The FTC’s ideas for journalism: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has spent much of the last year listening to suggestions about how they might change antitrust, copyright and tax laws in order to create the best possible climate for good journalism, and this weekend it posted its “discussion draft” of policy proposals to “support the reinvention of journalism.” It’s a 47-page document, so here’s a quick summary of their ideas:

— Expand copyright law to protect news content against online aggregators, including “hot news” legislation, further limits to fair use and mandatory content licenses.

— Allow antitrust exemptions for news organizations to put up paywalls together and develop a unified system to limit online aggregators.

— Enact direct or indirect government subsidies through a variety of possible means, including a journalism AmeriCorps, more CPB funding, a national local news fund, tax credits to news orgs for employing journalists, university investigative journalism grants, and newspaper and magazine postal subsidies. These subsidies could be paid for through taxes on broadcast spectrum, consumer electronics, advertising, or ISP-cell phone bills.

— Tax code changes to make it easier for news organizations to gain tax-exempt status.

— Pass various FOIA-related laws to make government data easier to access and search.

It’s worth noting that the FTC isn’t explicitly endorsing these proposals; the draft reads more as a list of possible proposals that might be worth exploring further. Still, j-prof and new media pundit Jeff Jarvis saw a perspective of old-media protectionism running through the draft, as he tore it apart point by point. The FTC is defining journalism through established news organizations and looking to prop them up instead of supporting visionary startups, he wrote. “If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here.”

Jarvis’ charges were seconded by two newspapermen, the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott and the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm, who likened the proposals to the government trying to save the auto industry by reviving the gas guzzlers of the 1960s. Steve Buttry of the new Washington news site TBD chimed in, too, homing in on the assertion that newspapers provide the overwhelming majority of our original news.

Free Press’ Josh Stearns responded by cautioning against “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” noting a few of things that he liked about the FTC’s proposals. And at the Huffington Post, Alex Howard praised the FTC’s open-government proposals. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen chipped in his own tweet-length proposal for the FTC: “Subsidize universal broadband; fight for sensible net neutrality.”

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Steve Jobs’ pitch for paid news: The folks from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital interviewed Apple chief Steve Jobs on stage this week as part of their D8 conference, and Jobs had a few words for the news industry: Yes, he wants to help save journalism, because, as he put it, ““I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself.” But if they’re going to survive, news organizations should be more aggressive about getting people to pay for content, Jobs said, like Apple did in helping raise e-book prices earlier this year.

As it turned out, there was something for everybody to pick apart in that exchange: Ex-Saloner and blogging historian Scott Rosenberg took issue with Jobs’ “nation of bloggers” jab, and Steve Safran of the local-news blog Lost Remote said that what Jobs really wants to save is paid, professional journalism. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram argued that an “iTunes for news” model that Jobs proposed might benefit Jobs, but probably won’t work for news outlets. And here at the Lab, Laura McGann pointed out a statement Jobs made elsewhere in the interview that rejected Apple app applicants (sorry, couldn’t resist) should simply resubmit their apps, unchanged.

Meanwhile, we got another diatribe about Apple’s app censorship from Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco, and a few other interesting pieces of app news: Statistics showing just how big game apps are on the iPhone and iPad (though content apps aren’t doing bad on the iPad), lessons for iPad news apps from Hacks/Hackers’ recent app-creating binge, and a cool iPad news reader designed by Stanford students.

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To link or not to link?: Author Nicholas Carr, who’s about to release a book about how the Internet is hurting our ability to think, highlighting one of the points from that book in a blog post this weekend: The link, Carr argues, hurts our ability to concentrate and follow an argument, and in some cases we may be better off without them. He calls links a high-tech version of the footnote, like little distracting textual gnats buzzing around our heads. “Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters.” Carr approvingly noted a couple of experiments in leaving links to the bottom of articles.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a thoughtful look at the purpose of links, wondering if they really might be better off at the end of articles, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum was sympathetic to Carr’s point as well: “It’s not a trivial question to ask what the Internet is doing to our attention spans,” he wrote. “I know mine, for one, is shot to hell.”

Carr, who’s had his runins with the Internet cognoscenti in the past, predictably caught some flak for his post too, including from Mathew Ingram, who argued that links are at least as much an intellectual discipline for the writer as the reader. The Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson noted that links are part of a long academic tradition that includes footnotes and inline citations: “Do they distract? Of course they do. … But it’s distraction through addition, if done well.” And author Scott Berkun brings up a few variables that others missed, including the skill of the author, web design, and the “open in new tab” function.

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‘The Twitter of news’: The link-sharing site Digg gave a preview of its new version, which will implement some Twitter-like features and emphasize the news links that the people you follow have shared, rather than just the top overall links. The net effect is an attempt to become, as GigaOm’s Liz Gannes put it, “the Twitter of news.” That, of course, raises the question, “Isn’t Twitter already the Twitter of news?” But Digg’s advantage, founder Kevin Rose says, is that it does away with the status updates and Justin Bieber memes and gives you purely socially powered links and news.

Tech pioneer Dave Winer was intrigued by the concept, and The Next Web’s Zee Kane lauded Digg for integrating more deeply with Twitter. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s, bashed Rose for “just re-implementing features from other websites,” and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington knocked both Rose and Ohanian down a peg in response.

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Bidders for Newsweek: Wednesday was The Washington Post Co.’s deadline for formal expressions of interest in buying Newsweek, and it received three offers: OpenGate Capital, a private equity firm that bought TV Guide for $1 in 2008; hedge fund manager and failed Chicago Sun-Times bidder Thane Ritchie; and conservative magazine and website Newsmax. On Twitter, Jeff Jarvis called the bidders “tacky” and wondered whether Newsweek would be better off dead.

Earlier in the week, The New York Times’ David Carr offered an explanation for why Newsweek and other magazines seem to be worth so little to potential buyers: “In the current digital news ecosystem, having ‘week’ in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.” At its Tumblr blog, Newsweek responded by arguing that while everyone seems to have the perfect idea of what Newsweek should have done, no one can change the simple business reality that Newsweek is no longer alone in its niche for readers and advertisers.

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Reading roundup: A couple of updates on stories from last week, plus a bunch of interesting articles and resources.

— There wasn’t much new said in the continuing argument over Facebook and privacy, but Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a couple more interviews defending its privacy policy and last week’s changes to NPR, All Things Digital and Wired, the latter of which included the revelation that Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, Facebook’s open-source startup competitor. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also defended Facebook’s privacy stance, and Jay Rosen took him to task for it.

— An addendum to last week’s Publish2 News Exchange launch: Publish2’s Ryan Sholin told the Lab’s Megan Garber that it only intends to disrupt the AP, not kill it. The exchange is aimed at the content distribution side of the AP, not the production end, he said. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds gave some more explanation of Publish2’s plans.

— The New York Times announced it will host Nate Silver’s political polling blog FiveThirtyEight, one of the web’s top operations at the intersection of data and journalism. Yahoo News’ Michael Calderone examined the fact that Silver’s been open about his liberal political views and asks how that will work out at the Times.

— Several smart, thought-provoking analyses here: journalism researcher Michele McLellan surveyed online local news publishers, news business expert Alan Mutter looked at Yahoo’s hints at a challenge to local newspapers, search guru Danny Sullivan examined a case of traditional media stealing his blog’s story; and media analyst Frederic Filloux explained why online advertising is so lousy.

— Finally, a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ for a couple of aspects of digital journalism: MediaShift’s Roland LeGrand gives journalists the reasons they should learn computer programming, and Poynter’s Jeremy Caplan has a great list of tips for crowdsourcing in journalism.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: A mobile aggregation dustup, journalists and the link, and fan-based local sports
2. This week in media musings: Tablet madness, and ideas for Sunday talk shows
3. This Week in Review: Google’s news crusade, lackluster iPad news apps, and what went wrong at Newsweek

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

The iPad’s fanboys and skeptics: For tech geeks and future-of-journalism types everywhere, the biggest event of the week will undoubtedly come tomorrow, when Apple’s iPad goes on sale. The early reviews (Poynter’s Damon Kiesow has a compilation) have been mostly positive, but many of the folks opining on the iPad’s potential impact on journalism have been quite a bit less enthusiastic. A quick rundown:

— Scott Rosenberg, who’s studied the history of blogging and programming, says the news media’s excitement over the iPad reminds him of the CD-ROM craze of the early 1990s, particularly in its misguided expectation for a new, ill-defined technology to lead us into the future. The lesson we learned then and need to be reminded of now, Rosenberg says, is that “people like to interact with one another more than they like to engage with static information.”

— Business Insider’s Henry Blodget argues that the iPad won’t save media companies because they’re relying on the flawed premise that people want to consume content in a “tightly bound content package produced by a single publisher,” just like they did in print.

— Tech exec Barry Graubart says that while the iPad will be a boon to entertainment companies, it won’t provide the revenue boost news orgs expect it to, largely for two reasons: Its ads can’t draw the number of eyeballs that the standard web can, and many potential news app subscribers will be able to find suitable alternatives for free.

— GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram is not impressed with the iPad apps that news outlets have revealed so far, describing them as boring and unimaginative.

— Poynter’s Damon Kiesow gives us a quick summary of why some publishers thought the iPad might be a savior in the first place. (He doesn’t come down firmly on either side.)

Two other thoughtful pieces worth highlighting: Ken Doctor, a keen observer of the world of online news, asks nine questions about the iPad, and offers a lot of insight in the process. And Poynter’s Steve Myers challenges journalists to go beyond creating “good-enough” journalism for the iPad and produce creative, immersive content that takes full advantage of the device’s strengths.

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Murdoch’s paid-content move begins: Rupert Murdoch has been talking for several months about his plans to put up paywalls around all of his news sites, and this week the first of those plans was unveiled. The Times and Sunday Times of London announced that they will begin charging for its site in June — £1 per day or £2 per week. This would be stricter than the metered model that The New York Times has proposed and the Financial Times employs: There are no free articles or limits, just 100% paid content.

The Times and Sunday Times both accompanied the announcement with their own editorials giving a rationale for their decision. The Sunday Times is far more straightforward: “At The Sunday Times we put an enormous amount of money and effort into producing the best journalism we possibly can. If we keep giving it away we will no longer be able to do that.” Some corners of journalism praised the Times’ decision and echoed its reasoning: BBC vet John Humphrys, Texas newspaperman John P. Garrett (though he didn’t mention the Times by name in a post decrying unthinking “have it your way” journalism), and British PR columnist Ian Monk.

The move also drew criticism, most prominently from web journalism guru Jeff Jarvis, who called the paywall “pathetic.” (If you want your paywall-bashing in video form, Sky News has one of Jarvis, too.) Over at True/Slant, Canadian writer Colin Horgan had some intriguing thoughts about why this move could be important: The fact that the Internet is so all-encompassing as a medium has led us to blur together vastly different types on it, Horgan argues. “What Murdoch is trying to do (perhaps unintentionally) is destroy that mental disconnect, and ask us to pay for media within a medium.”

Two other paid-content tidbits worth noting: Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma told paidContent that news organizations’ future online will come not from “digital razzle dazzle,” but from relevant, meaningful content. And Damon Kiesow plotted paid content on a supply-and-demand curve, concluding that, not surprisingly, we have an oversupply of information.

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Chatroulette, serendipity and the news: The random video chat site Chatroulette has drawn gobs of attention from media outlets, so it was probably only a matter of time before some of them applied the concept to online news. Daniel Vydra, a software developer at The Guardian, was among the first this week when he created Random Guardian and New York Times Roulette, two simple programs that take readers to random articles from those newspapers’ websites. Consultant Chris Thorpe explained the thinking behind their development — a Clay Shirky-inspired desire to recapture online the serendipity that a newspaper’s bundle provides.

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote about the project approvingly, saying he expects creative, open API projects like this to be more successful in the long run than Rupert Murdoch’s paywalls. Also, Publish2’s Ryan Sholin noted that just because everyone’s excited about the moniker “Chatroulette for news” doesn’t mean this concept hasn’t been around for quite a while.

Meanwhile, the idea sparked deeper thoughts from two CUNY j-profs about the concept of serendipity and the news. Here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson argued that true serendipity involves coming across perspectives you don’t agree with, and asked how one might create a true “news serendipity maker” that could take into account your news consumption patterns, then throw you some curveballs. And in a short but smart post, Jeff Jarvis said that serendipity is not mere randomness, but unexpected relevance — “the unknown but now fed curiosity.”

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How much slack can nonprofits take up?: Alan Mutter, an expert in the dollars-and-cents world of the news business both traditionally and online, raised a pretty big stink this week with a post decrying the idea that nonprofits can carry the bulk of the load of journalism. The numbers at the core of Mutter’s argument are simple: Newspapers are spending an estimated $4.4 billion annually on newsgathering, and it would take an $88 billion endowment to provide that much money each year. That would be more than a quarter of the $307.7 billion contributed to charity in 2008 — a ridiculously tall order.

Mutter drew a lot of fire in his comment section for attacking a straw man with that argument, as he didn’t cite any specific people who are claiming that nonprofits will, in fact, take over the majority of journalism’s funding. As many of those folks wrote, the nonprofit advocates have always claimed that they’ll be a part of network that makes up journalism’s future, not the network itself. (One of them, Northeastern prof Ben Compaine, had made that exact argument just a few days earlier, and Steve Outing made a similar one in response to Mutter’s post.)

John Thornton, a co-founder of the nonprofit Texas Tribune, wrote the must-read point-by-point response, taking issue with the basis of Mutter’s math and his assumption that market-driven solutions are “inherently superior” to non-market ones. Besides, he argued, serious journalism hasn’t exactly been doing business like gangbusters lately, either: “Expecting investors to continue to fund for-profit, Capital J journalism just ‘cuz:  doesn’t that sound a lot like charity?” Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon weighed in with similar numbers-based objections, as did David Cay Johnston.

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Reading roundup: One mini-debate, and four nifty resources:

Former tech/biz journalist Chris Lynch fired a shot at j-schools in a post arguing that the shrunken (but elite) audiences resulting from widespread news paywalls would cause “most journalism schools to shrink or disappear.” Journalism schools, he said, are teaching an outdated objectivity-based philosophy that doesn’t hold water in the Internet era, when credibility is defined much differently. Gawker’s Ravi Somaiya chimed in with an anti-j-school rant, and North Carolina j-school dean Jean Folkerts and About.com’s Tony Rogers (a community college j-prof) leaped to j-schools’ defense.

Now the four resources:

1) Mathew Ingram of GigaOm has a quick but pretty comprehensive explanation of the conundrum newspapers are in and some of the possible ways out. Couldn’t have summed it better myself.

2) PBS MediaShift’s Jessica Clark outlines some very cool efforts to map out local news ecosystems. This will be something to keep an eye out for, especially in areas with blossoming hyperlocal news scenes, like Seattle.

3) Consider this an addendum to last month’s South by Southwest festival: Ball State professor Brad King has posted more than a dozen short video interviews he conducted there, asking people from all corners of media what the most interesting thing they’re seeing is.

4) British j-prof Paul Bradshaw briefly gives three principles for reporters in a networked era. Looks like a pretty good journalists’ mission statement to me.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
2. This Week in Review: The Times’ blogs behind the wall, paid news on the iPad, and a new local news co-op
3. This Week in Review: The iPad has landed, WikiLeaks moves toward journalism, and net neutrality is hit

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.

—

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: 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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s news crusade, lackluster iPad news apps, and what went wrong at Newsweek
2. This Week in Review: Loads of SXSW ideas, Pew’s state of the news, and a dire picture of local TV news
3. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

Consider this your dictionary for those phrases. If you’ve got any more suggestions, by all means, let me know in the comments. This guide is very expandable. (And if you have a correction, please let me know, too.)

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

Where it came from: This is the signature phrase of Jeff Jarvis, the Entertainment Weekly/TV Guide/San Francisco Examiner veteran, CUNY journalism prof and author of “What Would Google Do?” Jarvis first wrote it in a Feb. 22, 2007, post at his popular media-watching blog, BuzzMachine.

What it means: Your best bet is simply to read that initial post — Jarvis explains the concept pretty well there. The short version: Rather than duplicating what bunches of other news organizations are producing just so your outlet can have its own version of the story, just ask yourself, as Jarvis says, “‘can we do it better?’ If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.” For another illuminating angle on what this phrase signifies, see in particular the second-to-last paragraph of Megan Garber’s Columbia Journalism Review article from November 2009 on the Fort Hood and Twitter lists.

“If the news is important, it will find me.”

Where it came from: An unlikely source — an unnamed college student in an anecdote in a March 27, 2008, New York Times article by Brian Stelter on how young people share political news. (The actual quote is, “If the news is that important …” but it seems to have been compressed.)

What it means: The idea quickly became an apt summary of the way news is consumed online — by linking, sharing, reading one bit whether even seeing the whole or even the original source. In the other words, a long, long ways from reading the newspaper front-to-back every day. The news organization’s role as an authoritative arbiter of news value is diminished in this philosophy; the user creates her own news agenda, and her most trusted sources are her social networks. (Here’s The Huffington Post’s Josh Young, web entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Canadian journalist Mathew Ingram and the aforementioned Jarvis on this phrase.)

“Information wants to be free.”

Where it came from: Our first recorded use was back in 1984, when writer Stewart Brand said this (as he recalled it 13 years later): ”On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” That was eventually compressed into “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.” Not surprisingly, the ‘free’ part was a lot more appealing to us than the ‘expensive’ one, so that’s the part of the quote that stuck. (Roger Clarke and Wikipedia are good sources for this information, both on its origins and meaning.)

What it means: This part is pretty fluid — and controversial. Critics of a free-based Internet economy often take it as an economic statement, as in, “Information wants to cost $0.” While Brand seemed to have been talking about cost and economics when he first uttered the phrase, many Internet thinkers after him have defined it to mean a broader freedom to access, distribute, and adapt information, especially online. The phrase became central in the struggles of free content and copyright — a rallying cry for those on one side and a rather pejorative label for the other. Of course, some pro-free people, like Wired’s Chris Anderson, still use the phrase in its dollars-and-cents sense.

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

Where it comes from: It was the title of a keynote speech given by NYU professor and new media guru Clay Shirky on Sept. 18, 2008, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. The phrase has been quoted by others (and Shirky himself) in various forms, including “Information overload is filter failure,” and “There’s no such thing as information overload; there’s only filter failure.”

What it means: To get the fullest idea, watch the speech. Shirky gives a hasty, Cliff’s Notes version in this interview with The Columbia Journalism Review, in which he argues that information overload has been around for centuries, and the reason it seems so problematic on the web is that we haven’t developed the proper filters for all that information. The idea has been tied to several concepts on the web, including social filters and sharing, and curation and aggregation of news.

“Our readers know more than we do.”

Where it came from: This phrase is former San Jose Mercury News columnist and citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor’s, first uttered in 2004. It seems the phrase was initially coined as “My readers know more than I do,” and you’ll still find it in either form. (Jay Rosen has a link to what may be Gillmor’s first use of it, but the link is dead now. The phrase also figures prominently in Gillmor’s 2004 book “We the Media.” )

What it means: Look no further than Jay Rosen’s December 2004 piece, which refers to the idea simply as “Open Source journalism.” As Rosen describes it, it’s the concept that any journalist’s (or media outlet’s) audience knows more than that journalist, and the web allows them to communicate that knowledge with each other and the professional journalist. It’s a way of drawing on “the wisdom of the crowd” — another favorite web phrase — within a journalistic framework.

“The people formerly known as the audience”

Where it came from: The phrase is NYU professor Jay Rosen’s, first written and defined in his June 27, 2006, post of the same title. Rosen acknowledges that it’s partly derived from Dan Gillmor’s phrase, “the former audience,” outlined in his 2004 book, “We the Media.” In January 2010, Rosen called the post “easily my most quoted piece of writing and the best meme of the decade just ended. … Nothing else comes close.”

What it means: I can’t do you much better than simply reading Rosen’s initial post, plus his notes and after matter. It’s related to the idea behind “Our readers know more than we do,” referring to, as Rosen puts it, “The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.”

“The sources go direct.”

Where it came from: The newest phrase on the list. This one comes from blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer, who seems to have officially coined it in the March 19, 2009, post “The reboot of journalism.” Now, Winer commonly refers to it as simply “Sources go direct.” It’s helped formed the ideological backbone of Winer and Jay Rosen’s weekly podcast, Rebooting the News.

What it means: It stands for the idea that the “sources” who used to have their message mediated through the traditional media can go bypass those channels and communicate directly with their listeners. Winer provides plenty of examples in that initial post, and if you listen to most any episode of Rebooting the News, you’ll probably hear him expound on the idea.

“Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Where it came from: The phrase was originated by technology philosopher David Weinberger, who first said it in a lecture in Toronto on Oct. 23, 2008. He further defined the idea and put the phrase to writing in a July 19, 2009, post at his blog.

What it means: When Weinberger first said the phrase, he followed it with the statement, “We are not going to trust objectivity unless we can see the discussion that lead to it.” In his July post, Weinberger fleshed this idea out further, arguing that transparency is the modus operandi in a linked medium like the web, where we can easily see (and expect to see) someone’s connections, sources and influences. Transparency, he said, has subsumed objectivity: “Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.” The phrase picked up quite a bit of use in fall 2009 as a principle in the discussions over news media outlets’ social media policies.

No related posts.

— Jason Fry, who’s been pumping out consistently thought-provoking posts at his blog lately, has this week’s best pithy one-sentence summary of a key future-of-journalism idea: “If we were starting today, would we do this?” Fry, who used to write for The Wall Street Journal Online, looked at a couple of journalism conventions and concluded that they were, as he says, “broken as in ‘this no longer works, and we need to stop doing it.’” First, he took on the hoariest of sportswriting traditions — the game story. In a world of continual SportsCenter highlights and instant mobile updates, the next-day game story needs to be blown up, he concluded.

Then, Fry dissected a New York Times story to show why the standard inverted pyramid-style structure for an incremental development in a larger story can be virtually incomprehensible. (On that point, Matt Thompson’s Nieman Reports piece from earlier this fall makes for wonderful background reading.)

These two critiques make perfect case studies for the need for a started-from-scratch news mentality — “rebooted” is the much more apt word Dave Winer and Jay Rosen use — where all the old-school assumptions, even on such elemental aspects as basic news story structure, are considered on equal merits along with the new ones. It would be like the ideological equivalent of the Gannett paper that made every one of its employees reapply for new jobs as part of an overhaul of the newsroom. And the central question in this reboot should be, “If we were starting today, would we do this?”

— A sequel of sorts to last week’s Rupert Murdoch/Google brouhaha: NPR’s On Point held a freewheeling show discussing the issue with “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff — both firmly in the anti-paid content, pro-Google camp. The real fireworks start 17 minutes in, when host Tom Ashbrook brings in Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, the new business that’s working with traditional news orgs to charge for their content online.

Jarvis and Wolff (especially Wolff) smelled blood, and the feeding frenzy began before Brill finished his first answer (though, to be fair, Brill took the first bite). After Brill’s nearly-out-of-control segment ended, Jarvis and Wolff teed off on whatever listeners were intrepid enough to call in and challenge them.

The pair made their points loudly and clearly — and for the most part, I agree with them — but they don’t come off well here. Wolff is almost laughably boorish, and both and he and Jarvis end up sounding like those phantom “the Internet will fix everything” Pollyannas that Jay Rosen spends so much time calling out as straw men. Which is disappointing, because having read a decent amount of their writing, I know they’re both much more reasonable in print than that. Brill’s claims about his startup are sketchy enough — as the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary Seward deftly pointed out this week — and it doesn’t help to make him sound so thoughtful by comparison.

— For anyone interested in the intersection between journalism and academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education released a nifty batch of ideas last weekend. In descending order of importance: Penn’s Carlin Romano opines on the need to teach philosophy of journalism, 18 people from various segments of the academy offer their quick takes on how the decline of the traditional news media will affect higher education, and Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson make the case for university-based reporting.

— The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a smart post on the need for news orgs to move from a “Web-first” to a “mobile-first” mentality. I’ll be honest: This is a difficult transition for me to make, given the spotty 3G coverage in rural Nebraska and my own personal apathy toward cell phones. But Buttry’s right — we should be moving past Web-first and into a mobile-centric outlook if we’re going to stay in front of (or even in the neighborhood of) of the social forces that are dramatically shifting the way news is consumed. Could anyone honestly argue that the demand for mobile news consumption isn’t going to be exponentially greater five years from now? Why not prepare for it already?

— Search expert Danny Sullivan has a wide-ranging two-part interview with Google News business product manager Josh Cohen that covers just about everything having to do with Google News. I haven’t taken time to absorb it all yet, but it’s must-reading if you’re trying to understand the controversy over aggregation, search and Google News.

— More bad news at The Washington Post, the paper that’s arguably fallen farther within the past five years than any other in America other than The Los Angeles Times: The online and print departments are merging, and it’s the Web folks that are getting the axe. Former employee Derek Willis and Mathew Ingram of The Globe and Mail in Toronto are worried about what this says about the print-focused direction the Post is headed.

— Over at Xark, Dan Conover, who is usually good for some of the more thoughtful long-form blog posts on the state of journalism and new media, has another that I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. He examines the question of what assets journalists have that they can put a monetary value on, depressingly whittling down each candidate until he comes to “the structure in which it assembles and stores freely available (but expensive to gather) information.” I think he could be onto something here, but take that with a grain of salt, because I’m still trying to figure out what he’s referring to.

— Two for the road: Microsoft’s danah boyd, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on youth and social media, gave a talk at the Web2.0 Expo last week on attention and the flow of information in social media. The talk was pretty poorly received (partly, yes, because of the audience’s inattention to a speech on decreasing attention), but it’s still great stuff in print. Finally, Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore has a look at America’s best media critics, the writers of The Daily Show. Want some examples of their work? Start with their eviscerations of Fox News and CNN.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Obama v. Fox News, and NPR’s social media tact
2. This week in media musings: Dividing and conquering, and two news models
3. This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader

Consequently, this review may end up a bit narrower in its sourcing than usual, but I still hope to touch all the primary bases. (Explanation is here.)

— The Obama administration and Fox News have never been on particularly good terms, but this week the proverbial gloves came off. White House communications director Anita Dunn blasted the channel as “a wing of the Republican party” on CNN last Sunday, then told The New York Times the same day, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.” I’ll spare you the White House’s list of grievances — most of these links have a good overview — and focus instead on the administration’s decision to publicly go after a single political news outlet.

First, I believe this is something unprecedented. Yes, it’s reminding a lot of people of Nixon-Agnew and their “nattering nabobs of negativism,” but keep in mind that that remark was directed at the entire mainstream political press, not a single outlet. And of course, we’ve long seen presidential press secretaries and other top political officials have their feuds with individual reporters and publications, but those have mostly played out either in private or for an inside-baseball audience. Journalism historians can correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the first time I’ve heard of an administration saying on national TV it will henceforth treat a major national news outlet as a political opponent.

So is the White House’s offensive a good idea? Probably not, although it’s probably going to accelerate Fox News’ move into a very strange spot on the political media spectrum: An advocacy/political niche outlet with a “mainstream media” audience. On the one hand, Chris Rovsar’s analysis in New York’s Daily Intel is spot-on — Obama is feeding an already galvanizing opposition’s caricature of himself with fresh material. And as the Times’ David Carr notes and Fox News counters in its own “news article” about the blowup (brilliantly skewered by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg), this move does make the administration appear petty and sensitive, as if it’s still in campaign mode.

Naturally, liberal media critics like Media Matters and The Nation are overjoyed at the White House’s aggressiveness, and in this case, there’s a legitimate reason. Those outlets have long seen Fox News with a “one of these things is not like the other” sensibility in relation to the rest of the mainstream political press, and they’re right. While the size of Fox’s audience may lead the public to believe it’s a mainstream press outlet, it’s clearly not — and that’s not because it tilts conservative. It’s because, as Weisberg points out a bit more calmly than Media Matters, Fox’s newsroom ethos is steadily being revealed as fundamentally different from the others. That ethos is about providing a central gathering point to inform and rally a political movement.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, of course; it’s just not what the rest of the mainstream political press does. It’s advocacy journalism, and the administration’s now-open war on Fox News will hasten the time when most of the American public recognizes that fact and evaluates Fox News within that framework. That may come too late to benefit Obama, but in terms of simply seeing things for what they are, it’s good for all of us.

— NPR released its new social media guidelines, and the takeaway is pretty similar to the Washington Post’s, released a week or two earlier: Don’t compromise our news organization’s objectivity, and don’t say anything on social media that you wouldn’t say in print or on air. Yet while the Post’s guidelines got killed online, NPR’s got a positive, though quiet, response.

That disparity is a bit unfair to the Post — after all, the net results between the two are about the same — but it’s instructive in the importance of tone. NPR’s tone was softer, more conciliatory, where the Post’s was more stilted and frightened. Michele McLellan’s analysis of “leadership code words” is a little inane — come on, the Post used the word “valuable” in its second sentence, too — but as Steve Buttry noted, NPR’s implicit message was clear, and it was right on: Use common sense, folks. We trust you to do that.

— This happened two weeks ago now, but ignoring it for that reason would feel like a dereliction of duty: The FTC posted new guidelines requiring bloggers reviewing products or services to disclose if they got them for free. Suffice it to say, Jeff Jarvis hates the new rule. So does Slate’s Jack Shafer. If you want to go deeper, Edward Champion has an interview with the FTC’s Richard Cleland, and MediaShift’s Mark Glaser (Jarvis’ sparring partner on Twitter) has all the links you’ll need.

— Also pretty old news, but worth noting: Rupert Murdoch and the Associated Press’ Tom Curley fired their latest shot against search engines and, I don’t know, the internet, at a summit in Beijing. This is almost too easy for Jeff Jarvis, who dismantles their assertions with a lesson on the collaboration economy. Suw Charman-Anderson also has fun with the contradictions between what they’re saying now and what they’ve said in the past. Meanwhile, thanks to the Nieman Journalism Lab’s relentless Zachary Seward, we get some clarification and much smarter stuff from Curley. (Short version/full version.)

— A few nice conference overviews: Poynter’s Steve Myers and the Knight Digital Media Center’s Jacqui Banaszynski on the trends at the Online News Association’s conference, and MediaShift’s Chris O’Brien on nonprofit news from the UC-Berkeley Media Technology Summit.

— This week in depressing media statistics: Poynter’s Rick Edmonds crunches the numbers and estimates that newspapers are spending $1.6 billion less on news gathering each year.

— Finally, Steve Buttry says it’s time for journalists to re-evaluate their impression and use of Wikipedia. (He’s absolutely right.) And former Baltimore Sun copy chief John McIntyre has another remarkably simple reason that newspapers are failing: They’re a bastion of really crappy writing. I suppose Occam’s razor makes sense applied to newspapers.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Piling on the Post’s new social media guidelines
2. This week in media musings: A full reboot for news, and a rude run-in over paywalls
3. This week in media musings: Advocacy journalism’s (bogus) failings and more paywall options

— Clay Shirky talked about journalism this past week, and when he talks about journalism, people listen. Shirky, an NYU prof, has been regarded for years as one of new media’s most respected thinkers. But after his March essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” went viral and reached an almost epochal level among journalism and new media circles in just a few months, he seems to have taken on a “first among equals” status.

So consider his brown-bag talk last Tuesday at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center his sequel to that essay. In “Thinking the Unthinkable,” Shirky responded to the question of “What will replace the newspaper model?” with the oft-quoted (and oft-misunderstood) statement “Nothing will work, but everything might.” On Tuesday, Shirky expanded on that answer a bit, saying that the accountability journalism that newspapers produce will be replaced 5 percent at a time by bunches of experiments. But as he said in March, that doesn’t mean the experiments will succeed soon, so he gives a grim prediction that “Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing.”

For somebody who’s been bashed as a newspaper grave-dancer, Shirky’s alarm sounds an awful lot like the one old-media “curmudgeons” have been sounding. But what makes Shirky different from them (among other things) is the fact that he doesn’t think the newspaper model is worth artificially propping up for much longer; that, in his mind, is just hampering innovation and postponing the inevitable chaos. The model is irretrievably broken, he said last week, because it’s been operating on an advertising model that overcharged and underserved advertisers and because its one-size-fits-all bundling of content doesn’t make any inherent intellectual sense.

These are all points others have made before, but Shirky has a knack for synthesizing and explaining things in an authoritative, coherent way, so his talk is worth a listen (or a read). Not a ton of opinion has congealed around the talk yet, but Dan Kennedy is struck by bleakness of Shirky’s vision, and Tim Kastelle says two of the experiments to work on, stat, are aggregation and filtering.

— As always, there’s plenty of new entries into the paid-content debate this week, and the battleground du jour seems to be micropayments. The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram doesn’t like them because newspapers don’t have a monopoly on their industry anymore. Pat Thornton agrees and offers a few more reasons why they’re a “dangerous delusion.”

Jeff Reifman disagrees with Ingram, but says news orgs will have to provide more value if they want to start charging. In his rebuttal to Reifman, Steve Outing wins the “original idea” prize by proposing “micro-rewards” for regular visitors. (Meanwhile, the paidContent:UK/Harris poll says readers prefer a subscription to micropayments.)

— We also saw the rollout of a relatively high-profile experiment with a paywall, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune decided to bring back its “Access Vikings Premium” program, charging $5.95 for three months or $19.95 a season for its Minnesota Vikings coverage. David Brauer of the Minnesota Post notes that the Strib’s first try was a failure, but says that if you’re going to charge, sports is the place to start. Staci Kramer of paidContent says the price is OK, but the process is a bear.

— Another interesting rollout this week: Google’s SideWiki, which allows people to comment on blogs using Google’s toolbar. Jeff Jarvis, a self-proclaimed “Google fanboy” came out against it, saying that SideWiki divides the conversation and moves responsibility for it from the site owner to Google. (Later, he said Google should work to organize conversation, rather than start its own.) David Sleight says now that it’s the giant in the web world, Google needs to be more mindful of how things like this are perceived. On the other side, Louis Gray argues that Jarvis and his ilk need to stop whining and realize that the web’s past the point where we can expect to control conversation. (I’m inclined to agree with Jarvis on this one; just because the web is moving beyond that point doesn’t mean it should, and it doesn’t mean Google should be its enabler.)

— And finally, our third big announcement this week was the news that Warren Hellman, “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” is planning to launch a nonprofit local online news outfit in the Bay Area. Given the travails of the San Francisco Chronicle and that area’s willingness to jump on new concepts, this seems at the outset like a winner. David Cohn thinks so, too, and offers some great tips for Hellman going forward. Steve Katz has high expectations and pleads for Hellman not to let the project be boring. Dumbest opinion in this whole thing? The East Bay Express’ Robert Gammon, who’s worried that student journalists will steal his job.

— This week in depressing statistics: Newspaper advertising is way down, but probably hasn’t reached bottom, courtesy of the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Martin Langeveld.

— President Obama offered some words of support for the newspaper industry, but no definite position on Sen. Benjamin Cardin’s bill that would allow newspapers to reorganize as nonprofits. Slate’s Jack Shafer rightly hammers this idea, while a Sacred Heart University poll finds that nearly 8 of 10 Americans would be opposed to using taxpayer money to save newspapers. While a bailout’s different than Cardin’s plan, I think the public has the right idea here, too.

— NYU’s Jay Rosen offers the most succinct refutation I’ve seen (it’s on Twitter, so it has to be) of the idea that any one thing can “save journalism.” That phrase drives me nuts when people use it as some sort of magic wand to wave in headlines over posts in order to get more clicks, so it’s good to have Jay shoot it down so simply.

— Oh yeah, and programming guru Paul Graham published an essay on “Post-Medium Publishing,” arguing that now that print media’s physical medium is dying, they’re going to be forced to realize that they were selling the medium, not the content. Jeff Jarvis thinks it’s as seminal as Shirky’s “Thinking the Unthinkable,” but I think the fact that Howard Weaver and Robin Sloan were so easily able to poke holes in it probably shoots that assessment down.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Advocacy journalism’s (bogus) failings and more paywall options
2. This week in media musings: The jumbled mess that is Fast Flip, and the great micropayment debate
3. This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism

— Mark Bowden of The Atlantic takes a case study of the discovery and development of Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” and “make policy” videos to use as a launching point into a diatribe against advocacy journalists and the establishment media outlets that unquestioningly swallow their work. He does this by zeroing in on Morgen Richmond of the conservative blog Verum Serum, who unearthed the videos.

While grudgingly praising Richmond for doing his own work, Bowden spends most of his time blasting the blogger for not going out looking for damning clips and for not paying enough attention to the sound bites’ contexts. Both are valid criticisms, but where Bowden goes off the rails is in his conclusion that Richmond and his ilk are therefore responsible for attending the rise of politics as blood sport, at the expense of the “disinterested voice.”

But it’s not Richmond’s job to not only dig up this clip, but also put it in the context of a nuanced view of Sotomayor’s entire judicial career. That’s the entire media ecosystem’s job. And as Richmond points out in his own response — and Bowden half-acknowledges with his contention that “more serious assessments of her record would demolish the caricature soon enough” — that’s what ended up happening in this case. I think the TV networks deserve far more censure than Richmond for airing the videos without context, as they at least claim to be quasi-disinterested outlets whose aim is to educate the public and distill information surrounding the political debate. But isolating the originator of this “news” and blaming him for everything that ended up happening with it is a bit like blaming Tim Berners-Lee for internet-based fraud.

— The biggest media-related news last week was probably the revelation that Google is pitching newspaper publishers with a micropayment program it’s in the early stages of developing. This is noteworthy for a few main reasons: Google is the biggest player in this arena (or just about any other one online), and Google and newspapers haven’t exactly been buddy-buddy this year.

Some quick background on micropayments: Here’s this year’s manifesto on the subject from Time’s Walter Isaacson, and here’s a refutation from new media guru Clay Shirky. In light of the Google micropayments news, journalism prof Mindy McAdams has an interesting idea for daylong micropayments.

— I’m not newspaper-publisher-savvy enough to know if Google’s bid has legs, but Alan Mutter has news of a survey that shows that 58% of publishers are looking into charging for content online, but 49% said they have no timetable for when or how. His headline stat is that 51% of publishers think online payment for news will work — a figure he apparently believes is low, but I was surprised it was so high. For an idea to go from largely anathema to being held by half of the country’s newspaper publishers in a year or two is quite a jump.

Jason Fry homes in one stat from the survey that shows a particularly glaring disconnect between how newspaper publishers think their readers get their news online, and what those readers actually do. Great insight.

— To finish out the paid-content parade, Steve Outing looks at a successful example of the “membership” model by someone not usually known as a new media pioneer: Bill O’Reilly.

— Of course, to charge for news, your content has to have some real value. Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco looks at the story of alleged kidnapper Augie Garrido to note the difference between news that we love to consume and news that has actual value to us.

— We have two new entries in the how-to-run-a-news-organization-manifesto department: Pat Thornton, formerly of BeatBlogging.Org, uses his experience there to illustrate what a “down and dirty” system of management looks like.  And citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor has 11 things he’d do if he ran a news organization. Gillmor’s list, in particular, is brilliant and highly recommended. I think, along with Jay Rosen, that #3 would be revolutionary, for the reason I briefly explained in Gillmor’s comments section.

— A treasure trove of practical resources for current and would-be hyperlocal journalists: Jeff Jarvis gives an overview of what the City University of New York’s New Business Models for News Project found regarding the financial nuts and bolts of hyperlocal blogging, and this interview with the Batavian’s Howard Owens and this day-in-the-life look at the Ann Arbor Chronicle are chock full of practical tips from people on the front lines.

— The Columbia Journalism Review has a fantastic package taking a more academic look at the history of the internet and the way news works on it. The undercurrent to both is the idea that the web is a collaboratively produced communication medium, rather than a place to dump content. The “further reading” addenda are great resources for those (like myself) looking to catch up on the discussion on those issues.

— Also in the theoretical realm regarding the internet, a group of German thinkers released a widely circulated (and translated) Internet Manifesto that succintly sums up much of the “net neutrality” school of thought. I wasn’t terribly impressed at first blush (and neither was Patricio Robles), probably at least in part because I’ve read much of it before, in various other places. But it does have some value in simply and powerfully stating the main tenets of a major belief system regarding the web, which, I suppose, is what a manifesto is supposed to do.

— As much as I love Mark Luckie’s work at 10,000 Words, I think he struck out with his 10 ugly truths about modern journalism. Almost every one of these paths is so well-trodden as to have lapsed into cliche. Henry Blodget has a nice takedown that hits it well.

— This remarkably prescient 1996 piece by Jeff vonKaenel on the coming decline of newspapers has gotten some play in the last week or two, and it’s worth a read, as it holds up really well.

— Finally, two other hints at possible aspects of a new system of news: Jason Fry looks at journalists as “micro-brands” within their publications, and the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Jim Barnett notes that more nonprofits are hiring journalists to do, well, journalism.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: The jumbled mess that is Fast Flip, and the great micropayment debate
2. This week in media musings: Shirky speaks, and three new projects to watch
3. This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism