this new news system: First, two-thirds of Twitter users aren’t followed by anyone that they follow, meaning they use it for information consumption rather than social connections. Second, despite the wide disparity between the Twitter “stars” and typical users, anyone’s tweet still has the possibility of reaching a wide audience, thanks to the usefulness of the retweet function. “Individual users have the power to dictate which information is important and should spread by the form of retweet,” the researchers wrote. “In a way we are witnessing the emergence of collective intelligence.”

Also this week, Canadian j-prof Alfred Hermida put forward his argument in an academic paper for Twitter as an “ambient form of journalism” — a medium in which the former news audience creates, disseminates and discusses news, performing acts of journalism that were once performed only by professionals. In a more technical paper, Alex Burns delved into the definition of “ambient journalism,” especially as it relates to Twitter. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber also looked at the way news organizations in several countries are using Twitter and other social media for news.

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The paid-content beat goes on: A few quiet indicators this week of the move toward news paywalls: Rupert Murdoch said News Corp. will be announcing their paywall plans in a few weeks. Those plans apparently include anchoring a consortium of paid-content systems across various media companies, using technology that powers the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, the Los Angeles Times reported. Meanwhile, the number of publications that Journalism Online’s execs say they’re working with on paywall plans has increased to 1,400, including the sizable MediaNews chain of newspapers.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s new publisher/CEO, Mike Klingensmith, talked to MinnPost about his plans for a new metered-model system (like what The New York Times announced in January), and from the sound of it, he’s looking at charging primarily for local news — the paper already charges for some of its Minnesota Vikings coverage — and wants to allow traffic from links to come in fairly uninhibited. A decision on the specific plans sound like they’re at least a year off, though.

Advertising Age’s Nat Ives also took a look at paywalls for smaller newspapers (here’s the link, but Ives’ article is also under a paywall). Ken Doctor says that for smaller papers, a paywall may be a good short-term wait-and-see strategy, but papers still have to be proactive about ensuring long-term growth.

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The pros and cons of Facebook’s spread: There wasn’t a lot of news involving Facebook this week, but the grumblings about its privacy issues rolled on. The New York Times used Facebook’s latest (relatively minor, it seems) privacy glitch to give another overview about those concerns, and TechNewsWorld pegged their overview to a Consumer Reports survey about Facebook information sharing that was released this week.

Social media guru Robert Scoble wrote a depressing piece about why Facebook’s disregard for privacy can’t be regulated, concluding that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won.” New media expert Jeff Jarvis suggested that Facebook turn their bad privacy PR into a service for users (with some help from their ubiquity), offering them a simpler way to see what’s being written about them across the web and manage their online reputation.

The New York Times’ digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, was pretty impressed by Facebook’s spread across the web, giving a sharp analysis of the importance of engagement and identity to publishers online. Those are things that Facebook has mastered, he said, but news organizations haven’t, and that’s a shame when the Times’ most valuable asset is “our audience as knowledgeable participants in the life our web site.”

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Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two news items and a few other good ideas to chew on.

— EBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched his new local news site, Honolulu Civil Beat, this week. It’s being run by John Temple, who was at the helm of the Rocky Mountain News when it shut down. The biggest distinctive of this project: It’s almost entirely behind a paywall. PaidContent and NPR both have the details.

— The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported the most recent set of newspaper numbers a couple of weeks ago, and here at the Lab, newspaper vet Martin Langeveld punched a few holes in the Newspaper Association of America’s declaration that the results are the sign of a turnaround. And after the announcement of the first quarter’s newspaper profit numbers, the Lab’s Ken Doctor explained why newspapers aren’t going to be investment those profits in much-needed innovation.

— Publish2’s Greg Linch put together a great case for incorporating more of a computational mindset into journalism, identifying several common elements between journalism and programming and urging the two groups to work more closely together. English professor Kim Pearson followed that post up with some proposals for ways to integrate computational thinking into curriculums.

— We’ve been hearing a lot about online comments over the past few weeks, and Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore took a close look at the ways several news organizations are working to improve them.

— I’ll close with two simple but thoughtful pieces on online media, one from the production standpoint, and the other looking at consumption. First social media entrepreneur and blogger Ben Elowitz gave a fine summary of the way the definition of quality has changed in online media versus traditional publishing, and Slate’s William Saletan had some helpful tips to make your media consumption broader, deeper and altogether smarter. It’s hard work, but it’s necessary, Saletan said: “In the electronic echo chamber, it’s easier than ever to shut out what you don’t want to hear. Nobody will make you open the door and venture out. You’ll have to do that yourself.”

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s news crusade, lackluster iPad news apps, and what went wrong at Newsweek
2. This Week in Review: Facebook’s privacy tweak, old and new media’s links, and the AP’s new challenger
3. This Week in Review: Google’s Buzz buzz, Demand Media’s plans, and turning relationships into revenue

Apple and Gizmodo’s shield law test: The biggest tech story of the last couple of weeks has undoubtedly been the gadget blog Gizmodo’s photos of a prototype of Apple’s next iPhone that was allegedly left in a bar by an Apple employee. That story got a lot more interesting for journalism- and media-oriented folks this week, when we found out that police raided a Gizmodo blogger’s apartment based on a search warrant for theft.

What had been a leaked-gadget story turned into a case study on web journalism and the shield law. Mashable and Poynter did a fine job of laying out the facts of the case and the legal principles at stake: Was Gizmodo engaged in acts of journalism when it paid for the lost iPhone and published information about it? Social media consultant Simon Owens has a good roundup of opinions on the issue, including whether the situation would be different if Gizmodo hadn’t bought the iPhone.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, came out most strongly against the raid, arguing to Wired and Laptop magazine and in its own post that California law is clear that the Gizmodo blogger was acting as a reporter. The Citizen Media Law Project’s Sam Bayard agreed, backing the point up with a bit more case history. Not everyone had Gizmodo’s back, though: In a piece written before the raid, media critic Jeff Bercovici of Daily Finance said that Gizmodo was guilty of straight-up theft, journalistic motives or no.

J-prof Jay Rosen added a helpful clarification to the “are bloggers journalists” debate (it’s actually about whether Gizmodo was engaged in an act of journalism, he says) and ex-Saloner Scott Rosenberg reached back to a piece he wrote five years ago to explain why that debate frustrates him so much. Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that the Gizmodo incident was just one in a long line of examples of Apple’s anti-press behavior.

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Bridging the newsroom-academy gap: Texas j-prof Rosental Alves held his annual International Symposium on Online Journalism last weekend, and thanks to a lot of people’s work in documenting the conference, we have access to much of what was presented and discussed there. The conference site and Canadian professor Alfred Hermida devoted about 20 posts each to the event’s sessions and guests, so there’s loads of great stuff to peruse if you have time.

The conference included presentations on all kinds of stuff like Wikipedia, news site design, online comments, micropayments, and news innovation, but I want to highlight two sessions in particular. The first is the keynote by Demand Media’s Steven Kydd, who defended the company’s content and business model from criticism that it’s a harmful “content farm.” Kydd described Demand Media as “service journalism,” providing content on subjects that people want to know about while giving freelancers another market. You can check summaries of his talk at the official site, Hermida’s blog, and in a live blog by Matt Thompson. The conference site also has video of the Q&A session and reflections on Kydd’s charisma and a disappointing audience reaction. The other session worth taking a closer look at was a panel on nonprofit journalism, which, judging from Hermida and the conference’s roundups, seemed especially rich with insight into particular organizations’ approaches.

The conference got Matt Thompson, a veteran of both the newsroom and the academy who’s currently working for NPR, thinking about what researchers can do to bring the two arenas closer together. “I saw a number of studies this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful,” he wrote. “Yet they’re not available in forms I’d feel comfortable sending around the newsroom.” He has some practical, doable tips that should be required reading for journalism researchers.

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Making sense of social data: Most of the commentary on Facebook’s recent big announcements came out last week, but there’s still been plenty of good stuff since then. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb published the best explanation yet of what these moves mean, questioning whether publishers will be willing to give up ownership of their comments and ratings to Facebook. Writers at ReadWriteWeb and O’Reilly Radar also defended Facebook’s expansion against last week’s privacy concerns.

