— There’s no doubt about the biggest journalism-related news this week: It’s the impending death of Editor & Publisher, the magazine that’s been covering the newspaper industry since 1884. E&P’s owner, Nielsen Business Media, announced on Thursday that it had sold the magazine’s sister publications and would be shutting down E&P. (Editor Greg Mitchell offers some more details.) Yup, it was pretty easy to see this as symbolic of the death of the entire newspaper industry itself, and that’s where many left it.

A few went deeper, though, on what E&P stood for and what killed it. Longtime E&P columnist Steve Outing reflected on the newspaper industry’s resistance to change, adding that “I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P.” The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch praised E&P and Mitchell in particular for their criticism of the media’s coverage of the runup to the Iraq war. The two main explanations for E&P’s demise being passed around are 1) the drying up of advertising dollars, especially classifieds; and, 2) as articulated by former Rocky Mountain News publisher John Temple and agreed with by Outing, the rise of online media-news aggregators like Romenesko. Steve Yelvington gave us a little of both in his explanation.

I think Yelvington’s analysis probably hits closest to the bullseye. E&P was a publication largely operating in a traditional, dying medium (magazines) covering another traditional, dying medium (newspapers). In other words, we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised at its death. I suspect that what killed E&P was not so much Romenesko as it was sites like JournalismJobs.com, as the Internet eroded the magazine’s classified base.

That said, E&P did solid work covering both the everyday and big-picture issues in the newspaper industry right up until the end. Judging from his byline counts and takeout pieces, Joe Strupp was a force of nature there.  But news media coverage is still in fairly good hands; sites like the Nieman Journalism Lab and PBS’ MediaShift have taken on the task of providing regular reporting on journalism in transition, and I’ve been fairly impressed with the work they’ve done (particularly the Nieman Lab). E&P will be missed, but it isn’t a mortal wound for journalism.

— Google made big media news twice this week: First, it announced that it’s adding real-time search from sites like Twitter and Facebook to its traditional search results. This is the beginning of the implementation of all the deals we heard about in October, and it’s big news. Google assured us its real-time search won’t kill journalism (duh) and will find a way to make sure the cream rises to the top. Daniel Honigman gives a quick look at how the change will affect the PR world.

— Second, Google introduced a new partnership with The New York Times and Washington Post called Living Stories, a smart, personalized version of the Wikipedia-style explainers that Matt Thompson has advocated. (The New York Times has more of the nitty-gritty details.) The announcement created a lot of buzz early in the week, with Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw calling it a “jaw-dropping online journalism form” and others wondering if it would “give newspapers new life.” Elsewhere, Thompson and Danny Sullivan are less enthusiastic: Thompson likes that news orgs are trying to tie stories together for readers, but says Living Stories is more of a starting point than a finished product. Sullivan has some  qualms with its usability.

I’m with Thompson on this one: Living Stories may be getting a lot of hype because Google’s behind it, but this type of re-envisioning of the way a news story should look is not new, and Google’s manifestation of it is not exactly the pinnacle of the form. But, most importantly, it’s a good start, and it’s miles ahead of the Post’s and Times’ concept of topic pages. Like Thompson, I sense that the pinnacle of this “explainer” form is a long way off, but it’s encouraging to see news orgs and the brilliant minds at Google diving into the pool.

— Some Google miscellany: Google also expanded its search personalization to include everyone. Danny Sullivan tells you how it works and what it means. Also, Rupert Murdoch responded to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Wall Street Journal op-ed with his own. His two main points: Media companies need to give people the news they want, and quality content is not free. Oh, and his third: The FCC needs to let me own everything.

— NYU professor Jay Rosen’s been talking for a while about his idea for a site built around the concept, “What is your question? Journalists are standing by.” This weekend, he gave us a mockup for that idea at explainthis.org. I love the journalists-as-question-answerers idea — the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News has been quite successful with it at MyReporter.com, and my paper, the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, began trying out the concept a few weeks ago. (Jeff Sonderman has a good roundup of similar projects.)

Matt Mireles raises a good question about the project: Why use journalists at all? Why not let the experts answer and cut out the middle man? It’s a valid point, but I think journalists still have a role in answering a lot of these questions. “Sources go direct” is wonderful and all, but what if the question is about corruption or incompetence somewhere? Do we really want the “experts” answering those questions for us?

Take even Rosen’s sample question: “Why is corn still subsidized?” I wouldn’t expect an entirely honest answer from the American Corn Growers Association, even though they’re certainly experts on the issue. Answering questions like these is a key part of the craft of  journalism, and I expect projects like these to start popping up soon at local news orgs around the country.

— Top tech blogs TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are both lamenting the coming rise of organizations like Demand Media that offer cheap, mostly useless, ad-driven content. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington calls it “fast food content,” and RWW’s Richard MacManus calls them “content farms.” Both fascinating reads on the assault on quality in some corners of the Web.

— Three for the road: 1) Steve Buttry has a comprehensive (read: long) followup spelling out the details of his earlier proposal of a mobile-first news strategy; 2) Conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart talks to Mediaite about his plans to develop the right’s Huffington Post; 3) and CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has a great roundup of the news industry’s current battles and the ones you’ll be seeing flare up soon. It’s a short but sweet primer on the state of the journalism.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Tablet madness, and ideas for Sunday talk shows
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: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism

— In addition to all its troubling implications for war, psychology and life in the military, the Fort Hood tragedy also was a referendum on citizen journalism, at least for TechCrunch’s Paul Carr, who used one Fort Hood soldier’s rather juvenile tweets as an example of why “the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists.” Dave Winer dismissed it as intentionally flawed “rubbish,” designed to bring in traffic by making an inflammatory argument. British blogger Suw Charman-Anderson gives it a much more thorough debunking, raising questions about just about every fact or argument Carr asserts. And Howard Weaver recounts his Twitter argument with Jay Rosen over whether Carr’s concerns should be taken seriously.

I think they should, despite how reckless Carr is with his argument, as Charman-Anderson points out. I don’t think it’s reasonable for him to extrapolate one tweeter’s behavior onto the rest of us as a society, but neither do I think his concerns can be pooh-poohed with the statement that, as Charman-Anderson says, “Some of what gets done with social media is good and some is bad. This is not news, nor new.” Social media does have effects on us, both culturally and morally, and that’s well worth looking into, particularly academically. (To Charman-Anderson’s credit, she suggests that type of research be done as well.)

But I fundamentally agree with Weaver (and Howard Owens in his comment on Weaver’s post): This is not a foundational failure of social media; this is a failure of our collective filter. (And not even that: As Charman-Anderson shows, this soldier probably got far more exposure in Carr’s post than anywhere else.) Of course there are going to be idiots who post stupid, irresponsible and downright wrong things during breaking news events. There always have been, and the advent of social media doesn’t change that. That just underscores the importance of filtering that firehose of real-time information and providing something that’s of real value to users. To quote Weaver: “The jerks are always with us. Let them screech. It’s how we collectively handle them that matters.”

— I had planned on leading off with my thoughts on Twitter Lists and Fort Hood in particular, but so much has been said about them in the past week or two that as I read a lot of it, I realized the best I could do would be to point you to the best stuff, rather than try to pile on yet another mostly useless opinion. So here goes:

If you’re trying to figure out The Meaning of Twitter Lists, the place to start is The Columbia Journalism Review, where last Tuesday Megan Garber covered just about everything that had been written about them to that point, then mused about how they may end up shoehorning people into playing the roles that others expect them to play, rather than using Twitter a free-associative, personality-driven tool. Robert Scoble, one of the giants of social media, has written two wonderful posts on the subject, the first on lists as the new RSS, and the second as part of an enlightening exploration of the value of hearing online from only people you want to hear. (A few weeks ago, Dave Troy also had some great thoughts on Twitter Lists’ impact on influence and its importance in curation.)

Then came the next level of discussion for us future-of-journalism junkies: What do these lists do for the news? Early last week, Columbia grad student Vadim Lavrusik had a neat little overview on Mashable of some of the cool things news organizations have done with lists. Then on Thursday came the Fort Hood shooting, and suddenly, we had one huge concrete example to work with. Again, CJR’s Garber has the most insightful analysis of that “first test” of Twitter Lists for journalism went, and her conclusion is worth quoting: ” … through, in particular, the deceptively simple innovation that is the hyperlink, news outlets are increasingly defined by connection rather than separation. … And that, in turn—fundamentally, if not completely—topples the competitive underpinnings of newsgathering as a profession.”

Meanwhile, Craig Kannalley of Poynter goes into the details of how news orgs created and maintained their Fort Hood Twitter lists, and over at MediaShift, Publish2’s Ryan Sholin is concerned that overeager news folks might be diminishing some of Twitter Lists’ value through too much repetition. And this morning, The New York Times pointed to another feature Twitter plans to roll out soon — “geolocation” — as something that could help lists cut through the overwhelming amount of information on Twitter.

— Just down the road from Fort Hood, The Texas Tribune, a new online nonprofit focusing on Texas state government, launched this week. Pretty much everybody loved it. Editor-in-chief Evan Smith talked with paidContent about the business side (their budget’s covered for two years) and with Poynter about his plans to make databases of government info more available to the public, including other journalists.

— Rupert Murdoch announced he’s delaying his planned rollout of paywalls for his newspapers’ websites. (It was intended to be done by next June.) Meanwhile, Stephen Brill of paid-content coordinator Journalism Online says five to 15 online publishers are planning to slowly, stealthily introduce his paid-content system within the next month or so. But Alan Mutter, the online news business guru, says he’s skeptical about how many publishers have the guts to go through with a paywall. And Jason Fry has a strong argument that the reasons that paywalls are a shaky idea are not technical ones, but issues of quality and increased competition.

— Jeff Jarvis, the CUNY professor and author of “What Would Google Do?,” has written quite a bit in the past about the place for entrepreneurship within new business models for news. This week he wrote something of a manifesto on the topic, looking at what it means to say, “The future of news is entrepreneurial.” Judy Sims responds with a word to the wise: Make sure you talk to your advertisers first if you want to make any money.

— I leave you with three good reads, in descending order of density: 1) A nifty essay by PR expert Brian Solis predicting the future of the social web (with dates!); 2) a short but fantastic piece by Time media critic James Poniewozik on the political media’s primary bias: centrism; and 3) a summary of NYU professor Jay Rosen’s speech to an Australian social media conference, which also serves as a neat little summary to the ideas Jay’s been evangelizing in general lately. If you follow his Twitter feed closely for about a week or two, he’ll probably hit on each one of these, but it’s good to have them all in one place.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing
2. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism
3. Trying to keep up with the future of journalism? 11 people to follow on Twitter right now

— First off, this was the week real-time search officially took off. On Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital broke the news that Microsoft had reached an agreement to give its Bing search engine the ability to include Twitter and Facebook status updates. Four hours later, we found out that Google, too, had reached a similar agreement with Twitter (no Google-Facebook marriage, though — that would have been a surprise).

So now we have Twitter status updates available on Google and Bing, and Facebook updates on Bing as well. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a handy-dandy chart to help us keep all the companies’ search strengths and weaknesses straight. He and Adam Ostrow from the social media blog Mashable both note that Microsoft’s plan for Facebook search is dependent on Facebook’s ability to persuade its users to make their status updates at least semi-public — and Facebook users have a history of fiercely guarding their privacy.

There’s a few different ways to examine the impact of these deals: The New York Times has focused on money, noting that this is likely a huge part of Twitter’s answer to the ubiquitous “But how are you going to make money off of this?” question, and then, in turn, wondering, “How are Microsoft and Google going to make money off of this?”

Several others have been talking about the value of this data. Catharine Taylor at Social Media Insider thinks most of it is “simply unimportant,” which is, well, nuts. (You seriously can’t see how finding out what people are saying right now about a given topic might be slightly valuable?) TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld posits (rightly, I think) that the greatest value of this data will be at the aggregate, “firehose” level in the ability to refine search results to reflect real-time results — sort of like an integration of a far more sophisticated version of Google Trends.

Then, of course, there’s the journalism angle. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum asks the same question that I can just about bet Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley were asking when they heard about the deals: “If tweets are worth money to a search engine, why isn’t the news?” Meanwhile, tech pioneer Dave Winer, in the most insightful post I’ve seen on these deals, argues that we should be beyond thinking about what this means for traditional news organizations: Google, Microsoft and Twitter are now in the news business themselves.

This is the dawn of a system, Winer says, where all of our news “flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested.” And instead of jumping in on this while it’s beginning, the moguls of traditional media are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will just stop by and decide to pay them — not because they’ve provided any serious value in this new media ecosystem, but only because they’re complaining loud enough. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Just read Dave’s post.

— The other big development this week was a report released by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie and UC-San Diego/Columbia University journalism prof Michael Schudson, which was followed by an avalanche of reactions from journalism pundits and scholars. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fine summary of the report and the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a comprehensive roundup of the reaction, so I won’t duplicate their work here.

The aspect of the report that got the most attention was Downie and Schudson’s recommendation of several avenues for increased government funding for journalism, summed up nicely by Michele McLellan here. And that may be the most valuable thing to come out of this report — it’s the first proposal of expanding public funding for journalism to be engaged with seriously by many of The People Who Think About Journalism, probably because it’s the first proposal that deserves to be taken seriously.

I have my own deep skepticism about publicly funding journalism — though I’m slightly more amenable to starting up new initiatives under the public-media banner than to using subsidies or tax breaks to prop up flagging newspapers — but it seems that Downie and Schudson’s report has finally gotten us past the knee-jerk “Over my dead body!” response to publicly funded journalism, even if the right answer is “No way — but here’s why, and I’m still open to hearing some ideas from the other side.”

— This week included a watershed moment for the sports blogosphere, too. Deadspin, a Gawker Media blog that towers over the sports blogging world, launched a daylong offensive against ESPN after, according to Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, a PR rep for the network brushed aside his questions last month about a rumored affair and suspension by ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips. When the story turned out to be true and was broken by the New York Post last week, Daulerio retaliated by publishing reports of sexual misdeeds by a mid-level ESPN Radio host and an unknown-to-the-public marketing VP.

The reaction from the sports blogosphere was almost universally negative (though there were exceptions), which is notable because so many of those blogs generally operate with a very similar M.O. If you had to boil the sports blogosphere down to just a few of its defining characteristics, one of them would be its fixation on sexual scandals that only tangentially involve sports. Yet this week we found out that even regarding that, those blogs have a line. And when even the most powerful sports blog on the Web crossed that line, they heard it from their fellow bloggers. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this, the National Sports Journalism Center has a roundup of reactions, Midwest Sports Fans has an audio interview with Daulerio about the flap, and lawyer and former Deadspin associate editor Clay Travis uses the episode to give us a lesson on libel law.

— In the wake of the past few weeks’ adventures in news orgs’ social media guidelines, veteran journalist Gina Chen has an extremely helpful personal guide to the ethics of social media for journalists, complete with case studies. Over at MediaShift, meanwhile, Stephen Ward has some tips for news orgs crafting social media policies.

— The nation’s 12th-largest newspaper, Newsday on Long Island, has put a paywall around its online content. Newsday execs explain the move at Editor & Publisher, and news business expert Alan Mutter cautions that Newsday’s being owned by a cable company makes this move a tough one to replicate.

— Finally, two professors argue at SEED magazine that social media and the explosion of online publishing mean that soon, our society will be characterized not only by nearly universal literacy, but by nearly universal authorship as well. And if you’re a journalism student (or a working journalist, for that matter), Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has some helpful advice: Be great at one analog craft and one digital craft. Sounds about right.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Fort Hood, citizen journalism and Twitter lists
2. This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism
3. To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant