Should papers charge for obits online?: We’ve written a whole bunch about Steve Brill’s paid-online-news venture Journalism Online around these parts, and the company’s first Press+ system went live on a newspaper site this week, with Pennsylvania’s LancasterOnline obits section going to a metered pay model for out-of-town visitors. PaidContent has a good summary of how the arrangement works: Out-of-towners get to view seven obits a month, after which point they’re asked to pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year for more access. Obits make up only 6 percent of the site’s pageviews, but the paper’s editor is estimating $50,000 to $150,000 in revenue from the paywall.

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell offered a detailed look at the numbers behind the decision and said the plan has several characteristics in its favor: It has valuable content that’s tough to find elsewhere, flexible payment, and doesn’t alienate core (local) readers. (He did note, though, that the paper isn’t providing anything new of value.) Most other media watchers on the web weren’t so impressed. MinnPost’s David Brauer was skeptical of Lancaster’s revenue projections, but noted that obits are a big deal for small-town papers. Lost Remote’s David Weinfeld was dubious of the estimates, too, wondering how many out-of-towners would actually be willing to pay to read obit after obit. GrowthSpur’s Mark Potts’ denouncement of the plan is the most sweeping: “Every assumption it’s based on—from projected audience to the percentage of readers that might be willing to pay—is flawed.”

TBD’s Steve Buttry posted his own critique of the plan, centering on the fact that the paper is double-dipping by charging people to both read and publish obits. The paper’s editor, Ernie Schreiber, fired back with a rebuttal (the experiment is intended to help define their online audience, he said, and no, they’re not double-dipping any more than charging for an ad and a subscription), and Buttry responded with a point-by-point counter. Finally, Buttry came up with the most constructive part of the discussion: A proposal for newspapers on how to handle obituaries, with seven different free and paid obit options for newspapers to offer families. Jeff Sonderman offered a different type of proposal, arguing that obituaries should be free to place and read, because if they aren’t, they’re about to be Craigslisted.

Meanwhile, MinnPost’s Brauer discovered that all you need to bypass the paywall is FireFox’s NoScript add-on, and Schreiber added a few more work-arounds while responding that he’s not worried, because the tech-geek and obit-junkie crowds don’t have a whole lot of overlap. Reuters’ Felix Salmon backed Schreiber up, arguing that a loose paywall is much better than a firm one that unwittingly harasses loyal customers.

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A new level of news-advertising fusion: We may have caught a glimpse into one less-than-savory aspect of the future of journalism late last week through the sports media world, when ESPN aired “The Decision.” Here’s what happened, for the sports-averse: 25-year-old NBA superstar LeBron James was set to make his much-anticipated free agency decision this summer, and ESPN agreed to air James’ announcement of which team he’d play for last Thursday night on a one-hour special. The arrangement originated from freelance sportscaster Jim Gray and James’ marketing company, which dictated the site of the special, James’ interviewer (Gray, naturally), and a deal in which the show’s advertising proceeds (all lined up by James’ company) would go toward James’ designated charity, the Boys and Girls Club. ESPN insisted that it would otherwise have full editorial control.

The show — and particularly the manner in which it was set up — received universally scathing reviews from sports media watchers: Sports Illustrated media critic Richard Deitsch called it “the worst thing ESPN has ever put its name to,” legendary sportswriter Buzz Bissinger said ESPN’s ethical conflict was so big it can never be fully trusted as a news source, Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik fumed that “never in the history of sports has the media behaved in a such a whored-out, dazed, confused and crass a manner,” and LA Times media critic James Rainey accused ESPN of playing up both sides of a spectacle it created.

The ethical conflict seemed even worse when there was a report that Gray, the interviewer, was paid by James, rather than ESPN (as it turned out, ESPN covered his expenses, but other than that he says he wasn’t paid at all). But the true details, as revealed by Advertising Age, were almost as shocking: ESPN had previously hoped to arrange a special program before its sports awards show, the ESPYs, with James handing out the first award just after his announcement.

Ad Age’s phenomenal article hammered home another important point for those concerned about the future of news: This program represented a new level of integration between advertising and news, and even a new breed of advertiser-driven news programming. Ad Age detailed the remarkable amount of exposure that the program’s advertisers received, and included superagent Ari Emanuel, the man who orchestrated the arrangement, boasting that “we’re getting closer to pushing the needle on advertiser-content programming.” In his typically overheated style, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi called the show “the prototype for all future news coverage,” in which a few dominant news organizations create their own versions of reality in a race for advertising money, while a few scattered web denizens try to ferret out the real story.

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Replacing the newspaper, or complementing it?: This week, the University of Missouri School of Journalism publicized a study that its scholars published this spring comparing citizen-driven news sites and blogs with daily newspaper websites. The takeaway claim from Mizzou’s press release — and, in turn, Editor & Publisher’s blurb — was that citizen journalism sites aren’t replacing the work that was being done by downsizing traditional news organizations. Not surprisingly, that drew a few people’s criticism: Ars Technica’s John Timmer said the study provides evidence not so much that citizen-driven sites are doing poorly, but that legacy media sites are embracing many of the web’s best practices. He and TBD’s Jeff Sonderman also pointed out that if one startup news site is lacking in an area, web users are smart enough to just find another one. The question isn’t whether a citizen journalism site can replace a newspaper site, Sonderman said, it’s whether a whole amateur system, with its capacity for growth and specialization, can complement or replace the one newspaper site in town.

TBD’s Steve Buttry (who must have had a lot of free time this week) delivered a point-by-point critique of the site, making a couple of salient points: The study ignores the recent spate of professional online-only news organizations and vastly over-represents traditional news sites’ relative numbers, and, of course, the long-argued point that the question of whether one type of journalism can replace another is silly and pointless. One of the Mizzou scholars responded to Buttry, which he quotes at the end of his post, that the researchers had no old-media agenda.

After hearing about all of that debate, it’s kind of strange to read the study itself, because it doesn’t actually include any firm conclusions about the ability of citizen-led sites to replace newspapers. In its discussion section, the study does make a passing reference to “the inability of citizen news sites to become substitutes for daily newspaper sites” and briefly states that those sites would be better substitutes for weekly papers, but the overall conclusion of the study is that citizen sites work better as complements to traditional media, filling in hyperlocal news and opinion that newspapers have abandoned. That’s quite similar to the main point that Buttry and Sonderman are making. The study’s guiding question may be deeply flawed, as those two note, but its endpoint isn’t nearly as inflammatory as it was publicized to be.

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Looking at a BBC for the U.S.: A few folks went another round in the government-subsidy-for-news debate this week when Columbia University president Lee Bollinger wrote an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal advocating for a stronger public-media system in the U.S., one that could go toe-to-toe with the BBC. Bollinger argued that we’re already trusting journalists to write independent accounts of corporate scandals like the BP oil spill while their news organizations take millions of dollars in advertising from those companies, so why would journalism’s ethical standards change once the government is involved?

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson agreed that government-funded journalism doesn’t have to be a terrifying prospect, but several others online took issue with that stance: CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis said we need to teach journalists to build self-sustaining businesses instead, and two British j-profs, George Brock and Roy Greenslade, both argued that Bollinger needs to wake up and see the non-institutional journalistic ecosystem that’s springing up to complement crumbling traditional media institutions. But the people who do want an American BBC are in luck, because the site launched this week.

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Reading roundup: A few cool things to think on this weekend:

— Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review has a long story on what is a safe bet to be one of the two or three most talked about issues in the industry over the next year: How to bring in revenue from mobile media.

— French media consultant Frederic Filloux asks what he rightly calls “an unpleasant question”: Do American newspapers have too many journalists? It’s not a popular argument, but he has some statistics worth thinking about.

— Adam Rifkin has a well-written post that’s been making the rounds lately about why Google doesn’t do social well: It’s about getting in, getting out and getting things done, while social media’s about sucking you in.

— The New York Times and the Lab have profiles of two startups, Techmeme and Spotery, that are living examples of the growing role of human-powered editing alongside algorithmic authority. And Judy Sims urges newspapers to embrace the social nature of life (and news) online.

— Finally, news you can use: A great Poynter feature on ways news organizations can use Tumblr, from someone who used it very well: Mark Coatney, formerly of Newsweek, now of Tumblr.

Related posts:

1. Why ESPN keeps growing while most everything else falls apart
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 media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing

The FTC’s last round of input: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wrapped up its series of forums on journalism and public policy Tuesday, and this forum got quite a bit more attention than the others — partly because it’s the last one, and partly because the FTC released its draft of possible policy proposals a few weeks ago, which gave people something concrete to pick apart.

Before the forum, The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters and TBD’s Steve Buttry both gave good summaries of what various people are saying about the issue, and Save the News’ Fiona Morgan gave a helpful, detailed description of what went on at the forum itself. As for the FTC’s final report due out this fall, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Olga Kharif both wrote that we’re unlikely to see any proposals for significant government intervention in the news business. Edmonds offers a handful of reasons that the idea has fallen out of favor: Newspapers’ financial fortunes have improved lately, we’ve seen an explosion of strongly backed digital journalism experiments, the government might not be able to do it well, and news organizations themselves aren’t sure what they want from Uncle Sam. Both Edmonds and Kharif also noted that Congress won’t be willing to be seen as bailing out another for-profit industry.

A few more voices — media economics professor Robert Picard, TBD’s Mandy Jenkins and conservative Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi — joined the anti-subsidy chorus this week, and the Times’ Eric Pfanner provided some evidence to back them up, pointing out that countries with the largest direct subsidies for newspapers also have the lowest newspaper readership. (He also noted the U.S. media’s extreme reliance on advertising compared with the rest of the world.)

Other folks offered a few ideas of what policy proposals they’d like to see the FTC endorse. Edmonds wants to see nonprofits allowed to accept advertising, j-prof C.W. Anderson says public policy has a role in “fostering an entrepreneurial, innovative, reinvented journalistic sphere,” Salon’s Dan Gillmor stumps for open broadband subsidies, and Save the News’ Josh Stearns lists five ideas he wants endorsed. The themes that run across several of those people’s proposals are clear: Net neutrality, expanded broadband, open government data, and encouragement for innovation, rather than protection for traditional media businesses.

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Google News goes human: One low-key but potentially significant development from late last week: As the Lab’s Megan Garber reported, Google News began an experiment called Editors’ Picks, in which editors from partner news organizations like the BBC and the Washington Post curate lists of news articles to go along with Google’s algorithm-run selections. Garber notes what a shift this is from Google’s historical approach to news aggregation and ties it to the quest for serendipity: “This is one way of replicating the offline experience of serendipity-via-bundling within the sometimes scattered experience of online news consumption,” she says.

GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram saw in the project a similar sign of a shift toward human-powered news aggregation at Google, though he noted that Google has tried numerous news-related experiments that never caught on. That’s exactly what a Google spokesperson told paidContent’s Staci Kramer, and both sites mentioned Google’s ill-fated commenting experiment as an example.

Still, Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik loved this idea, making a case for the value of human editors in making sure that people are reading what they need to know online as well as what they want to know. In other Google News news, its creator, Krishna Bharat, gave a long interview in which he discussed its role in journalism and his idea of what the future of journalism might look like.

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Murdoch picks up some paid-content pieces: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. continued its long, steady march toward a paid-news future with a few small but potentially important moves this week: It bought the Skiff mobile software platform from the newspaper chain Hearst — not the Skiff e-reader itself, though it seems they’re working on that — invested in Journalism Online, Steve Brill’s news paid-content venture, and bid to take full control of British Sky Broadcasting, Europe’s largest for-pay broadcaster.

Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein called the first two moves huge news for the digital news business, arguing that Murdoch is setting the standard for the way everyone else does business online. “This is about laying the groundwork for the very process by which people pay for that news; namely, the device they consume it on and the virtual storefront that handles the payment,” he wrote. And with BSkyB’s digital music and broadband services, it looks like Murdoch’s hoping to add another major asset in his plans to find new ways to get people to pay for not only news, but digital entertainment media as well.

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A theory of the political press defined: If you’ve been following NYU professor Jay Rosen on Twitter or reading his blog for any length of time, you’ve probably absorbed a general sense of his guiding philosophy about the American political press. But this week he posted the definitive explanation of that philosophy, which is most simply that political journalists’ prevailing ideology is one of false equivalency between two sides of political extremists, while they (and their favorite politicians) stand at the sane, savvy, skeptical center. It’s obviously just one critic’s opinion, but it’s a remarkably helpful frame to help interpret what the Washington press corps values and why it does what it does.

There’s some fascinating discussion about Rosen’s ideas in the lengthy comments of his post, and he got a few thoughtful responses elsewhere, as well. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf agreed with the main thrust of Rosen’s argument, though he challenged the assertion that political journalists are “big believers in the law of unintended consequences” who don’t pay much attention to the direct consequences of public policy. The Economist likewise endorses the post but counters that Rosen’s concepts of “he said, she said journalism” and “the sphere of deviance” are at odds. Over at Slate, Tom Scocca affirms a point of Rosen’s about journalists’ disregard for street protests, and Australian journalist Jonathan Holmes adapted the concept to the Australian media.

Also, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder — as a political editor, part of the tribe Rosen was dissecting — asked the professor what he would have the political press think instead. Rosen has promised an answer.

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Future-of-news thoughts and innovation: Before we get to the reading roundup, a note on a couple of interesting items that the Lab has been highlighting this week. First, our sister publication, Nieman Reports, has published its quarterly issue, which is always chock-full of thought-provoking essays on journalism in transition. This summer’s issue is titled “What’s Next for News?” so it’s right along the lines of the stuff we write about here at the Lab. The Lab has been pointing out several of the issue’s 36 pieces — including thoughts on the Internet’s effects on our thinking, the editor-as-gatekeeper role, and the semantic web — but there’s plenty more out there, so go look around.

Second, the Knight News Challenge announced the 12 winners of its $2.74 million worth of grants for innovative journalism projects. The Lab’s Josh Benton has a rundown of the winners and a few observations about the crop as a whole, and we’ve got profiles of a few of the initiatives, too. There’s Stroome, the wiki-style collaborative video-editing site; Public Radio Exchange, a crowdfunding project for public radio journalism; and Order in the Court 2.0, an effort to open up courtrooms through new media. They should have several more profiles up over the next few days (probably even before this post is published) if you’re in the mood to be encouraged by innovation in news.

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Reading roundup: Two ongoing discussions, one news economics development, and one thoughtful piece on context:

— Two news economics experts, Alan Mutter and Frederic Filloux, weighed in this week with their assessments of iPad news apps so far. Mutter looks at the winners and losers, and Filloux talks about what makes iPad news apps work.

— We’ve been hearing for a couple of weeks about what the Internet is (or isn’t) doing to our brains, and that conversation continued with a defense of the web by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton a caution to doomsayers by psychology professor Steven Pinker.

— Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated this week that Internet ad revenue will surpass newspaper ad revenue by 2014. Both will still remain behind TV ad revenue, they said.)

— Finally, former journalist John Zhu wrote a wonderful explanation of the state of, well, explanation in the news. (Complete with helpful visual aids!) If you’re interested at all in how journalists can make complex stories more understandable to people, this is the perfect place to start putting together where we’ve been and where we could be going.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Weigel and new journalism values, Google News gets personal, and Kos’ poll problem
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 media musings: Tablet madness, and ideas for Sunday talk shows

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

— 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