Three other folks did a little bit of thinking about the social effects of Facebook’s spread across the web: New media prof Jeff Jarvis said Facebook isn’t just identifying us throughout the web, it’s adding a valuable layer of data on places, things, ideas, everything. But, he cautions, that data isn’t worth much if it’s controlled by a company and the crowd isn’t able to create meaning out of it. Columbia grad student Vadim Lavrusik made the case for a “social nut graph” that gives context to this flood of data and allows people to do something more substantive than “like” things. PR blogger Paul Seaman wondered about how much people will trust Facebook with their data while knowing that they’re giving up some of their privacy rights for Facebook’s basic services. And social media researcher danah boyd had some insightful thoughts about the deeper issue of privacy in a world of “big data.”

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The Wall Street Journal goes local: The Wall Street Journal made the big move in its war with The New York Times this week, launching its long-expected New York edition. The Times’ media columnist, David Carr, took a pretty thorough look at the first day’s offering and the fight in general, and Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan liked what he saw from the Journal on day one.

Slate media critic Jack Shafer said the struggle between the Journal and the Times is a personal one for the Journal’s owner, Rupert Murdoch — he wants to own Manhattan, and he wants to see the Times go down in flames there. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis stifled a yawn, calling it “two dinosaurs fighting over a dodo bird.”

Along with its local edition, the Journal also announced a partnership with the geolocation site Foursquare that gives users news tips or factoids when they check in at certain places around New York — a bit more of a hard-news angle than Foursquare’s other news partnerships so far. Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram applauded the Journal’s innovation but questioned whether it would help the paper much.

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Apple and app control: The fury over Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore’s proposed iPhone app has largely died down, but there were a few more app-censorship developments this week to note. MSNBC.com cartoonist Daryl Cagle pointed out that despite Apple’s letup in Fiore’s case, they’re not reconsidering their rejection of his “Tiger Woods cartoons” app. Political satirist Daniel Kurtzman had two of his apps rejected, too, and an app of Michael Wolff’s Newser column — which frequently mocks Apple’s Steve Jobs — was nixed as well. Asked about the iPad at the aforementioned International Symposium on Online Journalism, renowned web scholar Ethan Zuckerman said Apple’s control over apps makes him “very nervous.”

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta also went deep into the iPad’s implications for publishers this week in a piece on the iPad, the Kindle and the book industry. You can hear him delve into those issues in interviews with Charlie Rose and Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

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Reading roundup: We had some great smaller conversations on a handful of news-related topics this week.

— Long-form journalism has been getting a lot of attention lately. Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote about longform.org, an effort to collect and link to the best narrative journalism on the web. Several journalistic heavyweights — Gay Talese, Buzz Bissinger, Bill Keller — sang the praises of narrative journalism during a Boston University conference on the subject.

Nieman Storyboard focused on Keller’s message, in which he expressed optimism that long-form journalism could thrive in the age of the web. Jason Fry agreed with Keller’s main thrust but took issue with the points he made to get there. Meanwhile, Jonathan Stray argued that “the web is more amenable to journalism of different levels of quality and completeness” and urges journalists not to cut on the web what they’re used to leaving out in print.

— FEED co-founder Steven Johnson gave a lecture at Columbia last week about the future of text, especially as it relates to tablets and e-readers. You can check it out here as an essay and here on video. Johnson criticizes the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for creating iPad apps that don’t let users manipulate text. The American Prospect’s Nancy Scola appreciates the argument, but says Johnson ignored the significant cultural impact of a closed app process.

— Two intriguing sets of ideas for news design online: Belgian designer Stijn Debrouwere has spent the last three weeks writing a thoughtful series of posts exploring a new set of principles for news design, and French media consultant Frederic Filloux argues that most news sites are an ineffective, restrictive funnel that cut users off from their most interesting content. Instead, he proposes a “serendipity test” for news sites.

— Finally, if you have 40 free minutes sometime, I highly recommend watching the Lab editor Joshua Benton’s recent lecture at Harvard’s Berkman Center on aggregation and journalism. Benton makes a compelling argument from history that all journalism is aggregation and says that if journalists don’t like the aggregation they’re seeing online, they need to do it better. It makes for a great introductory piece on journalism practices in transition on the web.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Facebook circles the wagons, leaky paywalls, and digital publishing immersion
2. This Week in Review: Facebook’s big move, the iPad’s news app control, and a future for hard reporting

Facebook tries to connect the web: Most of the talk on journalism and the web this week was about two tech giants making moves that, for the most part, aren’t making users and commentators happy. The first one I’ll run down is Facebook — its moves this week aren’t as directly tied to journalism as Apple’s, but their scope seems a lot larger. On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a set of tools that will allow its site to be integrated across the web by remembering users’ preferences and tying them all together through their Facebook accounts. GigaOm’s Liz Gannes and Om Malik have helpful overviews of the individual social features and Facebook’s larger plans.

What this means is that you’re going to be seeing a ton of Facebook around the internet and a ton of data — much of it personal — sent through Facebook’s connections. As tech guru Robert Scoble writes, this appears to be an incredibly ambitious move that could transform the look and feel of the web. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb notes that while it’s hard to find fault initially with anything specific about Facebook’s announcement, people are going to justifiably be concerned with the fact that the material Facebook is using to make the web social is formerly private information from its users.

And within the first day of commentary, a lot of people were concerned. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler thought Facebook took control of the internet with the move, saying that it’s backing up its assertion that “social connections are going to be just as important going forward as hyperlinks have been for the web.” Liz Gannes said Facebook’s asking for a lot of trust from developers and later pinpointed its “instant personalization” as the main privacy problem. Both Dave Winer and Robert Scoble marveled at Facebook’s audacity and the niftiness of its API, but both had big concerns about seeing so much power and data given to one company. Winer summed the position well: “Facebook is to be the identity system for the web. A company? That just can’t work. I can’t believe he doesn’t know that.”

So what does this mean for news orgs? In a post for ReadWriteWeb, Facebook marketer Chris Treadway took a first stab at an answer. Facebook is making social media (and itself in particular) pervasive across the web, Treadway argues, so it has to be a top consideration when designing, developing and creating content for newspapers. He says newspapers need to hire not just web developers, but Facebook developers. “The decline of those news sources that fail to realize the necessary potential of Facebook will be swift. … It’s becoming a necessary core competency, and fast.”

On the privacy front, a few people explained exactly which of Facebook’s new features might be problematic: The aforementioned Liz Gannes on “instant personalization“; paidContent’s Joseph Tarkatoff on allowing other sites to hold onto Facebook users’ data; grad student Arnab Nandi on “liking” sites you’ve never visited; and Mashable’s Christina Warren on the Open Graph API. Warren nails the essential change in Facebook privacy: “Public no longer means ‘public on Facebook,’ it means ‘public in the Facebook ecosystem.’”

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The iPad’s control over news apps: The other big tech company to draw criticism this week was Apple, for the continued controversy over its control over iPhone and iPad apps. About the time this post went up last Friday, we found out that Apple was reconsidering the iPhone app by Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore, which it initially rejected for mocking public figures. (Here are The New York Times’ and the Lab’s reports of the news.) Later that day, Apple chief Steve Jobs called the rejection a mistake. And a few days later, Fiore’s app was approved.

Several people used the episode as a window into the larger issue of Apple’s control over apps on the iPhone or iPad. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum called for all news orgs to remove their apps in protest: The press, he said, “would never let the government have such power over its right to publish. It shouldn’t let any corporation have it, either.”Media critic Dan Gillmor asked several major news orgs whether Apple has the power to disable their iPad apps and heard nothing back. And CNET’s Erica Ogg wondered if publishers’ embrace of the iPad will give Apple even more of an upper hand.

In other iPad-related bits, a CNET panel of reporters discussed that (seemingly) age-old question of whether it can save newspapers and magazines, and Jennifer McFadden looked at some hard numbers and concluded that the answer is probably no. Meanwhile, PR exec Steve Rubel took a mostly positive look at three trends the iPad might accelerate.

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A search for investigative reporting funding: Cal-Berkeley held its annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium last weekend, and it touched on some very timely topics as the news ecosystem expands to include more nontraditional sources. Chris O’Brien provided quite a bit of coverage for PBS MediaShift, writing detailed summaries of the back-and-forth exchanges on several panels. His day-one post includes discussions of collaboration between news orgs, the consequences of investigative reporting, and funding sources, and his day-two edition covers a panel on new investigative initiatives.

In a post written after the event, O’Brien zeroed in on one of those initiatives, WikiLeaks, coming away impressed that the whistle-blowing organization professionally vets its tips and has carefully structured itself to be protected from lawsuits. He also looked more closely at two of the nonprofits talked about in the symposium’s panels, ProPublica and the new Bay Citizen. He remained a bit skeptical about the Bay Citizen but noted its editor’s statement that the nonprofit model is becoming more viable as private capital from investors for journalism — as opposed to aggregation — dries up.

The Lab’s Laura McGann also wrote about the day-one panel on funding sources, focusing on the broad-based, experimental revenue-generating philosophy that one panelist described as “revenue promiscuity.”

NYU prof and web thinker Clay Shirky and veteran journalist Walter Robinson also talked about the future of investigative journalism this week at Harvard, and the Lab had the audio and transcript. The two talked about the Boston Globe’s work to uncover Boston’s priest abuse scandal, and Laura McGann summarized the reasons they said a small online news org would have a tough time doing the same thing. The whole thing’s well worth a read/listen if you’re interested in the future of accountability journalism by nontraditional sources.

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Reading roundup: We had a ton of interesting pieces this week that didn’t fit very well in a larger item, so I’ll pull them all together into a longer-than-usual reading roundup.

— The Associated Press, arbiter of much of American newsrooms’ copy style, announced it was changing “Web site” to “website.” Among journalists who hang out online, the news was mostly met with glee. Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore got some reaction, and the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles said young journalists need to spend more time learning SEO (search engine optimization) style than AP style.

— A sequel to the “hot news doctrine” case we looked at last month: Dow Jones sued Briefing.com for aggregating and summarizing content from their financial newswire under the same doctrine. Here’s the story from Bloomberg, the Citizen Media Law Project and paidContent, which has a copy of the suit.

— Here’s a few cool curated resources you might find helpful: Josh Stearns put together a list of collaborations between news outlets, Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan compiled social media tips for journalists (Kaukab Jhumra Smith has a shorter version), and USC j-prof David Westphal has a comprehensive list of public policy and funding ideas for journalism.

— Two interesting future-of-journalism case studies: One by Cindy Royal of Texas State-San Marcos on The New York Times interactive news technology department, and the other by J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer on the Philadelphia news ecosystem.

— Salon vet and blogging historian Scott Rosenberg launched MediaBugs, an open-source service that tracks media errors with the aim of correcting them more quickly and reliably. Poynter and the Lab both have write-ups.

— News business analyst Alan Mutter provides a critique of several of the most popular online paid-content models right now, then concludes that “it won’t matter what pay model publishers choose, unless they produce unique and compelling content, tools or applications that readers can’t find anywhere else.”

— Finally, two neat ideas to give some thought: Open-government activist David Eaves ably dissects five old-media myths about journalism and new media, and the Lab’s Megan Garber goes through the attributes that writer Dave Eggers associates with print, pointing out that those principles could apply just as well to the web. “They offer insights into what many consumers want out of news in general, regardless of platform,” she writes, as well as “a challenge to (and, more optimistically, a vision for) news organizations and web designers alike.”

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s news crusade, lackluster iPad news apps, and what went wrong at Newsweek
2. This Week in Review: Facebook circles the wagons, leaky paywalls, and digital publishing immersion
3. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Facebook circles the wagons, leaky paywalls, and digital publishing immersion
2. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
3. What Facebook and small-town weeklies have in common: A value for social news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: News talk and tips at ASNE, iPad’s ‘walled garden,’ and news execs look for revenue
2. This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency
3. This Week in Review: TBD takes off, Demand Media’s profit-less past, and Google’s open-web backlash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s news crusade, lackluster iPad news apps, and what went wrong at Newsweek
2. This Week in Review: Surveying the online news scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its feed
3. This Week in Review: Who’s responsible for local news, and Google plays hardball with China