Finding a place for a new breed of journalist: Laura touched on the resignation of Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel in last week’s review, and several of the questions she raised were ones people have been batting around in the week since then. Here’s what happened (and for those of you looking for a more narrative version, Jay Rosen has you covered via audio): Weigel, who writes a blog for the Post on the conservative movement, wrote a few emails on an off-the-record journalists’ listserv called Journolist bashing a few members of that movement (most notably Matt Drudge and Ron Paul). Those emails were leaked, the conservative blogosphere went nuts, and Weigel apologized, then resigned from the Post the next day. Journolist founder Ezra Klein shut the listserv down, and Weigel was apologetic in his own postmortem of the situation, attributing his comments to hubris toward conservatives designed to get other journalists to like him.

This was The Episode That Launched A Thousand Blog Posts, so I’ll be sticking to the journalistic angles that came up, rather than the political ones. A lot of those issues seemed to come back to two posts by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that included attacks on Weigel by anonymous Post staffers, the tone of which is best summed up by Goldberg’s own words: “The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.” (Goldberg did quickly back down a bit.) Fellow Post blogger Greg Sargent defended Weigel (and Klein, a young Post blogger who’s an outspoken liberal) by arguing that just because they express opinions doesn’t make them any less of a reporter. New media guru Jeff Jarvis decried the “myth of the opinionless man” that Weigel was bound to, and Salon’s Ned Resnikoff called for the end of neutral reporting, urging journalists to simply disclose their biases to the public instead.

Several other observers posited that many of the problems with this situation stemmed from a false dichotomy between “reporting” and “opinion.” That compartmentalization was best expressed by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, who asked of the Post’s bloggers, “Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?” (He proposed that the Post have one of each cover conservatives.) The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf said the Post is imposing binary categories on its reporters that don’t fit real life, when the two in fact aren’t mutually exclusive. Blogging historian and former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg made a similar point, suggesting Post “simply lets them be bloggers — writers with a point of view that emerges, post by post.” The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait pointed out that the Post has created a type of writer that it doesn’t know what to do with, while Jim Henley offered a helpful definition of the “blog-reporter ethos” that those writers embody.

Finally, a few other points well worth pondering: Nate Silver, whose opinionated political blog FiveThirtyEight just got picked up by The New York Times, marveled at how much more outrageous the response seemed to be than the comments themselves and wondered if even opinions expressed in private are now considered enough to disqualify a reporter. John McQuaid saw the episode as evidence that journalism traditionalists and the “view from nowhere” political press still rule in Washington, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx saw in the conflict a backlash against a new generation of journalists who emphasize personal voice, as well as “an opportunity to establish a new set of journalistic values” — fair-mindedness and intellectual honesty backed by serious reporting, rather than a veneer of impartiality.

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Google News gets a makeover: For the first time since it was launched in 2002, Google News got a significant redesign this week. Now, a little ways down from the top of the page is what Google called “the new heart of the homepage” — a personalized “News for you” section. That area can be adjusted to highlight or hide subjects, individual news topics, or certain news sources. The redesign is also emphasizing its Spotlight section of in-depth stories, as well as user-bookmarked stories. Search Engine Land has a nice visual overview of what’s changed.

The Lab’s Megan Garber also has a helpful summary of the changes, noting that “the new site is trying to balance two major, and often conflicting, goals of news consumption: personalization and serendipity.” All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka wondered how many people are actually going to take the time to customize their page, under the idea that anybody news-savvy enough to do so is probably getting their news through a more comprehensive source like RSS or Twitter. Jay Rosen wanted to know what news sources people choose to see less of. Meanwhile, in an interview with MediaBistro, Google News lead engineer Krishna Bharat gave a good picture of where Google News has been and where it’s heading.

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A possible polling fraud revealed: For the past year and a half, the liberal political blog Daily Kos has been running a weekly poll, something that’s reasonably significant because, well, it’s a blog doing something that only traditional news organizations have historically done. This week, Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote that he will be suing Research 2000, the company that conducted the polls for the blog. The decision was based on a report done by three independent analysts that found some serious anomalies that seem to be indicators that polls might be fraudulent. Zuniga renounced his work based on Research 2000’s polls and said, “I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent detailed the planned suit, including a clear accusation from Kos’ lawyer that the polls were fraudulent, not just sloppy: “They handed us fiction and told us it was fact. … It’s pretty damn clear that numbers were fabricated, and that the polling that we paid for was not performed.” Research 2000 president Del Ali asserted the properness of his polls, and his lawyer called the fraud allegation “absurd” and threatened to countersue. Polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who began his blog as a Kos commenter, echoed the study’s concerns, then was hit with a cease-and-desist letter from Research 2000’s attorney. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s John Cook laid out Research 2000’s troubled financial history.

This may seem like just a messy he-said, she-said lawsuit involving two individual organizations, but as Sargent and The New York Times pointed out, Research 2000’s work is cited by a number of mainstream news organizations (including the Post), and this could cause people to begin asking serious questions about the reliability of polling data. As trust in journalistic institutions wanes, the para-journalistic institution of polling may be about to take a big credibility hit here, too.

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How much do reporters need to disclose?: Conversation about last week’s Rolling Stone story on Gen. Stanley McChrystal continued to trickle out, especially regarding that tricky relationship between journalists and their sources. CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan stoked much of it when she criticized the article’s author, Michael Hastings, for being dishonest about his intentions and violating an unspoken agreement not to report the informal banter of military officials. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald saw the argument as a perfect contrast between adversarial watchdog journalism and journalism built on access, and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi came out firing with a characteristically inspired rant against Logan’s argument: “According to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass!”

The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson backed Taibbi up, but DailyFinance’s Jeff Bercovici rapped Taibbi’s knuckles for his disregard for the facts. Military and media blogger Jamie McIntyre found a spot in between Logan and Taibbi in ruling on their claims point by point. Politico takes a look at the entire discussion, paying special attention to how relationships work for other military reporters and what this flap might mean for them in the future. On another angle, the Lab’s Jason Fry used the story to examine whether the fragmentation of content is going to end up killing some news brands.

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Reading roundup: We’ve had a longer-than-usual review this week, so I’ll fly through some things and get you on your way to the weekend. There’s still some really fascinating stuff to get to, though:

— A newly released Harvard study found that newspapers overwhelmingly referred to waterboarding as torture until the George W. Bush administration began defining it as something other than torture, at which point their description of it became much less harsh. (They still largely described it as torture when other countries were doing it, though.) The study prompted quite a bit of anger about the American media’s “craven cowardice” and subservience to government, as well as its unwillingness to “express opinion” by calling a spade a spade. James Joyner noted that it’s complicated and The New York Times said that calling it torture was taking sides, though the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent said not calling it torture is taking a side, too.

— I was gone last week, so I didn’t get a chance to highlight this thoughtful post by the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf on what it takes to replace the local beat reporter. As for the newspaper itself, the folks at Reason gave you a section-by-section guide to replacing your newspaper consumption habit.

— Finally, in the you-must-bookmark-this category: Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee put together an indispensable glossary of tech terms for journalists. Whether you’re working on the web or not, I’d advise reading it and digging deeper into any of the terms you still don’t quite understand.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: The FTC and journalism, a human side to Google News, and the political press’s mind
2. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism

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 meter for the Times’ blogs: Plenty of stuff happened at the intersection of journalism and new media this week, and for whatever reason, a lot of it had something to do with The New York Times. We’ll start with the most in-depth piece of information from the Times itself: A 35-minute Q&A session with the three executives most responsible for the Times’ coming paywall (or, more specifically and as they prefer to call it, a metered model) at last Friday’s paidContent 2010 conference. No bombshells were dropped — paidContent has a short summary to go with the video — but it did provide the best glimpse yet into the Times’ thinking behind and approach to their paywall plans.

The Times execs said they believe the paper can maintain its reach despite the meter while adding another valuable source of revenue. Meghan Keane of Econsultancy was skeptical about those plans, saying that the metered model could turn the Times into a niche newspaper.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon started one of the more perplexing exchanges of the session (starting at about 18:10 on the video) when he asked whether the Times would put blogs behind its paywall. The initial response, from publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was “stay tuned,” followed shortly, from digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, by “our intention is to keep blogs behind the wall.” A Times spokeswoman clarified the statements later (yes, blogs would be part of the metered model), and Salmon blogged about his concern with the Times’ execs’ response. He was not the only one who thought this might not be a good idea.

My take: Salmon has some valid concerns, and, piggybacking off of the ideas he wrote after the paywall’s initial announcement, even the Times’ most regular online readers will be quite hesitant to use their limited meter counts on, say, two-paragraph blog posts on the economics of valet parking. Times blogs like Freakonomics and Bits are a huge part of their cachet on the web, and including them in the meter could do them significant damage.

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The iPad and paid content: We also saw another aspect of the Times’ paid-content plans at a conference in Australia, where Marc Frons, the paper’s chief technology officer, talked about the Times’ in-progress iPad app. Frederic Filloux, another one of the conference’s speakers, provided a useful summary of publishers’ attitudes and concerns about creating apps for the iPad, including their expectation that Apple will provide some sort of news store built on the iTunes framework.

Two media vets offered a word of caution to news organizations excited about the iPad’s possibilities for gaining revenue for news: Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog said that “with their hands on none of the key technology and innovation levers online … media giants continue to be without even a pair sticks to rub together to make digital fire.” And citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor wondered whether news orgs “should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions” like the ones Apple’s been making for years.

For those following the future of paid news content, we have a few other new data points to consider: The stats-heavy sports publication The Sporting News will begin charging for its daily digital edition, and a small daily newspaper in Washington State says the first year of their paywall has been a tentative success, with less effect on traffic than expected. Also, Alistair Bruce of Microsoft has a thorough breakdown of who’s charging for what online in a slideshow posted last week. It’s a wonderful resource you’ll want to keep for future reference.

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NYT, NYU team up on local journalism: The Times also had one of the week’s big future-of-journalism announcements — a partnership with New York University to create and run a news site devoted to New York’s East Village, where NYU has several buildings. NYU professor Jay Rosen has all the details you’ll need, including who’s providing what. (NYT: publishing platform, editorial oversight, data sources, inspiration. NYU: editor’s salary, student and faculty labor, offices.)

The partnership raised a few media-critic eyebrows, mostly over the issue of the Times using free (to them, at least) student labor after buying out and laying off 100 paid reporters. The Awl, BNET, The New York Observer, and Econsultancy all have short but acerbic reactions making just that point, with The Awl making a quick note about the professionalization of journalism and BNET speculating about the profit margins the Times will make off of this project.

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Innocence, objectivity and reality in journalism: Jay Rosen kicked off some conversation in another corner of the future-of-journalism discussion this week, bringing his influential PressThink blog out of a 10-month hiatus with a post on a theme he’s been pushing hard on Twitter over the past year: Political journalists’ efforts to appear innocent in their reporting at the expense of the truth.

Rosen seizes on a line in a lengthy Times Tea Party feature on “a narrative of impending tyranny” and wonders why the Times wouldn’t tell us whether that narrative was grounded in reality. Journalistic behavior like this, Rosen says, is grounded in the desire to appear innocent, “meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.” That drive for innocence leads savviness to supplant reality in political journalism, Rosen said.

The argument’s been made before, by Rosen and others such as James Fallows, and Joey Baker sums it up well in a post building off of Rosen’s. But Rosen’s post drew a bit of criticism — in his comments, from the left (Mother Jones), from the libertarian right (Reason), and from tech blogger Stephen Baker. The general strain running through these responses was the idea that the Times’ readers are smart enough to determine the veracity of the claims being made in the article. (Rosen calls that a dodge.) The whole discussion is a fresh, thoughtful iteration of the long-running debate over objectivity in news coverage.

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Where do reporting and aggregation fit?: We got some particularly valuable data and discussion on one of journalism’s central conversations right now — how reporting will work in a new ecosystem of news. Here at the Lab, Jonathan Stray examined how that new landscape looked in one story about charges of Chinese schools’ connections to hacks into Google. He has a fairly thorough summary of the results, headlined by the finding that just 13 of the 121 versions of the story on Google News involved original reporting. “When I think of how much human effort when into re-writing those hundred other unique stories that contained no original reporting, I cringe,” Stray writes. “That’s a huge amount of journalistic effort that could have gone into reporting other deserving stories. Why are we doing this?”

Also at the Lab, CUNY professor C.W. Anderson spun off of Stray’s study with his own musings on the definition and meaning of original reporting and aggregation. He concludes that aggregation/curation/filtering isn’t quite original reporting, but it does provide journalistic value that should be taken into consideration.

Two other interesting pieces on the related subjects of citizen journalism and hyperlocal journalism: PR/tech blogger Darren Barefoot raises concerns about citizen journalism’s ability to do investigative journalism, and J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer makes a strong case for the importance of entrepreneurs and citizen journalists in the new system of news.

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Reading roundup: I’ve got two news developments and two thoughtful pieces for you. First, BusinessWeek reported on AOL’s efforts to build “the newsroom of the future,” a model largely driven by traffic and advertising data, not unlike the controversial Demand Media model, only with full-time journalists.

Editors Weblog raises some questions about such an openly traffic-driven setup, and media/tech watcher Tom Foremski says AOL should be focusing on creating smart news analysis. Social media guru Chris Brogan likes the arrangement, noting that there’s a difference between journalism and publishing.

The second news item is ABC News’ announcement that they’re looking to cut 300 to 400 of its 1,400 positions and move toward a more streamlined operation built around “one-man band” digital journalists. The best examinations of what this means for ABC and TV journalism are at the Los Angeles Times and the Poynter Institute.

The first thoughtful piece is theoretical: CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis’ overview of the evolution of the media’s “spheres of discovery,” from brands to algorithms to human links to predictive creation. It’s a good big-picture look at where new media stand and where they might be going.

The second is more practical: In a Q&A, Howard Owens of the award-winning upstate New York hyperlocal startup The Batavian gives an illuminating glimpse into life in hyperlocal journalism. He touches on everything from advertising to work hours to digital equipment. Building off of Owens’ comments of the personal nature of online news, Jason Fry muses about the uphill battle that news faces to win our attention online. But if that battle is won, Fry says, the loyalty and engagement is so much greater online: “I chose this. I’m investing in it. This doesn’t work and wastes my investment — next. This does work and rewards my investment — I’m staying.”

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: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
3. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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.

— The discussion about Demand Media has been simmering since NYU’s Jay Rosen made it (or, more specifically, calling attention to how “demonic” it is) his cause du jour following the publication of this Wired profile of the online content factory. Early this week it reached a boil after both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb sounded the alarm about the coming onslaught of cheap, superficial “content farms” or “fast food content” like Demand Media. Here are the highlights, the miscellaneous commentary and my take.

The highlights: Pioneering tech thinker Doc Searls tells TechCrunch to stop hyperventilating, arguing that “Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it.” Rosen interviews Demand’s founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt, and while Rosenblatt makes things sounds a lot less scary than Rosen does, his statements are so filled with corporate platitudes and empty CEO-speak that they’re tough to take at face value. Two people with experience working for Demand Media weigh in: Andria Krewson says the work is low-paying but well done, and in a thoughtful post, John Zhu says companies like Demand Media might be the inevitable outgrowth of all media’s marginalization of quality.

The other commentary: And common (and very salient) point among much of the commentary was best put by Fred Wilson, who wrote that our friends and other trusted sources will play a big role in helping us separate the good stuff from the crap. Cody Brown and others noted that it’s tougher to “game” social networks like Twitter than search algorithms. In a related point, a few others noted that Google seems to be losing its battle against SEO-gaming spammers. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis says news orgs might have something to learn from Demand.

My (very quick) take: I’m with Doc Searls on this one. The best way to keep crappy content from choking out good content? Keep creating and linking to good content. Google’s search dominance depends (at least in part) on its ability to lead users to the good stuff; makes sense to just produce quality stuff, link to it and pass it around, and let Google’s engineers do their jobs. As Scott Rosenberg points out, it’s not like people actually want to read empty, cynically produced search-bot fodder, anyway.

— We’ve talked about this “transparency is the new objectivity” idea a bit here before, and this week Paul Bradshaw at Poynter provided us with us an intriguing example of the clash between the old and new philosophies in this area. After an email interview with a reporter for a story, Bradshaw asked for permission to publish the exchange on his blog after the story ran. The reporter said no and eventually allowed Bradshaw to post only his side of the email conversation, not hers.

Bradshaw uses the case to ask the question, “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. In this case, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either.

And why does she do this? Bradshaw gives us a pretty strong hint when he notes in passing that in her email “she gives her position on the issue.” Aha! This wasn’t about suppressing transparency for the sake of privacy or the final product or anything like that; this was about preserving the appearance of objectivity at all costs. What better way to illustrate the idea of transparency being the new objectivity than by this, its precise opposite?

— This being mid-December, we’re starting to see the inevitable end-of-year, end-of-decade, and preview-of-next-year lists. (I’ll admit it: I’m supposed to hate these kinds of lists, but I can’t stop reading them.) Here’s this week’s review of those lists:

End of year: Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp has the top 10 newspaper stories (40,000 jobs lost is appropriately #1); Lifehacker has a rather overwhelming list of all of Google’s developments in 2009; and though I mentioned it last week, C.W. Anderson still has the best year-end snapshot of media so far.

End of decade: The Austin (Texas) Statesman’s Robert Quigley has an insightful piece at Mediaite looking at how the Gawker media empire defined this decade; and About.com, not usually known as a font of quality media criticism, has a surprisingly solid roundup of the major developments in journalism this decade.

2010: Martin Langeveld, Adam Westbrook and Sean Blanda all have predictions for 2010 — Langeveld’s are more newspaper-centric, and Westbrook’s more optimistic and presented in spiffy video format; Save the News has 10 New Year’s resolutions for journalism organizations; and newspaper publishers think advertising will magically flatten next year after collapsing this year, prompting Alan Mutter to wonder, “What the heck are they thinking?”

— In tech-oriented news, Twitter’s API (the interface that allows it to interact with other programs) was added to Wordpress last week and Tumblr this week. Combined with its integration with Facebook’s status API and tons of other programs over the past year or so, that effectively means that, as tech thinker Anil Dash puts it, Twitter’s API is complete. I don’t understand the implications of this quite well enough to summarize it, but fortunately, we have the renowned Dave Winer to explain it to us. So read what he has to say about Twitter’s API becoming a new Internet standard here and here and listen to him here.

— In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten makes an interesting point regarding the ratings rise of MSNBC and Fox News and decline of CNN. He says that it’s not a sign that most Americans now want their news provided through an ideological lens, but that cable news instead attracts a relatively small niche of news junkies who follow news throughout the day. When evening rolls around, Rutten says, “they’re hungry for analysis rather than recycled reportage, and like most Americans today, they prefer interpretation that reinforces their own opinions.” I think the truth lies somewhere in between conventional wisdom and Rutten’s point of view, but it’s still a valuable corrective.

— I missed this one last week, but Jim Barnett of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a helpful quasi-scientific study of the finances of several significant local and national nonprofit news organizations. He finds a pattern, then looks at why Mother Jones might be an exception.

— Three social media-related links before I send you off for the holidays: 1) The Bivings Group’s study of newspapers’ use of Twitter (would like to see someone look at smaller newspapers, too, but I’m sure that’s coming from someone sometime), 2) A fun look at some reeeaaally early predecessors to modern social networking sites, and 3) Dan Schultz’s nifty survey and map of the participatory web, focusing on scope and individual vs. group focus. Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Google’s Buzz buzz, Demand Media’s plans, and turning relationships into revenue
2. This week in media musings: Piling on the Post’s new social media guidelines
3. A quick guide to the maxims of new media

— I’m about a week and a half late by now on the Washington Post’s new social media guidelines, but it dominated discussion this week and commentary is still trickling out about it, so it only makes sense to lead off with that. Here’s the quick summary: The Washington Post internally released its new guidelines a week ago Friday, the same day the paper’s ombudsman, Andy Alexander, described them for the public with an example of a Post editor who’d coincidentally (!) made some politically charged statements on Twitter that week and had subsequently shut his account down. Two days later, paidContent got its hands on the entire guidelines.

Predictably, the guidelines got hammered online. Among the more thoughtful critiques: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Megan Garber, the Times’ David Carr, Time’s James Poniewozik (probably the strongest criticism), Paul Bradshaw and BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker. Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic, offered a tepid defense of his paper’s new rules. The most comprehensive thoughts on the issue came from the apparently indefatigable Steve Buttry, who used the episode to think about social media as conversation, trust at the Post and objectivity in general.

So what was everyone so upset about? For the most part, it came down to two things: The concept that “nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment,” and the subsequent admonition that Post staffers not post anything “that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.” That seems to pretty well adhere to old-school journalistic values, but it also limits journalists from posting on just about anything online except, as Kurtz put it, “the weather and dessert recipes.”

Here’s my take: The Post and its critics are operating in two different universes, and both are convinced that the public also inhabits their universe as well. In the Post’s universe, the paper operates in a “hyper-sensitive political environment,” as Alexander puts it, in which “many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage.” Their new-media-savvy critics live in a world in which “transparency is the new objectivity,” and readers trust “here’s where I’m coming from” more than ostensibly objective journalism.

I think that right now, among most Americans, the Post is right. By and large, American consumers of news are obsessed with bias — perceived or real, disclosed or hidden. The notion of objectivity remains without question their primary frame for interpreting and judging journalism. The statistics bear this out, and I doubt many journalists would tell you otherwise based on their own experiences. Here’s the but: In the long run, the new-media critics are right. We’re headed toward a world in which transparency matters more than objectivity, and it’s not a matter of if, but of when. (Look at the rise of Fox News and MSNBC, for example: Even as they complain about bias, devotees of those two channels know they’re not getting objective news; they know where their news source is coming from ideologically, and it’s the same place they come from. That’s why they like it.)

So for the Post to create social media guidelines that are born out of dealing with a bias-obsessed public is entirely reasonable. After all, that’s who they’re dealing with every day, right? But it’s also short-sighted. The time is coming (and I suspect it isn’t far off) when the tide among most Americans will shift, and they’ll actually understand that a journalist who discloses her biases is more trustworthy than one who pretends she has none. And the Post has virtually assured itself that it will be caught flat-footed once that time comes.

— Must-read of the week: Former Rocky Mountain News editor and publisher John Temple’s speech to the UC-Berkeley Media Technology Summit giving the 14-year-long blow-by-blow of how and why his newspaper failed. It’s one thing to hear self-appointed media mavens bloviate about why newspapers are dying; it’s quite another to hear it from a man who helmed one himself — and doesn’t exempt himself from blame.

— The big tech news of the week was the introduction of Google Wave. Its announcement initially left a lot of non-programmers (like myself) going, “Huh?” Fortunately, Mark Milian of the Los Angeles Times has told us what the Wave could do for journalism. I’m officially excited.

— This week in depressing (but pretty) graphs: mintlife has a nifty-looking set of visuals giving a quick-and-dirty picture of newspapers’ decline.

— If your interest in sports media goes beyond complaining about TV announcers, the National Sports Journalism Center’s new site has been a gold mine of fascinating stuff. Just within the last week, Jason Fry gave sportswriters great tips on how to use their access in a fan-driven world, Eric Deggans offered practical advice for local TV sports departments and Dave Kindred outlined a vision for a better game story. Also on the sports front, Matt Egan of Fox Business wrote a great summary of what ESPN’s local sites might mean for newspapers.

— In the wake of his talk last week at Harvard, Clay Shirky did a “news biopsy” on his hometown paper, the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune. The results were depressing: He found only six staff-written local news articles. The problem? The paper’s list of 53 newsroom staffers includes just six news reporters. Jay Rosen tried an experiment like this earlier this year and generally found the same dearth of locally produced news. Obviously, if someone were to start a new local news organization in any of these towns, it would be much more thinly staffed than the newspaper. That’s the nature of institutions: They just don’t adapt well.

— Another big news announcement this week: NPR is launching a $3 million, two-year pilot project to give a dozen affiliates the tools to focus on providing more local news online. The same day, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued a report on the information gap in communities as it relates to maintaining a functioning democracy. The two events are obviously a coincidence, but it’s not hard to see the connection between the two ideas.

— I leave you with two interviews worth reading: One with The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman in which she argues that “press release journalism” is being increasingly exposed as worthless, and another with Columbia professor Dale Maharidge on journalists’ tone-deafness regarding issues of class and poverty. Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Obama v. Fox News, and NPR’s social media tact
2. This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing
3. This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency