The Times has the Pulse (briefly) pulled: Last week, I noted one of the more interesting iPad news apps: The Pulse Reader, designed by two Stanford grad students, is a stylish news aggregator. But on Monday, the app was pulled from the iTunes store based on a claim that it infringes on The New York Times’ copyright after some Times folks saw the paper’s own blog post about the reader. The app was reinstated the next day, but the debate over copyright, aggregation and mobile apps had already taken off.

The central point of the Times’ argument was that the $3.99 app was an illegal attempt to make money off of the Times’ (and the Boston Globe’s) free, publicly available RSS feeds. (The paper also objected to app’s placement of the Times’ content within a frame on the iPad.) The Citizen Media Law Project’s Kimberley Isbell helpfully broke down the Times’ claims and the Pulse Reader’s possible fair-use defenses, noting the Times articles’ free accessibility and the relatively small article portions displayed on the reader.

Reaction on the web weighed overwhelmingly against the Times: Wired contended that every piece of paid software used to access the Times’ site would be outlawed by the paper’s logic, while Techdirt’s Mike Masnick argued that Pulse was selling its software, not the Times’ feeds. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wondered whether the Times was declaring war on news aggregators, and the Sydney Morning Herald reasoned that if the Times is offering its RSS for free, it can’t complain when someone designs a reader to view it. Blogging and RSS vet Dave Winer had the harshest response in a post arguing that the Times is in the business of news production, not distribution: “Look, if the Times is depending on stopping those two kids for its future, then the Times has no future.“

The reader’s creators were just as baffled as anybody about why the app was reinstated, a Times’ spokesman apparently tried to pass off the complaint as a mistake, though that response doesn’t exactly square with the Times’ Martin Nisenholtz’s reiteration of the paper’s case to paidContent’s Staci Kramer. As for whether this claim would apply beyond the Pulse Reader, Nisenholtz said it would be handled “on a case by case basis.”

We had plenty of other iPad news this week, too — Jobs made a number of mostly iPhone-related announcements at a conference on Monday, and the Lab’s Josh Benton explained what they mean for mobile news. A few highlights: Apple’s not too concerned about app-banning controversies, but it is moving decisively on ebooks and its iAd mobile advertising platform. The AP reported that publishers are seeing encouraging early signs about wringing advertising dollars out of the iPad, but Ken Doctor went on a wonderful little rant against publishers that are slow to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson slammed news orgs’ repurposed “crapps” and talked, with the Journal’s Les Hinton, about his paper’s own iPad strategy. And the iPad faced its first major security issue, as the email addresses of its 114,000 owners were exposed by hackers.

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The purpose of the link: A Nicholas Carr post last week ignited a spirited discussion about the relative values of the link, and that conversation continued this week with twin Wall Street Journal columns by Carr and web scholar Clay Shirky debating whether the Internet makes us smarter. Carr said no, using a similar argument to the one he laid out in his earlier post (it’s also the central point of his new book): The Internet encourages multitasking and bite-size information, making us all “scattered and superficial thinkers.”Shirky said yes, arguing that the Internet enables never-before-experienced publishing and connective capabilities that allow us to put our cognitive surplus to work for a better society. (That’s also the central point of his new book.) Quite a few people, led by GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, posited that both writers were right - Carr in the short term, Shirky in the long term.

Here at the Lab, Jason Fry weighed in on the delinkification debate, giving a useful classification of the link’s primary purposes — credibility, readability and connectivity. Credibility has become a vital function in today’s web, Fry said, though he conceded Carr’s point that the link adds to the cognitive load when it comes to readability. Based on Carr’s original post, the web design firm Arc90 added an option to its browser extension to convert hyperlinks to footnotes.

The Lab also ran a fantastic three-part series on links by Jonathan Stray exploring four journalistic purposes of the hyperlink (it’s essential, he says), examining the way news organizations talk about links (they’re a bit muddled) and studying how much those news organizations actually link (not a whole lot, especially the wire services). It’s a tremendously helpful resource for anyone interested in looking at how linking and journalism intersect.

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Debate over Newsweek’s bidders: We found out about three bidders for Newsweek last Thursday, so last Friday was the time for profiles and commentary, much of it centered on the conservative news site and magazine Newsmax. Newsmax’s CEO, Christopher Ruddy, told the Washington Post that it has a number of non-conservative media projects, so Newsweek wouldn’t have to adopt a conservative viewpoint to be part of Newsmax’s plans. “Newsmax’s success is in its business model, not just its editorial approach,” Ruddy said. Newsweek employees were worried about the prospect of a Newsmax-owned Newsweek, but the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, himself a conservative, said Newsmax’s influence could be just the nudge Newsweek needs to hit its sweet spot in America’s heartland. Chicago magazine profiled another bidder, venture capitalist Thane Ritchie, while the Washington Post reported that audio equipment exec Sidney Harman is considering a bid, too.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz devoted a column to the publicly acknowledged bidders, exploring the question of why no major players have emerged as bidders and concluding that the lack of interest “amounts to a no-confidence vote not just on the category of newsweeklies, which have long been squeezed between daily papers and in-depth monthlies, but on print journalism itself.” Newsweek, via its Tumblr, ripped apart the work of its Washington Post Co. colleague, taking to task for a lack of evidence and disputing his claim that the re-envisioned Newsweek is a flop. (That Tumblr is written by Newsweek social-media guru David Coatney, who got a New York Daily Intel Q&A a couple of days later.) Meanwhile, New York Times columnist David Carr proposed eight ways to revive Newsweek.

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A sports blog network goes local: ESPN has been making a well-documented and initially successful local sports media play over the past year, but this week, a very different sports media company is making a push into what used to be local newspapers’ territory. SB Nation, a network of more than 250 fan-run sports blogs founded in 2003 by Tyler Bleszinski and Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, began rolling out 20 city-specific sports media hubs. Until now, the company has focused on team-specific (or sport-specific, in the case of some less prominent sports) blogs, but the new sites will aggregate real-time sports news mixed with fan-generated conversation and commentary.

In a New York Times feature, SB Nation’s Jim Bankoff said that while his company is trying to provide a ground-up alternative to traditional sports coverage, he’d be happy to collaborate with local newspapers. Former ESPN.com columnist Dan Shanoff echoed that perspective, saying that SB Nation’s brand of sharp fan analysis is ripe for media partnerships because “it is something that local newspapers and local cable-sports networks can’t or won’t do well.” Shanoff proposed that SB Nation become a piece of a larger media company’s local media strategy, suggesting Comcast as an ideal fit.

Here at the Lab, Bankoff gave Laura McGann a handful of lessons media organizations could learn from the SB Nation model, including tightly focused subject matter and maximizing repeat visitors. SB Nation’s team-specific focus seems to be a major component in its success, and could have some ready implications for news organizations, as Bankoff noted: “We’re not fans of sports — we’re fans of teams. We’re not fans of television. We’re fans of shows.”

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Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two news items, a few interesting pieces of commentary and one set of tips.

— Advertising Age reported that AOL is planning to hire hundreds of journalists for a major expansion into news production. At the local media blog Lost Remote, Cory Bergman, who owns a local news network himself, noted that AOL’s hyperlocal outfit Patch is making 300 of those hires and wondered what it will mean for local news.

— Los Angeles Times media writer James Rainey wrote a piece on the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that has poured legal resources into stopping people who use its content without permission. The Times’ Mark Milian also provided a quick guide to what’s OK and what’s not when reposting.

— Publish2’s Scott Karp wrote an intriguing essay on the concept of a Content Graph, in which media organizations collaborate through distribution to enhance their brand’s value.

— News business guru Alan Mutter sensed a theme among news startups — too much focus on news, not enough on business — and wrote a stiff wakeup call.

— Two journalism/tech folks, Jeff Sonderman and Michelle Minkoff, wrote a bit about what journalism school is — and isn’t — good for. Both are worthwhile reads.

— Finally, British journalism David Higgerson has 10 ideas for building good hyperlocal websites. Most of his (very practical) ideas are useful not just for hyperlocal journalism, but for online news in general.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: Plagiarism and the link, location and context at SXSW, and advice for newspapers
2. This Week in Review: The FTC’s ideas for news, Apple’s paid-news pitch, and the de-linking debate
3. This Week in Review: The Times’ blogs behind the wall, paid news on the iPad, and a new local news co-op

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the four resources:

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

The Times, plagiarism and the link: A few weeks ago, the resignations of two journalists from The Daily Beast and The New York Times accused of plagiarism had us talking about how the culture of the web affects that age-old journalistic sin. That discussion was revived this week by the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, whose postmortem on the Zachery Kouwe scandal appeared Sunday. Hoyt concluded that the Times “owes readers a full accounting” of how Kouwe’s plagiarism occurred, and he also called out DealBook, the Times’ business blog for which Kouwe wrote, questioning its hyper-competitive nature and saying it needs more oversight. (In an accompanying blog post, Hoyt also said the Times needs to look closer at implementing plagiarism prevention software.)

Reuters’ Felix Salmon challenged Hoyt’s assertion, saying that the Times’ problem was not that its ethics were too steeped in the ethos of the blogosphere, but that they aren’t bloggy enough. Channeling CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis’ catchphrase “Do what you do best and link to the rest,” Salmon chastised Kouwe and other Times bloggers for rewriting stories that other online news organizations beat them to, rather than simply linking to them. “The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren’t really bloggers at heart,” Salmon wrote.

Michael Roston made a similar argument at True/Slant the first time this came up, and ex-newspaperman Mathew Ingram strode to Salmon’s defense this time with an eloquent defense of the link. It’s not just a practice for geeky insiders, he argues; it’s “a fundamental aspect of writing for the web.” (Also at True/Slant, Paul Smalera made a similar Jarvis-esque argument.) In a lengthy Twitter exchange with Salmon, Times editor Patrick LaForge countered that the Times does link more than most newspapers, and Kouwe was an exception.

Jason Fry, a former blogger for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Ingram and Smalera, but theorizes that the Times’ linking problem is not so much a refusal to play by the web’s rules as “an unthinking perpetuation of print values that are past their sell-by date.” Those values, he says, are scoops, which, as he argued further in a more sports-centric column, readers on the web just don’t care about as much as they used to.

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Location prepares for liftoff: The massive music/tech gathering South By Southwest (or, in webspeak, SXSW) starts today in Austin, Texas, so I’m sure you’ll see a lot of ideas making their way from Austin to next week’s review. If early predictions are any indication, one of the ideas we’ll be talking about is geolocation — services like Foursquare and Gowalla that use your mobile device to give and broadcast location-specific information to and about you. In anticipation of this geolocation hype, CNET has given us a pre-SXSW primer on location-based services.

Facebook jump-started the location buzz by apparently leaking word to The New York Times that it’s going to unveil a new location-based feature next month. Silicon Alley Insider does a quick pro-and-con rundown of the major location platforms, and ReadWriteWeb wonders whether Facebook’s typically privacy-guarding users will go for this.

The major implication of this development for news organizations, I think, is the fact that Facebook’s jump onto the location train is going to send it hurtling forward far, far faster than it’s been going. Within as little as a year, location could go from the domain of early-adopting smartphone addicts to being a mainstream staple of social media, similar to the boom that Facebook itself saw once it was opened beyond college campuses. That means news organizations have to be there, too, developing location-based methods of delivering news and information. We’ve known for a while that this was coming; now we know it’s close.

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The future of context: South By Southwest also includes bunches of fascinating tech/media/journalism panels, and one of them that’s given us a sneak preview is Monday’s panel called “The Future of Context.” Two of the panelists, former web reporter and editor Matt Thompson and NYU professor Jay Rosen, have published versions of their opening statements online, and both pieces are great food for thought. Thompson’s is a must-read: He describes the difference between day-to-day headline- and development-oriented information about news stories that he calls “episodic” and the “systemic knowledge” that forms our fundamental framework for understanding an issue. Thompson notes how broken the traditional news system’s way of intertwining those two forms of knowledge are, and he asks us how we can do it better online.

Rosen’s post is in less of a finished format, but it has a number of interesting thoughts, including a quick rundown of reasons that newsrooms don’t do explanatory journalism better. Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls ties together both Rosen’s and Thompson’s thoughts and talks a bit more about the centrality of stories in pulling all that information together.

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Tech execs’ advice for newspapers: Traditional news organizations got a couple of pieces of advice this week from two relatively big-time folks in the tech world. First, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen gave an interview with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld in which he told newspaper execs to “burn the boats” and commit wholeheartedly to the web, rather than finding way to prop up modified print models. He used the iPad as a litmus test for this philosophy, noting that “All the new [web] companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

Not everyone agreed: Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin said publishers’ current strategy, which includes keeping the print model around, is an intelligent one: They’re milking the print-based profits they have while trying to manage their business down to a level where they can transfer it over to a web-based model. News business expert Alan Mutter offered a more pointed counterargument:“It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.”

Second, Google chief economist Hal Varian spoke at a Federal Trade Commission hearing about the economics of newspapers, advising newspapers that rather than charging for online content, they should be experimenting like crazy. (Varian’s summary and audio are at Google’s Public Policy Blog, and the full text, slides and Martin Langeveld’s summary are here at the Lab. Sync ‘em up and you can pretty much recreate the presentation yourself.) After briefly outlining the status of newspaper circulation and its print and online advertising, Varian also suggests that newspapers make better use of the demographic information they have of their online readers. Over at GigaOM, Mathew Ingram seconds Varian’s comments on engagement, imploring newspapers to actually use the interactive tools that they already have at their sites.

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Reading roundup: We’ll start with our now-weekly summary of iPad stuff: Apple announced last week that you can preorder iPads as of today, and they’ll be released April 3. That could be only the beginning — an exec with the semiconductor IP company ARM told ComputerWorld we could see 50 similar tablet devices out this year. Multimedia journalist Mark Luckie urged media outlets to develop iPad apps, and Mac and iPhone developer Matt Gemmell delved into the finer points of iPad app design. (It’s not “like an iPhone, only bigger,” he says.)

I have two long, thought-provoking pieces on journalism, both courtesy of the Columbia Journalism Review. First, Megan Garber has a sharp essay on the public’s growing fixation on authorship that’s led to so much mistrust in journalism — and how journalists helped bring that fixation on. It’s a long, deep-thinking piece, but it’s well worth reading all the way through Garber’s cogent argument. Her concluding suggestions for news orgs regarding authority and identity are particularly interesting, with nuggets like “Transparency may be the new objectivity; but we need to shift our definition of ‘transparency’: from ‘the revelation of potential biases,’ and toward ‘the revelation of the journalistic process.’”

Second, CJR has the text of Illinois professor Robert McChesney’s speech this week to the FTC, in which he makes the case for a government subsidy of news organizations. McChesney and The Nation’s John Nichols have made this case in several places with a new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” on the shelves, but it’s helpful to have a comprehensive version of it in one spot online.

Finally, The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a simple tip for newspaper publishers looking to stave off their organizations’ decline: Learn to understand technology from the consumer’s perspective. That means, well, consuming technology. Niles provides a to-do list you can hand to your bosses to help get them started.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: iPad news apps emerge, plagiarism on the web, and a first for citizen journalism
2. This Week in Review: Loads of SXSW ideas, Pew’s state of the news, and a dire picture of local TV news
3. This Week in Review: A mobile aggregation dustup, journalists and the link, and fan-based local sports

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

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

The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s how it’ll work: you can view an as-yet-unidentified number of articles for free each month before the Times requires you to pay a flat, unlimited-access fee to see more; this is known as a metered system. (If you subscribe to the print edition, it’ll be free.) Two Times execs answered questions about the plan, including whether you can still email and link to articles (you can) and why it’s different from TimesSelect, the abandoned paid-content experiment it tried from 2005-07. Gabriel Sherman of New York’s Daily Intel, who broke the rumor on Sunday, has some details of the paywall debate within the Times.

There’s been a ton of reaction to the Times’ plan online, so I’ll tackle it in three parts: First, the essential reading, then some other worthwhile opinions, and finally the interesting ephemera.

Four must-reads: It makes sense to start with New York Times media critic David Carr’s take on the plan, because it’s the most the thorough, cogent defense of the Times’ paywall you’ll find. He argues that Times execs “have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times,” giving the site another flexible revenue stream outside of advertising. If you’re up for a little algebra, Reuters’ Felix Salmon has a sharp economic analysis of the paywall, arguing that the value of each article will become much greater for subscribers than nonsubscribers. For the more theoretical-minded, CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has some fascinating thoughts here at the Lab on how the paywall turns the Times into a niche product and what it means for our concept of the “public.” And as usual, Ken Doctor thoughtfully answers many of the practical questions you’re asking right now.

Other thoughtful opinions: Poynter’s Bill Mitchell poses a lot of great business questions and wonders how the Times will handle putting the burden on its most loyal online-only users. Steve Yelvington reminds us that we’re not going to learn much here that we can apply to other papers, because “the Times is fundamentally in a different business than regional dailies” and “a single experiment with a single price point by a single newspaper is just a stab in the dark.” Before the announcement, former Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing, Forrester Research’s James McQuivey, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon gave the Times advice on constructing its paywall, almost none of which showed up in the Times’ plans. Two massive tech blogs, TechCrunch and Mashable, think the paywall won’t amount to much. Slate’s Jack Shafer says people will find ways to get around it, NYU’s Jay Rosen echoes C.W. Anderson’s thoughts on niche vs. public, and CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis doesn’t like the Times’ sense of entitlement.

The ephemera: The best stuff on Twitter about the announcement was collected at E&P In Exile and the new site MediaCritic. Steve Outing and Jason Fry don’t like the wait ’til 2011, and Cory Doctorow is skeptical that that’s even true. Former E&Pers Fitz & Jen interview a few newspaper execs and find that (surprise, surprise) the like the Times’ idea. So does Steven Brill of Journalism Online, who plans to roll out a few paywalls of his own soon. Dan Gillmor wants the Times to find out from readers what new features they’d pay for, and Jeff Sonderman makes two good points: “The major casualty of NYT paywall is sharing,” and “Knowing the ‘meter is running’ creates cautious viewing of the free articles.”

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Apple’s tablet to go public: Apple announced that it will unveil its “latest creation” (read: its new tablet) next Wednesday. Since the announcement came a day after word of the Times’ paywall plans broke, it was only natural that the rumors would merge. The Daily Intel’s Gabriel Sherman, who broke the story of those Times plans, quoted Times officials putting the Times-tablet-deal rumors to rest. The Wall Street Journal detailed Apple’s plans for the tablet to do to newspapers, magazines and TV what the iPod did to music. Meanwhile, Columbia j-student Vadim Lavrusik and TechCrunch’s Paul Carr got tired of the tablet hype — Lavrusik for the print industry and Carr for tech geeks. (The Week also has a great timeline of the rumors.)

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MediaNews goes bankrupt: Last Friday, MediaNews Group — a newspaper chain that publishes the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury-News, among others — announced it would file for bankruptcy protection. (A smaller chain, Morris Publishing Group, made the same announcement the day before.) For the facts and background of the filing, we’ve got a few sources: At the Lab, MediaNews veteran Martin Langeveld has a whole lot of history and insight on MediaNews chief Dean Singleton. News business analyst Alan Mutter tells us about the amazing fact that Singleton will come out of the filing unscathed but Hearst, which invested in MediaNews to save the San Francisco Chronicle, stands to lose $317 million in the deal. And MinnPost reports that the St. Paul Pioneer Press was the only MediaNews paper losing money.

Looking at the big picture, Ken Doctor says that bankruptcies like these are just a chance for newspapers to buy time while adjusting their strategy in “the fog of media war.” Steve Outing takes a glass-half-full approach, arguing that the downfall of old-media chains like MediaNews are a great opportunity for journalism startups to build a new news ecosystem.

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How much do Google News users read?: An annual study by research firm Outsell and Ken Doctor on online and offline news preferences made waves by reporting that 44 percent of Google News users scan headlines without clicking through to the original articles. PaidContent noted that Outsell has a dog in this fight; it openly advocates that news organizations should get more money from Google. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan was not impressed, giving a thorough critique of the study and its perceived implications. Syracuse j-prof Vin Crosbie also wondered whether the same pattern might be true with print headlines.

In a similar vein, BNET’s David Weir used comScore numbers to argue that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft support big newspapers, and Jeff Jarvis made one of his favorite arguments — in defense of the link.

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Heartbreak in Haiti: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the journalism and media connections to the largest news story in the world for the past two weeks — the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Several sites noted that Twitter led the way in breaking news of the quake and in raising money for relief. The money aspect is new, but as Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan noted last June, Twitter came of age a long time ago as a medium for breaking global news. That’s what it does. The coverage also provided an opportunity for discussion about the ethics of giving aid while reporting.

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Reading roundup: In addition to being out in front of the whole New York Times paywall story, Gabriel Sherman authored a nice, long think piece for The New Republic on the difficulties of one of America’s other great newspapers, The Washington Post. For what it’s worth, Post patriarch Donald Graham thought it was “not even a molehill.”

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan uses the economic concept of stock and flow to describe the delicate balance between timeliness and permanence the world of online media. It’s a brilliant idea — a must-read.

Finally, a promising new site named MediaCritic, run by Salon veteran Scott Rosenberg, citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor, and Lucasfilm’s Bill Gannon, had its soft launch this week. It looks like it’s going to include some nifty features, like Rosenberg’s regular curation of Twitter commentary on big media subjects.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
2. This Week in Review: The iPad’s skeptics, Murdoch’s first paywall move and a ‘Chatroulette for news’
3. This Week in Review: Newsweek on the block, Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall rumblings

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.

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