Freelancing, foreign correspondence, and risk: The Islamic militant group ISIS’s video depicting the murder of American journalist James Foley, released last week, has prompted an examination of the little-discussed issue of journalist kidnappings. Foley’s family released a letter he sent them — by having a fellow hostage memorize it — during his captivity, and Philip Balboni, CEO of GlobalPost (the organization with which Foley was working) gave a tribute to Foley.

Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, in prison in Egypt on a dubious conviction earlier this year, expressed his anger at Foley’s death, and the Times of London (via Gawker) reported on experts who believe the video was staged and Foley was beheaded afterward. Meanwhile, the mother of the other journalist being held by ISIS, freelancer Steven Sotloff (whose life was threatened in last week’s video), issued a video plea to ISIS to spare her son’s life.

Another journalist kidnapping ended safely this week, with American freelance journalist Peter Theo Curtis being released by an al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria after being held for two years. The New York Times reported that no ransom was paid by the family, but his return was made possible through extensive negotiation on Curtis’ behalf by the government of Qatar. Both the Times and The Washington Post took a closer look at Qatar’s growing role in mediating kidnapping cases like this one.

As The Associated Press’ Jessica Gresko noted, Foley, Sotloff, and Curtis are all freelance journalists, who make up nearly half of all the journalists killed in Syria since 2011. Gresko highlighted the plight of freelance foreign correspondents, who have very little institutional support and safety training. In The New Yorker, Steve Coll defended the right of hostages’ employers and families to pay ransoms, even if the U.S. government won’t. Coll also defended foreign correspondents against charges of recklessness, arguing that theirs is a job with a significant public purpose. “For the foreseeable future, freelance journalism will be vital to public understanding. It requires resources, not second-guessing,” he wrote.

At The New Republic, Tom Peter, who was briefly kidnapped in Syria in 2012, questioned the value of that public purpose in an environment in which so much of the American public questions the validity and credibility of virtually all journalistic work. “Why risk it all to get the facts for people who increasingly seem only to seek out the information they want and brand the stories and facts that don’t conform to their opinions as biased or inaccurate?” he asked.

Regarding the images of Foley’s video itself, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Christopher Massie highlighted news organizations’ difficult decisions on how much to publish, while Dan Gillmor at The Atlantic and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept lamented the editorial control that social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have gained over what we see online. Gillmor urged readers to work to decentralize the web, and Brian Fung of The Washington Post argued for consistent standards on posting sensitive content on social media. USC professor Philip Seib examined the influence of images like ISIS’s in the social media battleground over public opinion.

News consumption and loaded language in Ferguson: As the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, calmed down this week, there was some reflection on the way we consumed the story as it happened. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton cautioned that what many users got from Twitter and live streams was a narrow, one-sided, and unconfirmed picture of what was going on. Twitter, Circa’s Anthony De Rosa told Bilton, is “good for monitoring all the noise that is happening — and there are elements of truth in there — but you have to do a lot of work to authenticate what’s real and what’s not.” The Pew Research Center’s Jesse Holcomb used some survey data to examine the question of why Ferguson was missing from so many Facebook feeds, noting that a significant part of the news exposure on Facebook depends on whether users follow news organizations there. MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman explained how Facebook’s structure can lead to more of an echo chamber on stories like Ferguson than Twitter does.

The main media-related story from Ferguson this week was The New York Times’ publication of a profile of Michael Brown, the black teenager who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson. The piece described Brown as “no angel,” citing his dabbling in drugs and alcohol and his rapping with vulgar lyrics. That characterization was ripped throughout social media, and the Columbia Journalism Review contrasted the tone of the Times’ profiles of Brown and Wilson.

A Times editor initially defended the “no angel” phrase to The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple — it was intended to be a reference to the article’s lead, about an angelic vision Brown had — but the writer of the piece, John Eligon, expressed his regret about the phrase to Times public editor Margaret Sullivan. Like Eligon, Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley said that while the Times clearly erred with the “no angel” phrase, the piece was positive about Brown as a whole and didn’t imply that Brown deserved to be killed.

A few other pieces on Ferguson this week: The Lab’s Joseph Lichterman looked at the partnership between The Guardian and St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Ferguson coverage, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds looked at the sparse media coverage that Ferguson had gotten before Brown’s shooting. Josh Stearns of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation noted the differing counts of arrested journalists during the protests and wrote about finding a better way to track journalist arrests in the U.S.

Facebook, clickbait, and attention: Facebook has become known over the past couple of years as the hub for clickbait content, and it took a step toward ridding itself of that distinction this week with a change to its News Feed algorithm that will take into account how long people spend away from Facebook once they click on a link. If people jump right back to Facebook, the algorithm will downgrade that content on the assumption that people found the content uninteresting. VentureBeat’s Kia Kokalitcheva said bounce rate is an imperfect measure for engagement but an improvement nonetheless.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said that the change won’t necessarily hurt the reigning Facebook-sharing kings like Upworthy and BuzzFeed; they just have to improve their content to match the quality of their headlines. The Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan also said those sites should be fine by Facebook’s standards and noted that there might be a gap between what gets commonly referred to as clickbait and what Facebook considers clickbait.

At The Awl, John Herrman went further with that idea, pointing out that producers and consumers have vastly differing (and very malleable) definitions of clickbait: “For media consumers, it’s usually something along the lines of ‘things that I don’t think are important, or that I disagree with.’ For media producers, it’s usually something closer to ‘things that are not like the things I do.'” In addition, he pointed out that Facebook’s metric of time spent on site is pretty easy to game, and many of these sites are already doing just that.

Reading roundup: A few other things happening in the media and tech worlds this week:

— The Pew Research Internet Project released a fascinating study applying an old communication theory called the “spiral of silence” — the idea that people who hold a minority opinion are less likely to talk about it, thus furthering others’ perception that it’s a socially unacceptable minority opinion — to social media. They found that people were less willing to share their views on the NSA surveillance story on social media than in person, and less likely if they believed others in their social network didn’t agree with them. You can find good summaries and interpretations of the study at The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and Techcrunch.

— Amazon bought the live-streaming gaming site Twitch, which had been courted by Google among others, for $970 million this week. Analysis of the deal centered on Twitch’s ability to capture the attention of some coveted demographics for long periods of time, giving Amazon some potentially lucrative new advertising opportunities. The best posts breaking down the deal came from Ben Thompson, Recode, ReadWrite, Wired, and The Guardian.

— Turner Broadcasting, which owns CNN, TNT, and TBS, among other channels, announced it would offer buyouts to about 600 of its 9,000 employees as part of a broader cost-cutting program that will probably eventually include layoffs.

— Finally, a few pieces worth a read this weekend: A new report by the Knight Foundation evaluating what’s worked and what hasn’t for winners of the Knight News Challenge, a post by Ken Doctor examining Gannett’s strategy as well as newspapers’ situation more generally, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jihii Jolly on examining and giving more thought to your own media diet.

Police aggressiveness and media coverage in Ferguson: In the second week of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police, the targeting, threats, and violence toward journalists only escalated, with at least six more journalists arrested, including Getty Images photographer Scott Olson. Ryan Devereaux, a reporter for First Look Media’s The Intercept, spent the night in jail, being arrested (though not charged) because of “failure to disperse,” as he explained in a first-person account.

In addition to the arrests, at least four reporters caught police on tape threatening to mace, shoot, “bust your head,” or kill them. (The officer who made the latter threat was suspended.) Forty-eight media organizations signed a letter protesting the violent treatment of journalists and the lack of information being provided about those incidents and Brown’s shooting. As the week went on, journalists began being harassed and threatened by protesters as well when they attempted to record looting.

Bob Butler, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, chastised the police for their disturbingly aggressive behavior, and The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson made the case for why the treatment of reporters matters: When police arrest or threaten journalists, it’s not just about them. “They are trying to decrease the flow of information that the journalists can provide the rest of us. They are trying to keep all of us in the dark,” he wrote. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi explained how reporters were adjusting to the stonewalling and danger in a situation that ranged beyond what many of them had ever been trained for, and on Medium, Quinn Norton gave some useful advice for reporters on covering civil unrest. Columbia Journalism Review’s Jonathan Peters added a primer for journalists on their First Amendment rights in these situations.

A few publications highlighted the stellar work being done by journalists in Ferguson: Columbia Journalism Review’s Deron Lee gave a thorough review of the excellent coverage by local news organizations, and Time’s Olivier Laurent went behind the coverage by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s photojournalists, while Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin looked at the work the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’ alt-weekly, has done on the protests. The Huffington Post announced it would establish a crowdfunded fellowship with the St. Louis Beacon to keep a reporter in Ferguson for the next year, though many, including The Awl’s Matt Buchanan, Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco, and 10,000 Words’ Karen Fratti, wondered why such a massive media organization is crowdfunding a position it should be able to easily pay for itself. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram argued that it’s a smart move for both HuffPo and the Beacon.

There were some questions about the media’s behavior in Ferguson, though. Photojournalist Abe Van Dyke explained why he was embarrassed to be part of the media in Ferguson — it reached a point, he said, where the media was “no longer simply reporting what is happening but rather becoming a hindrance and making the situation worse.” Ryan Schuessler, who had been covering Ferguson with Al Jazeera America, also expressed disgust at the media’s tone-deaf behavior, concluding that “In the beginning there was a recognizable need for media presence, but this is the other extreme. They need time to work through this as a community, without the cameras.” Similarly, BagNews’ Michael Shaw said the media presence has gotten so heavy that it’s become difficult to tell what’s the story and what’s spectacle.

Noah Rothman of the conservative blog Hot Air questioned whether the press was too closely identifying itself with the protesters, a point echoed by Politico’s Dylan Byers. But Slate’s Josh Voorhees countered that the press is siding with protesters because “what the people in the streets of Ferguson want is the same thing the journalists were sent there to find” — namely, the truth about Michael Brown’s killing. M. Scott Brauer of the photojournalism blog dvafoto provided a good roundup of the discussion of both police brutality toward journalists and media coverage of the protests.

Following Ferguson on Twitter: Much of this action on the streets in Ferguson was reaching us through the filter of Twitter, which for many people was a nonstop feed of the latest reports, photos, and video from both professional reporters and protesters. The New York Times’ David Carr argued that this story highlights one of Twitter’s greatest strengths in its ability to capture the interests and informational needs of a broad range of news consumers that the traditional media often misses, including communities of color. Politico’s Byron Tau explained that it took the arrests of two reporters last week for Ferguson to finally grab the establishment political press’s attention, and a Pew study showed that while Twitter picked up the story before cable news, their attention rose and fell mostly in tandem.

There are downsides to the way Twitter mediates events like Ferguson’s protests as well: Politico’s Alex Byers talked to several experts who said Twitter’s free-for-all nature fused with the chaos in Ferguson “to create an environment that spotlights startling developments over measured action or solutions.” Still, many users have remarked on how much better Twitter has been for following the situation in Ferguson than Facebook, which has been inundated with videos of people being dumped with buckets of ice water for most of the week.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram highlighted several reasons for the differences between the two platforms, focusing on Facebook’s symmetrical following model and the algorithms behind its News Feed. Likewise, Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noted that Facebook’s algorithm has prioritized personalized relevance over newness, which hurts it for minute-by-minute stories like Ferguson. Digiday’s John McDermott pointed to the social norms on Facebook that emphasize fun, light-hearted material at the expense of current events. The American Journalism Review’s Lisa Rossi advised readers to spread their news consumption across platforms, and Mandy Brown of The Verge called for more transparent and sophisticated filters that can help us comprehend information at the same speed we’re sharing it.

The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor praised the citizen journalism coming out of Ferguson, particularly the valuable documentation of police brutality. At the Local News Lab, Josh Stearns looked at what local journalists can do to aid community-driven information efforts like those fueling the Ferguson story, and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis emphasized the importance of journalists to start serving communities by listening to and understanding them, rather than charging in from the outside.

A brutal execution, and censorship questions: The Islamic militant group ISIS posted a video on YouTube this week of its execution of freelance photojournalist James Foley, who was kidnapped in Syria two years ago. As The New York Times explained, the video was meant to intimidate the U.S. into stopping its airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, and concluded with a threat to kill another freelance journalist. President Obama said he was appalled by Foley’s beheading but declared he would continue the airstrikes, and Obama administration officials revealed they had tried and failed a secret operation to rescue Foley earlier this year.

Reuters’ Jack Shafer traced some of the history of videotaped murders of journalists and argued that ISIS will accomplish none of its goals regarding American policy and public opinion as a result of this video, though it may serve as an effective recruiting tool. The New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya and Christine Haughney examined the immense dangers journalists are facing both at home and abroad.

Foley’s friends and colleagues paid tribute to his immense courage and selflessness. You can get a good sense of the kind of man he was through articles by Vox’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Brian Stelter, and BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel.

The discussion also shifted to the spread of the video on social media, as journalists voiced their opposition to other journalists and news organizations who posted screenshots and clips from the video. In the U.K., police warned that sharing and even viewing the video could be grounds for arrest under terrorism legislation, something Techdirt’s Mike Masnick scoffed at. News organizations that published images from the video, several of them tabloids belonging to News Corp, defended their decisions.

As Foreign Policy’s Shane Harris and The Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson reported, the social networks themselves, particularly YouTube and Twitter, scrambled to block the photo, with Twitter suspending accounts that post graphic images. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram objected to that decision, arguing that the decision over whether to view images or footage from the execution should be our decision as users.

The Guardian’s James Ball pointed out the departure of this decision from Twitter’s very laissez-faire past on free speech. He concluded that “if Twitter has decided to make editorial decisions, even on a limited basis, it is vital that its criteria are clearly and openly stated in advance, and that they are consistently and evenly applied,” and PandoDaily’s David Holmes also called for consistency on Twitter’s part. The Berkman Center’s David Weinberger noted what a difficult decision this is for YouTube and Twitter, saying that by becoming used as a news distribution system, “Twitter has been vested with a responsibility, and a trust, it did not ask for.”

As for the personal decision to view, The Guardian’s Ball urged serious self-examination before clicking on such links, while also wondering if we’re disproportionately concerned about graphic images of white Westerners. And Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed used this as an example of the downside of Twitter’s (generally) unfiltered stream of news.

Reading roundup: There were a few stories about the media this week that didn’t have to do with violence and repression. Here’s a sampling:

— Gawker published an internal Time Inc. spreadsheet, obtained from a union representative, that showed that Sports Illustrated online staffers are being evaluated based on, among other things, producing “content that [is] beneficial to advertiser relationship.” Those evaluations may have played a role in SI’s recent layoffs. A Time Inc. exec “clarified” to CNN’s Brian Stelter that that evaluation means “Does what they create or who they are capture the attention of Madison Avenue?” which, as Politico’s Dylan Byers noted, sounds like kind of the same thing. Time’s Norman Pearlstine gave a further defense to New York’s Gabriel Sherman, calling the reaction overblown.

— After experimenting with the change earlier this summer, Twitter officially added some favorited tweets from people you follow to users’ feeds. It seems exactly no one liked the change, and The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer said that while we have already been seeing tweets from people we don’t follow in our streams (those would be ads), this change is damaging because it breaks Twitter’s “favorite” function, and TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas made a similar point a bit more bluntly.

— The anonymous duo who busted BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson for serial plagiarism went after CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week, accusing him of lifting from a wide variety of publications. Zakaria was accused of plagiarism in 2012, and a spokesman for Time magazine, which reviewed his work at that point, said it would review his material again, though The Washington Post and CNN said they saw nothing in these new allegations to justify a new review. Zakaria offered his own defense to Politico’s Dylan Byers, and Steve Buttry gave some tips for avoiding plagiarism through attribution and linking.

— Finally, three smart pieces on where the news business is headed: Journalism professor Nikki Usher in Columbia Journalism Review with some insights into her research on the new wave of news aggregation apps, French newspaper exec Frederic Filloux on the future of mobile news apps, and NYU professor Clay Shirky with a warning call to journalists working in newspapers.

One aspect of the announcement that caught quite a bit of attention was Dixon’s statement that his firm views BuzzFeed as more of a tech company than a media company. Gawker and New York Observer alum Elizabeth Spiers objected to that description, and tech writer Ben Thompson sifted through the claim, concluding that while BuzzFeed is still primarily a media company, it has a disconnect from traditional media logic and an ability to cheaply scale that make it uniquely valuable.

Recode’s Peter Kafka looked at BuzzFeed’s $850 million valuation and said that if BuzzFeed is a media company, then that number is a huge overvaluation, but if it’s a tech company, it’s a steal. And for everyone saying “$850 million for a bunch of listicles and cat GIFs?!” Fusion’s Felix Salmon argued that BuzzFeed is different from other media companies in that it doesn’t sell audiences to advertisers, but instead sells its expertise in creating content that young, mobile audiences love. “The best way to think of BuzzFeed’s various products, then, is probably as a proof of concept: it’s a way to show advertisers that the company is able to reach a large, young, mobile, social audience in a multitude of different ways,” Salmon wrote.

Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen examined what it means for BuzzFeed to be, as Dixon called it, a “full-stack” startup, and investor Om Malik looked at the potential hazards for BuzzFeed, specifically its reliance on Facebook and the continued success of native advertising. The Awl’s Matt Buchanan noted that BuzzFeed is moving even deeper into Facebook and other social networks, creating content that only exists there, rather than on BuzzFeed’s site. And TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said the native ads on which BuzzFeed depends may be a fickle form.

As Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram pointed out, BuzzFeed’s investors are betting that it can scale into a massive media company without losing the agility it has so prized, and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Felix Gillette noted that its cost of production and scale of competition are about to increase just as dramatically as its cash on hand. The New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller explored BuzzFeed’s move toward higher-quality content and the larger accompanying shift online from search to social.

Elsewhere, Mike Shields of The Wall Street Journal looked at the deal’s implications for one of BuzzFeed’s biggest competitors, The Huffington Post, and Forbes’ Eric Jackson made the case that Yahoo should have bought BuzzFeed. Gawker’s J.K. Trotter noticed that BuzzFeed has removed more than 4,000 posts this year, and Slate’s Will Oremus talked to BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti about why: The posts didn’t meet its editorial standards for a variety of reasons, and they were created before BuzzFeed saw itself as journalistic. Poynter’s Kelly McBride looked at the ethics of unpublishing in light of the situation.

Gannett’s spinoff and future of print: Gannett became the latest media company to spin its print properties off from its broadcast properties into a separate company last week, announcing a split set to take place next year with the broadcasting unit assuming all of the company’s debt. The Lab’s Ken Doctor, who had suggested just a day before the announcement that Gannett could use such a split, gave several observations on the current wave of breakups, arguing that despite the initial cash infusion for newspaper units, they’ll ultimately result in less of a financial cushion for those properties.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis argued that these newspaper companies are being spun off because the business is going to continue to get worse and they’re punting on the work of transforming it. “What these spin-offs signals is that media companies do not have the stomach, patience, capital, or guts to do the hard work that is still needed to finish turning around legacy media,” he wrote. The New York Times’ David Carr painted a similarly depressing picture of the spun-off newspaper industry, but concluded that its decline is no one’s fault in particular. Jarvis countered that the decline of newspapers has indeed been journalists’ fault, and it should prompt not fatalism but renewed action and innovation.

At USA Today, Michael Wolff was more optimistic, seeing some potential for newspapers to rethink what business they’re in and reinvent themselves. And Poynter’s Rick Edmonds said there’s no reason to declare these newspaper spinoffs failures before they even occur, and USA Today’s Rem Rieder said there’s a way forward for newspapers despite print’s decline: Find enough in digital subscriptions and advertising to keep revenue flat after years of declines. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson added that while there’s no certain model for making money off of news, there are several promising avenues, many of them in digital-native outfits or organizations with substantial private funds behind them.

Gannett also announced it’s restructuring the newsrooms at five of its papers to cut down on resources for editing and design while increasing the emphasis on analytics, as Poynter’s Sam Kirkland reported. Columbia Journalism Review’s Corey Hutchins talked to an editor of one of the papers about what the changes will mean, and Jim Romenesko rounded up details of the news that journalists have to re-apply for their jobs, as well as the new job descriptions.

Gawker responded by first disabling all images in comments as a temporary solution, then bringing back its old pending comment system, in which only comments from approved users are immediately visible, and the rest are put in a separate “pending” queue that’s visible only with an extra click. As both Business Insider’s Caroline Moss and the Lab’s Justin Ellis pointed out, the tension here is between Gawker founder Nick Denton’s vision of its commenting platform, Kinja, as an open, collaborative, and anonymous environment and the practicalities of allowing that kind of freedom to Gawker users.

BuzzFeed’s Myles Tanzer talked to Gawker staffers who expressed frustration at the disconnect between Denton’s vision for Kinja and the difficult, time-consuming reality of wading through comments looking for quality material. And PandoDaily’s Paul Carr pointed out the inconsistency between its handling of abusive content that affects its staffers and the content it posts about others.

Reading roundup: A few other stories and discussions that have emerged in the busy last couple of weeks:

— After making a bid for Time Warner earlier this summer, Rupert Murdoch announced his entertainment media company 21st Century Fox was walking away from negotiations with Time Warner, which had been taking a hard line and refusing to negotiate. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, media watchers still see the deal as in play eventually, even if it’s no longer seen as inevitable. The Guardian’s Heidi Moore wondered whether we’re seeing the decline of the great media moguls, without anyone to take their place. Meanwhile, News Corp’s profits dropped, but Murdoch continued to express his bullishness on print.

— The New York Times announced that it would now refer to torture by that name, rather than the term “harsh” or “brutal” interrogation techniques. The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Barry Eisler criticized the paper’s reasoning for finally using the term, and journalism professor Dan Gillmor called for the Times to apologize for referring to it incorrectly for years. NYU’s Jay Rosen analyzed the factors behind the Times’ refusal to use the term for so long and its change of mind.

— In the ongoing battle between Amazon and the book publisher Hachette, more than 900 writers paid for ad in The New York Times siding with Hachette and urging readers to complain to Amazon. Amazon responded with a letter to readers of its own, urging them instead to complain to Hachette. TechCrunch’s John Biggs and the Times’ David Streitfeld criticized Amazon for its misuse of a quote from George Orwell, and writers John Scalzi (two posts), Chuck Wendig, and Matt Wallace picked apart Amazon’s argument. Writer Christopher Wright and Slashgear’s Nate Swanner gave more “a pox on both their houses” analysis.

— Two potentially useful posts: The American Press Institute’s Kevin Loker on the best strategies for using events to generate revenue for news organizations, and journalism professor Dan Kennedy with a guide to blogging like a journalist.

— Finally, two thought-provoking pieces: Mat Honan of Wired on what happened when he liked everything on Facebook for two days, and Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic on the ad-based model as the Internet’s original sin (along with Jeff Jarvis’ response).

Meanwhile, Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo reported, based on a reader survey that was recently sent out, that The Times is considering another subscription option, this one in print: A condensed print edition that would be about half the price of the current paper.

— First Look Media, the news venture founded last year by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, announced a shift this week in a blog post by Omidyar. Instead of building a family of “digital magazines” as it had initially intended, it will focus on the two it’s already launched — one built around Glenn Greenwald’s work and another around Matt Taibbi’s — while planning on doubling its staff to 50 and centering its work on more tech-based experimentation with news. Jay Rosen, a consultant to First Look, offered his interpretation of the announcement, as did the Lab’s Justin Ellis and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram.

— The Washington Post announced that it will launch Storyline, a sister site to Wonkblog, which had been piloted by Ezra Klein, who’s since departed to found Vox. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone and Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin both gave some details about The Post’s plans: It will center on policy issues, and will be data-driven and topic-oriented.

— The New Yorker relaunched its website last week, a move that includes the addition of a metered paywall. The Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson went through the redesign, and Capital New York’s Nicole Levy and Peter Sterne went deep into what’s at stake with the overhaul.

— E. W. Scripps and Journal Communications announced a deal in which they will merge their broadcast operations and spin off their newspapers into a separate company. Here at the Lab, Joshua Benton explained how the move marks a trend of media companies looking to narrow their portfolios after years of talk of diversification.

Finally, USA Today’s Michael Wolff and Financial Review’s Neil Chenoweth looked at two behind-the-scenes players on each side who are helping engineer this possible deal: Time Warner’s Gary Ginsberg, in Wolff’s piece, and Fox’s Chase Carey, in Chenoweth’s.

Going beyond clickbait and its backlash: “Clickbait” has been one of this summer’s ongoing topics of discussion in the media world, and The Daily Beast’s Emily Shire examined the anti-clickbait movement — exemplified by The Onion’s Clickhole and Twitter accounts like @SavedYouAClick — as evidence that people are getting wise to the premise of duping and manipulating readers through unnecessarily coy headlines. Vox’s Nilay Patel said clickbait headlines still work (most of the time) because they’re essentially games for the reader to play, and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon posited that the main problem with clickbait is not the headlines, but the disappointing content that goes with them. “And yet,” he said, “the blame often falls more heavily on marketing than the people churning out stuff that sucks.”

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick provided some data on the connection between attention and sharing that’s the foundation of most clickbait’s popularity, and found that there are many readers who spend very little time on pages after clicking but share the article anyway, sharing essentially based on the headline alone. But beyond those headline-sharers and the people who read on and are disappointed with the content, there are also a significant number of people who spend substantial time reading an article and are also quite likely to share it. Borthwick urged publishers to spend more time attracting those kinds of readers, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram described Borthwick’s findings as two versions of the online world: one noisy, fast, and click-driven; and the other deeper, slower, less noticeable, but still widely read and shared.

One of the most prominent sites built around the former model, Upworthy, reported late last week that by far their most viewed, shared, and closely read pieces are not their own editorial content, but their native ads. At Contently, Joe Lazauskas gave a few reasons for Upworthy’s remarkable success with native ads: It likely pays to relentlessly promote those ads on social networks, and the type of blandly feel-good content that makes for the best ads is exactly the same type of content Upworthy’s already producing in its editorial content.

Was SI scooping or suckered?: Sports Illustrated scored the biggest breaking sports news story of the year last Friday when it ran a first-person piece by NBA star LeBron James revealing that he would re-sign with his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. The essay was written as an as-told-to piece with veteran SI journalist Lee Jenkins. Deadspin, The Wall Street Journal, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer all provided some details about how the story came about: Jenkins got wind of James’ decision on Thursday, pitched a first-person piece to his editors at SI, interviewed James and wrote the piece Thursday night, and handed it off to his editors on Friday. Deadspin reported that the idea for a first-person essay was first proposed by James’ camp, but The New York Times reported that it came from Jenkins.

The Times’ Richard Sandomir criticized SI’s strategy, saying the magazine gave up an opportunity to put some journalistic weight behind a big story. Said Sandomir: “the approach cast Sports Illustrated more as a public-relations ally of James than as the strong journalistic standard-bearer it has been for decades.” In an online chat, The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten echoed the point, calling it an example of a journalistic mindset in which “being first is overvalued and being good is too often beside the point, or financially imprudent.”

Craig Calcaterra of NBC Sports questioned what exactly Sandomir was expecting SI to add to the story, characterizing it as commodity news as opposed to a substantial story crying out for in-depth reporting. Sandomir, he said, is “fetishizing the business of Serious Journalism at the expense of understanding what sports fans actually care about, appreciating how informed sports fans already are and asserting that the reporter’s highest and best function is to get between fans and the news as opposed to delivering it to them.” Poynter’s Sam Kirkland said it’s still possible for SI to break the story this way and do deeper journalism on it as well. (Jenkins was in Cleveland this week reporting a feature on James’ decision.) And Deadspin’s Kevin Draper looked at the other reporters who scrambled to get this scoop.

Reading roundup: A few other pieces to read from this week:

— Industry analyst Alan Mutter pulled together some simple numbers to remind us just how dire the newspaper industry’s situation is, and Temple University’s David Boardman criticized the Newspaper Association of America’s Carolyn Little’s rosy speech and instead urged newspapers to drop to one day a week in print. Little issued a defense of her picture of the industry.

— The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s public comment period on its proposed “fast lane” plans for Internet providers was supposed to end on Tuesday, but it was postponed until today because a surge of comments from net neutrality supporters overwhelmed its system. (The FCC passed 1 million comments this week.) The Washington Post’s Brian Fung explained the proposal and backlash, and at The Guardian, Dan Gillmor urged net neutrality advocates to make their voices heard.

— Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo profiled the new Philadelphia-based online local journalism initiative by Washington Post/TBD/Digital First veteran Jim Brady, Brother.ly, and Brady talked with Poynter’s Butch Ward about what he’s learned about local news.

— Finally, Nebraska professor Matt Waite wrote a thoughtful and important piece on the value of doubt in data journalism, with some ideas on how to better incorporate it.

In a weeklong series, PBS MediaShift took a deeper look at what journalism schools are doing to meet the growing demand for skilled, critically thinking data journalists. The series included an interview on the state of data journalism with Alex Howard of Columbia’s Tow Center, tips from The Upshot’s Derek Willis on “interviewing” data to understand it and find its stories, a look at how journalism schools are teaching data journalism, and practical suggestions of ways to incorporate data into journalism education.

Elsewhere in journalism education, the American Journalism Review’s Michael King examined enrollment declines at American journalism schools, noting the tricky question of whether these declines are a leading or lagging indicator — something primarily indicative, in other words, of journalism’s last several years or next several years. And David Ryfe, director of the University of Iowa’s journalism school, looked at the difficulty of fitting the dozens of skills desired by employers into a relatively small number of journalism courses.

— The Wall Street Journal celebrated its 125th anniversary this week with an archive looking at how they’ve covered big news events in the past as well as a special report. The Lab’s Joseph Lichterman took a closer look at the Journal’s anniversary offerings, and Capital New York talked to Journal managing editor Gerard Baker. The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, meanwhile, had a fascinating look at the Journal’s design through the years.

— The Pew Research Center released a study on the declining number of reporters covering U.S. state legislatures and what’s being done to fill the gaps. The Lab’s Joseph Lichterman wrote a good summary.

— This week’s handiest piece: Sarah Marshall’s summary of the tips Johanna Geary, head of news at Twitter UK, gave to British journalists about using Tweetdeck as a reporting tool.

— The U.S. National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed another finding on surveillance this week: The Washington Post reported that the number of ordinary American Internet users in communications intercepted by the NSA far outnumber the legally targeted foreigners. The Intercept also reported on several prominent Muslim American academics and activists who were monitored by the NSA. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald talked to Wired about why the story is important, while PandoDaily’s Paul Carr questioned Greenwald’s hesitation in publishing the story.

— Finally, the Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan talked to Cornell’s Tarleton Gillespie about a wide range of issues surrounding algorithms, including personalized news, news judgment, and clickbait.

The review has been off the last two weeks, so this week’s review covers the past couple of weeks.

Facebook’s ethically dubious experiment: Facebook was under fire again this week for collecting data from its users without their knowledge, this time in conjunction with Cornell University professors for an experiment on the influence of Facebook’s News Feed on its users’ emotions. The study, which was published in May, involved skewing what nearly 700,000 users saw for a week in their News Feeds with more positive or negative words and then measuring the positivity and negativity in their own posts.

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer has a good explanation of the procedural and ethical details behind the study: Cornell’s institutional review board, which reviews all research the university does involving human subjects, wasn’t involved until after the experiment was finished. And as Forbes’ Kashmir Hill reported, the statement in Facebook’s terms of service that it can use its users’ data for research wasn’t added until after the study was conducted. It’s not clear what review the study did get — in another Hill article, Facebook said it conducted an “internal review” of the study. The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance also reported on the misgivings of the study’s editor as well as her reasons for approving it.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram put together a good summary of the criticism and defenses of the study’s ethics from people within and outside Facebook. British regulators said they’re investigating Facebook on the study, and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg apologized on the company’s behalf — not for the study itself, but for communicating it poorly. One of the study’s authors, Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, defended the study’s design while apologizing for “any anxiety it caused” and noting that Facebook’s internal review processes have improved since the study was conducted.

Numerous writers condemned Facebook’s callousness in running the study, including Mike Masnick of Techdirt, James Poniewozik of Time, Jordan Ellenberg of Slate, and Alex Wilhelm of Techcrunch. Wired’s Katie Collins argued that the study reminds us that “Facebook as a company trades in information, not people,” and both Charles Arthur of The Guardian and David Holmes of PandoDaily warned that the study indicates Facebook’s immense power and its willingness to use that power for ignoble ends.

Several researchers published defenses of Facebook: The University of Texas’ Tal Yarkoni argued that concerns about Facebook manipulating its users’ experience are overblown because the News Feed is an entirely artificial environment, the site of constant manipulation. Northeastern’s Brian Keegan argued that “every A/B test is a psych experiment.” And in a more measured post, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said that too much of the criticism has narrowly focused on Facebook because it provided a concrete point on which to focus their anxiety about big data.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pushed back against those defenses, arguing that the concern about manipulation is a legitimate one: “it is clear that the powerful have increasingly more ways to engineer the public,” she wrote. “That, to me, is a scarier and more important question than whether or not such research gets published.” Design researcher Sebastian Deterding had the most thorough ethical breakdown of the study, explaining the clash of opinions as a collision between understandings of the study as academic research and as social media A/B testing. At The Atlantic, Sara Watson said the controversy centers on the question of whether data science can consider itself a science.

Sociologist Janet Vertesi said this study points up the larger issue of increasing corporate funding of academic research. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford called for future experimental studies to be made opt-in, and at Wired, Evan Selinger and Woodrow Hertzog urged the development of a “People’s Terms of Service Agreement.”

A big court win for broadcast: Aereo, a startup that allowed users to pay to stream over-the-air television by renting tiny antennas, lost its case in the U.S. Supreme Court last week in a big victory for broadcasters. In its majority decision, the court stated that Aereo was not so much an equipment provider (as the company claimed) as a cable system that transmitted copyrighted content. Cable carriers have to pay retransmission fees for the over-the-air networks they broadcast, which Aereo was trying to avoid. Aereo suspended its service in the wake of the decision while it determines if it can find a way to continue, while its streaming-TV competitors began to move in on its spot in the market.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Public Knowledge attorney John Bergmayer, and Notre Dame law professor Mark McKenna all critiqued the legal foundations of the decision, concluding that its vague definition of why Aereo was substantially like a cable system provides little guidance for future cases and leaves the door open for a raft of legal challenges and differing conclusions. At The Guardian, Julian Sanchez argued that if future courts don’t care much about technological differences between Aereo and cable systems, the ruling’s precedent could endanger a whole range of cloud-based services, and Vox’s Timothy B. Lee made a similar point about the perilous future of cloud storage. Gigaom’s Derrick Harris said the impact on cloud services won’t be as severe as feared, but DVR could be challenged.

Fox has already used the Aereo decision to support its case against a streaming-TV service by Dish, and Variety’s Ted Johnson looked more closely at several possible outcomes from the ruling: rising TV bills and retransmission fees, more timidity among startups, and a broader legal definition of what constitutes a “public performance.” Forbes’ Sarah Jeong said we’ll never know the innovative startups we’ve lost as a result of this ruling.

Recode’s Peter Kafka said that while the decision helps the TV industry in the short run, it could hamper its development in the long run, since a legal Aereo would have pushed it to innovate more aggressively in light of its inevitable disruption. Instead, he said, “they’ll be sticking with lucrative business as usual for now. Pretty sure we’ve seen this show before.” Michael Learmonth of the International Business Times made a similar point. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Laskow said local TV news may have avoided catastrophe with the ruling, since a decision in Aereo’s favor may have eventually meant reduced retransmission fee revenue or even a move by the networks to pay TV.

Resolution and continued questions in hacking case: After at least three years at the center of the British media spotlight, News Corp’s phone hacking scandal reached something resembling a denouement last week, when the trial of two of its principal figures concluded with the acquittal of Rebekah Brooks and the conviction of her deputy, Andy Coulson, on a conspiracy charge. Brooks, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper holdings, proclaimed herself “vindicated” by her acquittal amid speculation News Corp might deploy her to Australia. Coulson, the former editor of the now-defunct News Corp tabloid News of the World, was hired as Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman in 2010, a move for which Cameron apologized last week.

News Corp’s trouble is certainly not over, though. Scotland Yard informed Murdoch it wants to interview him in their investigation into the phone-hacking case, and in the U.S., the FBI is still investigating whether anyone from the company may have broken American law. The Daily Beast’s Peter Jukes reported that the FBI has 80,000 emails from News Corp’s New York servers, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said that while it will take quite a bit of firepower to go after Murdoch, his potential influence is being substantially diminished.

At USA Today, Michael Wolff noted how Murdoch was distanced from Brooks’ and Coulson’s trial, and The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta wondered whether the British tabloid press will be chastened by the embarrassment that the trial was for their industry. At The Guardian, Suzanne Moore said the scandal exposed the coziness between British journalists and politicians, and The Economist said it diminished the political importance of the British press.

The Telegraph argued that the trial was an underwhelming spectacle that ultimately showed there isn’t a conspiracy among the press against the public, but in a scathing review of the scandal and the trial, The Guardian’s Nick Davies said that despite the not-guilty verdicts, the News Corp newspaper empire’s corruption and coarsening of British public culture was on full display. The Independent’s Cahal Milmo and James Musick also reviewed News of the World’s behavior in the scandal, emphasizing its willingness to cut ethical corners in order to land scoops.

The Guardian also expressed its hope that the era in which the British tabloid insisted that there was no right to privacy had ended. “In its place should come respect for the universal right to privacy, honoured by all those who wield power – a mighty news company no less than the state itself,” the editorial stated. The Guardian’s media columnist, Roy Greenslade, criticized the British press for its shoddy coverage of the case.

Egypt jails three journalists: Three Al Jazeera English journalists who had been arrested in Egypt in December were sentenced last week to seven to 10 years in prison on dubious terrorism-related charges after a surreal and chaotic trial. The Guardian had a vivid account of the verdict, while The New York Times focused on the response by the U.S. government.

Journalists around the world rallied to the jailed trio’s cause, including protests by hundreds of journalists in London. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the verdict as a politicized result with no connection to the law, asserting that “Egypt cannot be allowed to normalize its international relationships so long as it continues to jail journalists.” Despite the pressure from numerous Western governments, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he wouldn’t interfere with the court’s decision.

Reading roundup: A few of the other stories and discussions that have merited some attention over the past couple of weeks:

— Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon reported that The New York Times will close more than half of its blogs, including its aggregative news blog The Lede, as part of a long move away from blogs at the paper. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram expressed concern that The Times will lose some of the innovative drive that came with the blogs, though Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said moving away from blogs could be a good thing for The Times to encourage continual experimentation, as long as its journalists can integrate what they’ve learned from them into the rest of their work. Blogging pioneer Dave Winer said The Times’ blogs were never truly blogs because they were edited and impersonal, while PandoDaily’s David Holmes countered that we shouldn’t worry about what’s blogging and what’s not.

— SCOTUSblog, one of the top sources of U.S. Supreme Court news and analysis, had its appeal for a congressional press pass from the Senate Daily Press Gallery denied last week based on concerns about it independence from the law practice of its publisher, Tom Goldstein. Goldstein wrote a defense of his site’s credentialing case, one echoed by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. The Columbia Journalism Review reviewed the history of SCOTUSblog’s application to the Senate press gallery to critique the gallery’s decision. SCOTUSblog also got support from the Newspaper Guild-CWA.

— Upworthy released the source code for its preferred metric, attention minutes, which focuses on time spent on a site rather than number of visits or shares. BuzzFeed explained what’s in it for Upworthy, and Digiday’s Ricardo Bilton, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Fiona Lowenstein, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram all looked at what other publishers think of using attention as a primary metric.

— Finally, the Columbia Journalism Review went deep into Jeff Bezos’ efforts to restore The Washington Post’s global ambition. It’s a lengthy, well-reported look at some important changes underway there.

— A couple of other interesting studies released this week: The Tow Center published a study on the use of user-generated content in global TV and online news, and a group of organizations led by the Digital Media Law Project released a study examining who gets press credentials (and who doesn’t) and why. You can read pieces on the study at the Columbia Journalism Review and here at the Lab.

— Finally, two fascinating peeks behind the curtain at NPR: Melody Kramer described at Source how she and Wright Bryan developed a data analytics dashboard for NPR journalists, and Brian Boyer explained how the NPR visuals team works.

Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici also pointed out the increase in sensors and other wearable or mobile systems that are measuring mountains of user data, only a very small portion of which is being analyzed. On the financial side, Meeker presented some numbers suggesting that tech’s role in the market isn’t approaching the bubbly levels of the dotcom bust era, as Recode’s James Temple noted, though Fortune’s Dan Primack argued that Meeker was selectively omitting data indicating abnormally high VC valuations of tech companies.

For those in traditional journalism, Benton broke down what he called the scariest chart in Meeker’s slide deck, which shows that despite the decline in print advertising, it still far outstrips the attention paid to print, which continues to drop annually. Benton noted that while one could argue that print may be a medium distinctly suited for advertising, newspapers need to reckon with the fact that “Print advertising is not coming back. It will fall further. Substantially further.” On the flip side, he said, “mobile is eating the world, and most news organizations make only a pittance off it.”

— On the New York Times and innovation front: In Politico magazine, David Warsh criticized the Times’ recently released Innovation Report as short-sighted, while French media executive Frédéric Filloux praised the paper’s digital adaptation and said it could conceivably even drop print and survive financially. Here at the Lab, Times news analytics director James Robinson explained a tool the Times is using to track the flow of traffic and audience attention across the site, and Benton noted that the paper was restructuring its Page 1 meetings to be more digital in focus, as the innovation report had recommended.

— The New York Times’ David Carr profiled Medium, the publisher-as-platform run by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame. Ricardo Bilton of Digiday looked into its prospects for bringing in revenue as well.

— Finally, Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum analyzed some historical newspaper data to make the case that newspapers have been relying on inflated advertising revenue and must extract more revenue from their readers as they did before about 1980.

Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor tied the report’s findings to Dean Baquet’s hiring, outlining the need for the generally non-digital Baquet to make a digital splash and the barriers to his doing so. Derek Willis, who works on The Times’ new data journalism site, The Upshot, urged his colleagues at the paper to be more proactive about trying digital tools rather than blaming the system. Journalism professor Carrie Brown-Smith sympathized with Willis’ frustration and noted that opposition to change is broader than The Times, and it’s deeply rooted in organizational routines and individual psychology.

At the American Journalism Review, Mark Potts also noted a similarity between The Times’ situation and that of so many other newspapers over the past two decades. He proposed abandoning the current incremental approach in favor of the radical change of dropping the print edition to unshackle the paper from print routines and shift it toward a mobile-first mindset. Peter Lauria of BuzzFeed also saw in the report a potential future without a print Times.

Elsewhere from the report, Vox’s Ezra Klein and Trinity Mirror’s Martin Belam pushed back against the idea that the report signaled the death of the homepage as a strategy for The Times and other news organizations, arguing that the homepage still has value for power users and as a brand statement. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland also made a similar point, and wondered why The Times has just made a big play based on a mobile app rather than the social traffic that seems to be supplanting traditional homepage traffic.

Meanwhile, as if to underscore the digital difficulties The Times is facing, The Guardian hired away Aron Pilhofer, The Times’ top digital editor and longtime digital pioneer. to a new executive editor of digital position.

Creating more careful data journalism: There was some thought-provoking conversation about the new wave of data journalism websites from a variety of places this week. Data visualization professor Alberto Cairo pointed out the troubling number of pieces on sites like Vox and FiveThirtyEight that are based on dubious data interpretation or presentation, deriving far too grand theories from far too little evidence. At Source, The New York Times’ Jacob Harris provided a thorough critique of one faulty piece and give some suggestions for being skeptical of your data. There was also some good conversation on Twitter, Storified here, about what might be causing this data journalism shoddiness.

Business Insider’s Milo Yiannopoulos said data journalism sites are too scattershot and dull to draw attention and sustain trust, while Liliana Bounegru at the Harvard Business Review called on data journalists to create their own datasets more often, rather than relying on “official” ones. British journalism professor Paul Bradshaw, meanwhile, wondered what might be in the data journalism canon.

Reading roundup: Yes, there were events and discussions this week that weren’t related to The New York Times. Well, a couple, at least. Here’s a quick rundown:

— Facebook executive Mike Hudack ranted about the proliferation of fluffy stories meant to go viral on social networks in today’s media environment, and the irony of this complaint coming from an executive of the organization arguably most responsible for this viral pandering was not lost on many people. ValleyWag’s Sam Biddle, PandoDaily’s David Holmes, The Tow Center’s Alex Howard, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel, Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram, and Vox’s Matthew Iglesias all looked at Facebook’s role in the rush for light, shareable stories.

— A few net neutrality notes: Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times explained how the Federal Communications Commission hemmed in by its attempts to please everyone, Poynter’s Al Tompkins looked at the impact of the regulations on journalism, and the Columbia Journalism Review explored the potential effect on diversity online.

— Two interesting pieces on some of the inner workings behind new journalism processes: The Lab’s Josh Benton wrote about Vox’s use of “notebooks” to provide a way for its journalists to publish very short pieces, and Jihii Jolly wrote at the Columbia Journalism Review about the use of algorithms to determine news production.

— Finally, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic collected more than 100 of his picks for the best nonfiction of 2013. You should be able to find a few (or a few dozen) that are well worth a read.

Photo of the New York Times building by Alexander Torrenegra and photo of a Zenith Z-19 computer terminal by AJmexico used under a Creative Commons license.

The most explosive source of tension was reported by The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta: Abramson discovered that her pay and pension benefits were considerably lower than those of her predecessor, Bill Keller, and confronted Times executives about the disparity. NPR’s David Folkenflik confirmed that Abramson did challenge executives over unequal pay, though The Times denied that Abramson’s compensation was less than Keller’s, as did Sulzberger himself. Gawker noted that The Times’ statement regarding Abramson’s compensation continued to change, from “not less” to “not meaningfully less” to “directly comparable,” and Auletta pointed out that “directly comparable” didn’t mean it was the same, especially since Keller had been at the paper for much longer than Abramson had.

FiveThirtyEight’s Chadwick Matlin noted that beyond Abramson, there’s a broader gender-based pay gap among American editors, and Rebecca Traister of The New Republic and Forbes’ Ruchika Tulshyan both lamented the gender-based elements surrounding Abramson’s departure, particularly the perception of her as “pushy.” The List’s Rachel Sklar decried Sulzberger’s treatment of Abramson, saying he displayed far worse leadership skills than she did. (Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan also ripped Sulzberger’s general handling of the firing.) As Vox’s Danielle Kurtzleben wrote, “at first blush Abramson’s tenure is a perfect storm of everything ugly about becoming a woman boss, from the wage gap to the glass cliff to the gender stereotypes that afflict female leaders.” Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said she believed the ouster had more to do with undiplomatic personnel decisions than gender issues, though she had praise for Abramson’s tenure as a whole. Slate’s Amanda Hess reported on the influential role she had with young women at the Times.

There’s also, of course, the man who is succeeding Abramson — Baquet, a longtime Times journalist who also edited the Los Angeles Times and is now the paper’s first African American executive editor. The Times and New York magazine offered brief profiles of Baquet, and at Quartz, Richard Prince explained why it’s a big deal to have a black journalist running The Times. At AllDigitocracy, Tracie Powell reflected on the mixed news for newsroom diversity in the change from Abramson and Baquet. Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review explored the task ahead of Baquet, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said the paper’s still headed for trouble in its digital transition regardless of who’s in charge.

— A Duke University report titled “The Goat Must Be Fed” examined why local newsrooms in the U.S. aren’t using digital tools, concluding that many smaller and mid-sized news organizations are too wed to production routines and without the resources or technical expertise to experiment in innovative digital reporting forms. Poynter and the Lab both summarized the study’s findings.

— The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reported that the Associated Press has directed its journalists to keep most daily bylined stories under 500 words, and Reuters made a strikingly similar directive last week. Reuters’ Jack Shafer lamented a one-size-fits-all approach to news story length.

— Finally, several interesting pieces to give a read: The Lab published an excerpt on NYTimes.com homepage construction from a new book on The New York Times by journalism professor Nikki Usher as well as an interview with Usher about the process of researching for the book. Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark proposed a “pyramid of journalism competence” in the skills journalists need to know, and Source’s Erin Kissane looked at the different standards for openness at FiveThirtyEight, Vox and The Upshot.

Defending the new Internet regulations: After last week’s backlash to his proposal to overhaul the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality regulations, chairman Tom Wheeler wrote a blog post reassuring open web advocates that the new rules would outlaw anything that slows existing service or harms competition or free speech. He also said he’s willing to regulate the Internet as a utility, if necessary, to protect its openness. TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm explained Wheeler’s post well.

In a speech to the cable industry, Wheeler also said he’d preempt state laws banning municipal broadband in order to encourage more local competition. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick was skeptical of Wheeler’s willingness to follow through on the statement, but called it “a very good place to start.” Meanwhile, former FCC chairman Michael Powell, who is now head of the cable industry’s top lobbying organization, made the argument against treating the Internet as a public utility, saying that it’s grown so well over the past decade because it’s not dependent on political processes and public funding for its maintenance.

Arguments against the proposal continued to trickle in from observers like Cory Doctorow, who argued at The Guardian that innovation will be stifled by an unnecessary shakedown of users and content providers by Internet service providers. Under these rules, if you want to disrupt an established web-based industry, Doctorow said, “you have to start out with a bribery warchest that beats out the firms that clawed their way to the top back when there was a fairer playing-field.”

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal and Adrienne LaFrance went into the history of the concept of net neutrality, and Vox’s Nilay Patel explained the politics behind the FCC’s proposal. The New York Times’ David Carr saw the new proposal as one of several strands threatening to unravel the long-dominant cable TV bundle, and Sports on Earth’s Will Leitch argued that if that bundle unravels, sports TV and leagues may be hit the worst. Meanwhile, Netflix reached a paid agreement to speed up its streaming on Verizon’s network similar to the one it signed with Comcast earlier this spring, and Time reported that there are 76 lobbyists working to push through the Comcast–Time Warner Cable merger that’s before federal regulators.

Facebook’s new logins, mobile ads, and app linking: Facebook announced a raft of features and changes this week at its f8 conference, led by new login formats that allow people to select what information they share with Facebook as they sign in to other apps through Facebook — or to be anonymous to the other app (though not to Facebook). The New York Times’ Vindu Goel wrote a good explanation of what the new login functions entail — Facebook is hoping more people will be persuaded to log in to outside sites and apps through Facebook.

PandoDaily’s Nathaniel Mott said that although Facebook is still keeping its users’ data when they’re logged in through Facebook elsewhere, these changes show signs that they’re understanding their users’ privacy concerns better. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington said Facebook is finally “getting it” regarding privacy, unlike Google, though Forbes’ Kashmir Hill emphasized that even under Anonymous Login, Facebook’s users are still sending their data to Facebook. “‘Anonymity’ is the gateway drug to greater disclosure. Once the connection is made, it’s expected you’ll take the cloak off and share some info,” Hill wrote.

Facebook also unveiled a mobile ad network called the Facebook Audience Network that allows other mobile apps to run targeted ads based on Facebook data. Forbes’ Robert Hof detailed the network a bit further and explained why advertisers are excited to use it.

Facebook also introduced several tools for developers, the most significant of which was App Links, a service that will allow app-to-app links. Business Insider’s Steve Kovach explained why developers love this idea — it has the potential to organize the information among apps, just as Google organizes it on the web — and why Facebook loves it, too: “Facebook could essentially have insight into all the apps and content on your phone, not just the ones it makes.”

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave a lengthy interview to Wired’s Steven Levy explaining his company’s changes and its shift toward utilities for developers (more on these in a bit), describing as Facebook “growing up” but insisting that the company isn’t reaching middle age. Valleywag’s Sam Biddle disagreed, saying that Facebook’s becoming more stable, reliable, and boring — “just a very large utility, an inevitable fate for anything giant and technical.”

Has Twitter plateaued?: Twitter made its own announcements this week, though they weren’t as well received as Facebook’s. The company released its quarterly results, revealing what would seem to be a mixed set of results: 5% quarterly growth in active users, up to 255 million; 119% revenue growth over this time last year; another net loss; and slightly decreasing ad revenue per timeline view. As The Wall Street Journal reported, its stock dropped 10% and hit a new low on the news.

The New York Times’ Nicole Perlroth laid out the problem between Twitter and Wall Street: Twitter’s user base and engagement are increasing, but not fast enough for its investors. It’s sold itself as a way to keep users more glued to live TV, but TV executives may be getting skeptical of its actual impact. Alex Weprin of Capital New York went deeper into Twitter’s relationship with the TV industry.

The greater fear among investors is that not only has Twitter not reached the mainstream for consumers as Facebook has, but it may never get there, as Valleywag’s Sam Biddle and Quartz’s John McDuling suggested. As Forbes’ Robert Hof reported, Twitter is arguing that it already has gone mainstream but simply needs to increase users’ engagement and improve their experience. Hof also argued that investors and critics shouldn’t expect Twitter to become another Facebook, because it wasn’t intended to be.

At The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer made the case for Twitter’s decline from the user’s perspective, arguing that the site isn’t as vibrant as it used to be, and the premise that its users could converse with and be heard by fascinating new networks of people is being stripped away. “Twitter feels closed off, choked, in a way that makes us want to explore somewhere else for a while,” they wrote. Google Ventures partner MG Siegler countered that Twitter is constantly being declared “over,” but it’s still well within the mainstream of pop culture and the news media, and Slate’s Will Oremus argued that Twitter is growing as a media platform and that its better comparison is YouTube rather than Facebook.

Reading roundup: A few additional pieces to read from this week:

— A few pieces on the frustrating experience of covering the White House: Politico polled the White House Correspondent’s Association on the ins and outs of their job and their opinions of the administration they cover, and The Washington Post profiled a White House reporter as a glimpse into their lack of access. Yahoo News wrote about the Obama administration employee who tracks reporters’ tweets and flags them to other administration officials.

— The Columbia Journalism Review’s Alexis Sobel Fitts profiled Upworthy, examining the roots of its click-friendly advocacy and its approach to creating shareable content.

— Finally, three thoughtful pieces to take a look at over the weekend: Journalism professor Cindy Royal on rethinking the skills journalism schools teach students, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson on chasing traffic vs. building community at news websites, and former New York Times editor Bill Keller and former Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli talking with Politico about the state of the news industry.

Initial reviews of the site were generally positive: Alex Howard of the Tow Center appreciated its transparent approach, though Gigaom founder Om Malik said the site was solid but bland — “reading through it felt like homework.” Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram was intrigued by The Upshot’s goal to explain and give context to — to aggregate, in a way — The Times’ other content. At Mother Jones, Simon Rogers called for greater transparency across the new generation of data journalism sites.

Ingram also compared The Upshot with Vox and FiveThirtyEight, wondering if there are really enough interested readers to support all three of these explanatory sites. The Guardian’s James Ball offered the best analysis of the three sites, focusing more deeply on their audience conundrum: Despite their efforts to give basic background information on big stories, “the people who read them are likely to be the ones who already have a pretty good understanding of the news. You’ve got to be a pretty informed (and humble) news consumer to read a news piece and then hunt down a separate site to understand it better.” Ball advised the sites to pick a particular audience and tone, and to focus on personalizing data and explanation.

PandoDaily’s David Holmes pointed out another challenge to the explanatory journalism genre, noting that the best explainers often leave readers with more questions and awaken them to just how complex an issue is. John Herrman of The Awl wrote that by themselves, explanatory sites look like an awkward, disjointed, and preachy cavalcade of headlines because they assume the existence of a stream of misinformation which they are there to clarify or correct. “They are unbroken strings of interruptions that have nothing to interrupt.” And at the Lab, Craig Silverman looked at the challenge of keeping Vox’s card stacks current as knowledge changes and becomes obsolete.

— The Newspaper Association of America released its annual revenue numbers for the industry, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds highlighted newspapers’ narrowing revenue losses, noting that digital subscriptions cut into advertising losses a bit. Analyst Alan Mutter, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton all took a more pessimistic tack, noting that the boosts from those subscriptions are still being swamped by declining ad revenue.

— Prominent Reuters columnist Felix Salmon is leaving to join the year-old youth-oriented cable network Fusion, owned by Disney and Univision. Salmon explained why he’s making the move in a post touting the demise of text and the ascendance of multimedia and multiplatform content, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram countered that text still has a significant role to play along multimedia.

— Finally, a few interesting and useful pieces of journalism research: The Tow Center’s Claire Wardle and Sam Dubberley released the first part of their report on the use of user-generated content at cable news networks, the Knight Digital Media Center’s Michele McLellan released some numbers from her survey of local news startups, and Poynter’s Craig Silverman wrote about a new study showing the value of “communicating imperfection” in sustaining readers’ trust in journalism.

— The Chicago Sun-Times announced that it’s temporarily killing comments with plans to build a new commenting system, and Digiday’s Ricardo Bilton wrote about other news organizations’ moves away from comment sections. The Lab’s Joshua Benton noted that the reason may not just be low-quality comments, but that in a news organization built around social sharing, asking readers to comment may simply be too much. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram argued that rather than kill comments or outsource the conversation to social media, news organizations should try to improve them. Doctoral student Jeff Swift gave some tips on what makes comment sections work.

— A new report found that 44 percent of Twitter accounts have never sent a tweet. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said Twitter needs to find out how to make itself more accessible for a broader set of users, though Forbes’ Mark Rogowsky said the problem isn’t a low ratio of active users (which he said shouldn’t be considered low at all), but Twitter’s continued attempts to ape Facebook.

— Finally, there were several longer pieces worth reading this week: Journalism professor Nikki Usher’s report on changing newsroom spaces for changing forms of digital journalism, sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci’s piece on the protests in Turkey and the ambiguous role of the Internet in politics and activism, Ken Doctor’s analysis at the Lab from late last week on billionaire newspaper owners and the unchaining of U.S. journalism, and a Tow Center video report led by Duy Linh Tu on the state of news video.

Mathew Ingram said Baron’s justification makes decent financial sense, but starting sites like Vox are precisely the bets the Post should be taking in an attempt to survive the disruption of news. Similarly, Reuters’ Felix Salmon said Klein made the right decision by going with a nimbler company and voiced his doubt that the Post is the best place to develop the wonky journalism that’s so popular right now. “In general, the bigger and more entrenched the media company you’re part of, the harder it is to get stuff done,” he wrote.

In another piece for Politico, Salmon explained why analytical journalism like Klein’s and Nate Silver’s is experiencing a boom, and Laurie Penny of the New Statesman questioned why white men like Klein and Silver are being feted as the future of journalism: “These, it turns out, are the kind of ‘outsiders’ the old guard can cope with: outsiders who look almost exactly like them, except younger and cooler.”

— Finally, several great reads to look at this weekend: Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark on what it takes to create a new mode of journalism and whether data journalism qualifies, Adrienne LaFrance on rethinking online news archives, News Corp.’s Raju Narisetti with 26 key questions to ask about news organizations’ move to digital, and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron on reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism.

Thunderdome and the long, hard road for local news: The newspaper chain Digital First Media shut down its ambitious Project Thunderdome this week, a stinging reminder of the difficulties in large-scale digital media innovation within local newspapers. Thunderdome, which was launched three years ago as a digitally savvy centralized news production site for Digital First’s 75 papers, was shut down as part of larger cuts at the company, with about 50 Thunderdome employees laid off.

Digital First CEO John Paton said some of what Thunderdome did would be discontinued, and some would be distributed among Digital First’s papers. Poynter’s Jill Geisler gave a sense of the mood in the newsroom, and one of Thunderdome’s journalists, Steve Buttry, said the project didn’t fail because “you can’t fail unless you were given a chance to succeed.”

USA Today’s Rem Rieder focused on the schadenfreude that others in the news industry were reportedly feeling over Thunderdome’s demise, based on their perception of Paton as a digital-media showman with more brash style than actual solutions. But the Lab’s Ken Doctor, in the most thorough analysis of the shutdown, argued that while Thunderdome’s demise is a bitter pill for Paton, his overall transformation efforts at Digital First have been impressive: “Paton parlayed a small hand on a way-down-on-the-food-chain (Journal Register Co.) into a major U.S. digital news company.” Likewise, Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram saw the shutdown not as a failure, but simply as an indication of how tough it is to reinvent a newspaper company, and J-Source’s Melanie Coulson praised Digital First for its digital experimentation and called for more.

A few observers tried to pinpoint exactly what sunk Thunderdome. Rick Edmonds of Poynter highlighted the chain’s outdated technology with which the project had to work, exemplified by its widely varying and clunky set of content management systems. Media analyst Alan Mutter focused on Digital First’s owners, the hedge fund investors of Alden Capital Investors. “The objectives of the Digital First investors were the antithesis of the patience — and multimillion-dollar commitment — required in the slog to identify successful interactive publishing models,” Mutter wrote. Journalism professor Dan Kennedy made a similar point while looking at Digital First’s New Haven Register, wondering if local journalism can really be reinvented by a company owned by a hedge fund.

Facebook chokes off brands’ reach: The tech world has been talking for a couple of weeks about reports that Facebook is cutting the amount of reach brands can get with their posts, forcing them to pay if they want to reach more than just a small percentage of their fans. One company, the food delivery service Eat24, complained about the change in an post announcing it planned to delete its Facebook page. Facebook responded with a retort of its own saying that it’s not showing its readers content that they’ve shown they don’t care about, though Recode’s Mike Isaac said Eat24 has a valid point, and The New York Times’ Vindu Goel said its concerns are quietly being echoed by many other, larger companies.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said the change reinforces the distinction between Twitter’s flood of information and Facebook’s carefully controlled stream, and the notion that Facebook isn’t the kind of social network we’ve assumed it was: “It is not an open platform in which content spreads according to its own whims: like a newspaper, Facebook controls what you see and when.”

At Recode, marketing executive Michael Lazerow defended Facebook, arguing that companies are naive to expect free distribution from Facebook forever, and they need to respond by making their posts more relevant and spreadable. On the other side, Dijit Media president Jeremy Toeman argued that when Facebook users like a page, they expect to get that page’s updates. He urged Facebook to disclose to users that they won’t see every update when they like a page and to give them an option to subscribe to all of a page’s updates.

NYT Now launches: NYT Now, The New York Times’ much anticipated (or at least much promoted) news digest and aggregation app, launched this week. The Lab’s Ken Doctor analyzed the Times’ business strategy behind the app, looking at who’s going to subscribe at an $8-a-month rate. The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer expressed his excitement at the idea that NYT Now is trying to reward regular readers with a single, contained news package rather than a stream of news to dip in and out of.

The Lab’s Joshua Benton gave the app a mostly positive review, noting that its stories (and story selection) closely resemble the Times’ main product, but its aggregation and voice are a new arena for the paper. “Here’s hoping that the DNA of NYT Now can spread back into the core apps and that it can push harder at bringing an experimental edge to sharing great Times content with the world,” he wrote. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland also noted that NYT Now isn’t emphasizing breaking news and suggested that readers will switch back and forth between NYT Now and the main app.

Reading roundup: A few other stories to catch up on during a relatively slow week:

— The mobile analytics company Flurry published a set of data on use of apps vs. mobile browsers, concluding that the former have left the latter in the dust. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland said the mobile web is still very much alive for news, while BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel said the data help explain Facebook’s recent purchase of WhatsApp.

— Local billionaire Glen Taylor signed a letter of intent on a cash offer to buy the Minneapolis Star Tribune from the two investment firms that currently own most of the paper’s shares. Fellow Minnesotan David Carr of The New York Times reflected on the Star Tribune that was and its prospects with Taylor in charge.

— A few fantastic pieces on data journalism: The Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted illuminating interviews with The New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and NPR’s Jeremy Bowers. And at Source, Jeremy Merrill and Sisi Wei offered a very useful guide to getting a job in journalism and coding.

The Lab’s Joshua Benton said he’s not so much concerned about the particulars of The Oregonian’s bet on online traffic as the fact that it’s making a bet in the first place. Any bet, he said, is an encouraging departure from the age-old plan of cutting, retrenching around declining print advertising and circulation, and relying on an aging audience.

The New York Times’ David Carr included The Oregonian’s changes as an example of a larger trend toward paying journalists based on the traffic they bring in, a practice that brings a welcome meritocracy to journalistic production but is also alarmingly open to manipulation. Newswhip’s Paul Quigley argued that this trend actually tilts things toward writers’ favor rather than their bosses, because it depends in part on their brands and their networks. Gigaom’s Ingram noted, though, that this obsession will continue as long as advertising (and, by extension, advertisers) are still driving the bus of online revenue.

Lucia Moses of Digiday looked at the range of approaches among online news organizations to giving journalists metrics, and Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noted that there are still lines editors won’t cross in search of traffic. Deadspin’s Tim Marchman railed against the cynicism in the ubiquitous term clickbait, saying it presents a moralistic “false binary between stories that serve the public interest and those cynically presented just because people will read them.”

— After weeks of hints, The New York Times officially announced two new paid-content options, an $8-a-month app of core Times content called NYT Now and a $45-a-month subscription called Times Premier that includes behind-the-scenes information about the paper. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland has more details on the programs, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel looked at whether NYT Now will succeed, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram offered suggestions for personalizing the Times’ paid content plans.

— Turkey’s government sought to ban Twitter late last week, prompting widespread workarounds by Turkish Twitter users as well as a legal challenge filed by Twitter. One Turkish court overturned the ban on Wednesday, while another one rejected Twitter’s complaint. The government also blocked YouTube on Thursday. Some of the best commentary on the subject has been by Turkish digital sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who explained why Turkey is blocking Twitter and what Turks are doing about it.

— The chatter about Nate Silver’s relaunched data journalism site FiveThirtyEight continued this week, and while much of it come from an ongoing slap-fight between Silver and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, some of it was also quite thought-provoking. The Tow Center’s Alexander Howard gave some historical context to some of the backlash against data journalism, Om Malik gave some advice to Silver on dealing with criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Tanveer Ali called for better understanding of narrative at FiveThirtyEight, and Adam Tinworth offered a defense of data journalism.

— The New York Times reported that the Obama administration is proposing an end to the U.S. National Security Agency’s systematic collection of Americans’ bulk phone records, allowing it access to phone companies’ data only with a specific court order. The Volokh Conspiracy’s Stewart Baker compared Obama’s plan to Congress’ proposed overhaul, and The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald examined the tough spot the new plan may put pro-NSA Democrats in.

— Finally, tech blogger Ben Thompson wrote a thoughtful post on the well-trod topic of traditional and future business models for news, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton added some of his thoughts on what might be ahead.

— The Media Insight Project published a study on how Americans consume news, and the Associated Press reported on it as encouraging evidence of consumers’ desire for meatier news, while The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza saw an appetite for quick headlines and little else. The Lab’s Justin Ellis looked at a few other trends revolving around topics, news cycles, and trust.

— A few notes on the continued fallout from Newsweek’s troubled bitcoin cover story: Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, the man Newsweek identified as the creator of bitcoin, issued a statement denying the claim and saying he’d hired a lawyer. Reuters’ Felix Salmon annotated the statement, and law professor Eugene Volokh looked at the legal case for any potential suit. Ars Technica’s Joe Mullin called for a retraction, and The Daily Dot’s Ben Branstetter saw the episode as an example of the emptiness of “meet the man behind X” stories in the Internet age.

— A few final pieces to take a look at: New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan launched AnonyWatch, “an effort to point out some of the more regrettable examples of anonymous quotations in The Times,” the American Journalism Review’s Mary Clare Fischer looked at some news organizations’ reluctance to give out metrics information to reporters, and here at the Lab, Center for Investigative Reporting fellow Lindsay Green-Barber wrote about efforts to measure impact in investigative journalism.

Photo of Nate Silver from 2012 by AP/Nam Y. Huh. Image of Twitter bird by katska used under a Creative Commons license.

Newsweek and showing your work: The cover story of Newsweek’s return to print was supposed to be a bombshell revelation of the identity of Bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but it’s been unraveling ever since it was published late last week. The man Newsweek identified as Bitcoin’s creator, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto of California, denied involvement with Bitcoin to The Associated Press, and the story’s details were widely questioned.

After publication, we got some more details about the forensic analysis that led Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman to Nakamoto and the interview she conducted with him. Newsweek issued a statement standing by its story, and its editor-in-chief, Jim Impoco, appeared to both revel in and express outrage at the criticism the story was receiving.

The story was picked apart, paragraph by paragraph, by several people, including former Grantland editor Jay Caspian Kang and Priceonomics’ Rohin Dhar. The Guardian’s Michael Wolff chastised readers and commentators for being so shocked at the flimsiness of Newsweek’s story, saying that much of that outrage was predicated on the false premise that this is the Newsweek we’ve always known. “The new Newsweek is hoping to pass itself off as the old and real Newsweek, but, really, that is less its fault than the fault of the gullible,” he said.

The sharpest commentary on the story came from Reuters’ Felix Salmon, who wrote a pair of posts — the first breaking down Newsweek’s evidence and concluding that it should have presented its story as a thesis rather than a scoop, and the second with Goodman’s description of her reporting techniques and suggestions of how Newsweek should better engage its critics.

NYU’s Jay Rosen highlighted a few of Goodman’s statements to Salmon appealing to Newsweek’s reputation and referring to evidence she hasn’t made public. “Sorry, that was 25 years ago. Today: Show your work. Don’t tell us how much work went into it. You publish your story, you know it’s going to come under attack, you prepare for battle and when the time is right you release the evidence you have,” Rosen wrote. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum also expanded on Salmon’s posts, pointing out the increased accountability for news organizations.

Diversity in personal franchise sites: The three most prominent of the new wave of personal franchise sites each made announcements this week, and came under some criticism for lack of diversity as well. Ex-Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein’s project for Vox Media will be called simply Vox, and revealed a bit about how it’s going to approach explanatory journalism on all types of subjects. PandoDaily’s David Holmes looked at the current market for news explainers and how Vox might push the genre forward, and Gigaom’s Laura Hazard Owen discussed why Vox could become essential reading for people trying to catch up on current events.

Nate Silver’s data journalism site, FiveThirtyEight, will relaunch on Monday and will be housed with fellow ESPN projects Grantland and ESPN Films in a new unit called Exit 31. He gave details of its new mission in a Q&A with New York magazine. Meanwhile, The New York Times explained the purpose of its data-oriented replacement for FiveThirtyEight, which will be called The Upshot, and the Columbia Journalism Review looked at the future of Klein’s former Wonkblog at the Post.

And The Intercept, the subsite of First Look Media centered on Glenn Greenwald’s work and surveillance issues surrounding the Edward Snowden documents, hired Gawker editor John Cook as its new editor, as well as two new writers.

But former Guardian editor Emily Bell criticized these new well funded startups for hiring staff and leadership that’s overwhelmingly male (and white, too). For being hailed as a new vanguard of journalism, Bell said, these projects look a lot like the old guard. “Remaking journalism in its own image, only with better hair and tighter clothes, is not a revolution, or even an evolution. It is a repackaging of the status quo with a very nice clubhouse attached.” FiveThirtyEight’s Silver responded that his site doesn’t have a “bro-y” clubhouse mentality and tries to make the best hires possible from an applicant pool that’s 85% male.

Snowden speaks: The news stemming from Edward Snowden’s leaked U.S. National Security Agency documents continues to flow — this week’s biggest story came from The Intercept, which reported that the NSA and the British spying unit GCHQ are using automated tools to install malware onto computers, including programs that pose as Facebook servers to smuggle out files and email spam that installs malware to secretly record users with their computers’ microphones and webcams. The New York Times also reported on decade-old secret court rulings that dramatically expanded the U.S.’ ability to share information obtained from spying on its own citizens.

As stories from Snowden’s documents have dominated the news over the past year, Snowden will also be at the center of the Pulitzer Prizes when they’re decided next month. As Politico’s Dylan Byers reported, the Pulitzer board will consider teams from The Guardian and The Washington Post for their reporting on the Snowden documents, and a decision either way will likely be read as a political statement — perceived timidity on one hand or a repudiation of numerous government officials on the other.

Snowden addressed a crowd at SXSW this week via video from Russia, defending his leaks, criticizing the U.S.’ surveillance practices, and urging tech companies to tighten their security and be more discriminate in their data collection. Barton Gellman, the Washington Post reporter who has reported extensively on the documents, also spoke at SXSW, calling for more widespread encryption and security technology.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that popped up this week:

— The World Wide Web turned 25 this week, and its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, called for a digital bill of rights protecting its freedom, openness, and neutrality. He spoke in particular about his concern over net neutrality and also gave an Ask Me Anything on Reddit on the topic. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing also urged Berners-Lee to reconsider his support for digital rights management technology in web browsers.

— Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile wrote an illuminating article at Time drawing some surprising conclusions from web tracking data, including that what people share doesn’t correlate with how long they spend reading it and native ads don’t get nearly the engagement that un-sponsored content gets. Recode’s Peter Kafka looked at the implications for native advertising, and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis examined ways to measure web use better.

— The New York Times previewed its new NYT Now app at SXSW this week, giving a glimpse of its cheaper, more simplified version of its main app. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan gave some of the details of the app and the paper’s goal behind it (including the nearly 20 editorial staffers working on it), and Mashable gave some more information on the app.

— The BBC launched a redesigned version of its iPlayer and announced it’s planning to launch online-only channels. It was also reported to be considering scrapping the license fee that funds it through licenses on TVs in the U.K. in favor of a subscription plan, though it denied that report.

— Finally, Stuart Dredge at The Guardian wrote a smart piece on the ascendant gatekeeping role of algorithms in determining what news reaches us and how.

Photos of white male mannequin by Horia Varlen and of Edward Snowden speaking at SXSW by Alfred Lui used under a Creative Commons license.

There’s no mystery in this case as to whether Zite will survive the acquisition: Its co-founder, Mike Klaas, said Zite will shut down, with its technology folded into Flipboard. Klaas said both companies have been focused on helping people discover personalized content, though they diverge in how they do it: “Zite’s focus was on topics, while Flipboard was mostly about publications; Flipboard was a reader for social media but Zite tried hardest to find articles you couldn’t find on your Twitter feed.”

ReadWrite’s Dan Rowinski also said Flipboard will benefit greatly from the serendipity of Zite’s recommendation technology, and Zite CEO Mark Johnson — who won’t be joining Flipboard in the merger — agreed with him that adding Zite’s back-end technology to Flipboard would be best for both apps, even though it meant the death of his own app.

Zite’s biggest shortcoming seems to have been not its technology, but its relative lack of size. J.P. Mangalindan of CNN’s Fortune reported that Zite never got the kind of traffic bump it had expected when it was bought by CNN. The social reader field now looks like it’s dominated by Flipboard and Facebook’s new Paper app, though Flipboard’s Mike McCue told TechCrunch he’s not worried about Paper as it’s simply “a different way of letting you look at Facebook.” Rachel King of ZDNet agreed that Paper is too narrowly drawing from Facebook content to be considered a “Flipboard killer.”

The Globe and Guardian’s differing paywall paths: The Boston Globe announced that it’s turning the hard paywall at its BostonGlobe.com site into a metered model, a change that was reported to be in the works last month. BostonGlobe.com was created in 2011 when the Globe split into two sites, one free (Boston.com) and one paid (BostonGlobe.com). In a memo to staff, the Globe’s editor, Brian McGrory, deemed the hard-paywalled BostonGlobe.com a success, with nearly 60,000 digital-only subscribers. The switch to a metered model (which allows readers 10 free stories over 30 days), he said, is simply an attempt to grow its readership.

McGrory said the two sites will now be completely separate, even competing; Boston.com will no longer publish anything produced by Globe staff, and Boston.com’s staff will move out of the Globe newsroom. The Lab’s Justin Ellis looked more closely at the split between the two sites and the rationale behind it, and new Globe owner John Henry explained the split and his other plans for the paper in emails to Boston magazine.

Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy said the change isn’t a major shift but a rather expected course correction, though he protested the two-site strategy, calling it confusing. Why, he asked, should paying BostonGlobe.com customers have to go to Boston.com for anything? In a followup post, Kennedy said the Globe seems to be going with a hub-and-spoke model with a variety of affiliated projects, as opposed to a strict two-site model.

The Guardian, meanwhile, continues to move in the opposite direction regarding paid content online. Fresh off the announcement that the paper’s digital revenues have jumped 25 percent in the past year and the £619 million sale of its share in AutoTrader, Guardian CEO Andrew Miller told a conference crowd that the chance at a paywalled site has long passed. Instead, he said The Guardian will be looking into membership models over the next few months.

Mike Darcey, head of the News Corp unit that includes hard-paywalled Times and Sunday Times of London, backhandedly called The Guardian “very brave” for betting on a free-site strategy. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum commended The Guardian for its advertising gains but said it’s still leaving money on the table without a metered paywall. “You can set a meter as high as you want, and even then you could simply ask for money, rather than require it,” he said.

The New York Times, which pioneered the metered model, continues to tweak it: It announced it’s working on NYT Now, a mobile-oriented briefing of Times stories that will cost $8 a month. NYT Now is the first of several other paid offerings the Times is planning to offer that run a little cheaper than the main Times digital subscription plan.

The Verge’s Russell Brandom compared the move to the music industry’s efforts to adapt to downloading while keeping control and worried about long-term link rot with embedded images if Getty’s terms change. The Lab’s Joshua Benton had the most in-depth look at Getty’s plan, outlining the shortcomings of its embedding format and characterizing its possible strategy as “(a) get some people to use an embed instead of stealing while (b) making the experience just clunky enough that paying customers won’t want to use it.”

— Time unveiled a redesign that includes new, more dynamic and interactive ad units and, as Poynter’s Sam Kirkland pointed out, a more text-heavy, app-like feel. Tech entrepreneur Chris Saad tweaked sites like Time’s for web design that mimics iPad design. Meanwhile, Time’s (former?) rival, Newsweek, relaunched its print edition this week with an attention-getting cover story revealing the identity of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto that led to a denial, outrage, a car chase, and an ethical debate. The New York Times outlined Newsweek’s plans — it’s printing 70,000 copies, available for a whopping $7.99 each — and the Lab’s Ken Doctor went deeper into its print-web subscription strategy.

— Federal attorneys in Texas dismissed 11 charges against Barrett Brown, who had been accused of trafficking in stolen data for posting a link to the data online. The case has drawn attention from free speech advocates, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation praised the decision to drop the charges. Earlier in the week, Brown’s attorneys had filed a motion to dismiss his indictment; you can read Techdirt’s commentary on that document here.

— As First Look Media and Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept build on their non-hierarchical, collaborative editorial model, PandoDaily lobbed a conflict-of-interest accusation revolving around funding its owner, Pierre Omidyar, has given to pro-democracy groups in Ukraine. Greenwald responded with a defense of his and The Intercept’s journalistic independence, and PandoDaily issued another reply. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple summarized the conflict with some rebukes for both sides, and CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis looked at the episode as a case study in the new ethics of philanthropy-based journalism.

— The trial of three Al Jazeera journalists who have been detained in Egypt for several months began this week, with the defendants claiming they’ve been tortured and the prosecutors presenting, according to The Guardian, farcical evidence from the journalists’ hotel rooms. The trial has been postponed until March 24.

— Just like The New York Times in December, Slate hit a traffic high this week with a non-article — a name generator inspired by John Travolta’s Oscar-night flub. The Lab’s Joshua Benton delved into the ambivalence around non-news content drawing huge traffic at a news site, while the Times explored it as an instance of the gamification of news.

— Three thoughtful pieces to chew on: Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review’s “new consensus on the future of the news” manifesto, UNC professor John L. Robinson reflected briefly on the pros and cons of his students’ social media-heavy news diets, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s Anna Hiatt went deep (naturally) into the future of online longform journalism.

The Lab’s Ken Doctor looked at the business end of the deal: Netflix is clearing hurdles to its video streaming quality as it prepares to introduce additional tiered pricing, and Comcast is removing Netflix as a possible objector to regulatory approval of its purchase of Time Warner Cable. Variety’s Todd Spangler said Netflix has now fixed some of its key costs and is solving its biggest streaming quality problems, though Peter Cohan of Forbes said the deal doesn’t tell us much about how Comcast will treat other video-streaming services, especially after its Time Warner merger. If you want the really deep dive on the agreement, read Dan Rayburn’s post with the details.

It’s important to note that this deal would not have been covered by net neutrality regulations. As CNET’s Marguerite Reardon and Consumerist’s Chris Moran explained well, peering isn’t about stopping intentional slowdowns of traffic quality or about giving preferential treatment to some services, both things that net neutrality would be built to stop. Instead, it’s about Netflix being allowed to connect its own content delivery network — most companies pay for third-party networks to deliver their content around the web, but Netflix has built its own to account for its incredibly high volumes of data — directly to Internet service providers like Comcast.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t raise concerns about the future of the Internet, however. The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee argued that deals like this transform the Internet from its classic structure in which all sites’ content flow together to ISPs through a few big “pipes” — the structure on which the net neutrality ideal was built — to one in which each major content provider uses its own pipe which can be easier to individually manipulate.

Gizmodo’s Eric Limer said this deal relies on both sides’ size and encourages further consolidation: Comcast had enough leverage to sit back and wait for Netflix to pay up to fix its streaming quality problem, and Netflix was able to solve it being big enough to build “its own private highway.” Now, he wrote, “established champs who can pay for a separate tube have the advantage of not having to fight with a bunch of other traffic. It’s about to get harder than ever for something like Netflix to come along again.” Free Press pointed to the deal as evidence of the need for stronger anti-consolidation regulatory forces in Washington, and The New York Times’ Vikas Bijaj made a similar point in calling for the FCC to revisit its net neutrality stance.

On the other hand, Wired’s Robert McMillan argued that smaller players may not need or want a direct connection to ISPs like Netflix has, since they already pay third-party networks for that same connection and don’t stream nearly enough data to make it a serious problem like Netflix has. StreamingMedia’s Dan Rayburn said there’s nothing nefarious or threatening to net neutrality about this deal; Netflix is just shifting its costs for connecting to Comcast’s network from a third-party network directly to Comcast. “This is how the Internet works, and it’s not about providing better access for one content owner over another,” he wrote. In a follow-up post, Rayburn said this is a win for consumers more than anything, as we get better streaming quality and it costs Netflix less over time to give it to us.

Elsewhere in telecommunication, The Wall Street Journal reported on telecom giants’ fight against net neutrality laws in Europe and the U.S., and at In These Times, Jay Cassano and Michael Brooks said net neutrality’s erosion will disproportionately impact the mobile Internet and therefore lower-income people who depend on it.

— Politico’s Dylan Byers wrote a thorough piece on the failures of text-based news sites in producing compelling live video, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton looked at the consumers’ side of the problem as well.

— Finally, a few thought-provoking pieces from the week: The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer and the Lab’s Joshua Benton on the boxy style that’s ubiquitous in newly redesigned news sites, Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood decried the proliferation of dumb apps, and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis gave some prescriptions for the relationship between philanthropy and news.

Photos of a Netflix envelope by Scott Feldstein and of Piers Morgan in a Burger King ad by Cow PR used under a Creative Commons license.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009, and since then it’s grown to some 450 million users — a faster growth rate than Facebook, Twitter, or any other company in history, as its investors, Sequoia Capital, noted. Many of those users are outside the U.S., in countries like Brazil, Spain, and Russia, where WhatsApp has gained a toehold through carrier deals and word-of-mouth marketing. WhatsApp is intended to be a better form of text messaging, and it’s especially useful for people to send international texts without racking up SMS fees. (The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo looked at the positive influence WhatsApp has had in dropping phone carriers’ SMS prices.)

Despite WhatsApp’s incredible growth, the deal’s enormous price tag triggered skepticism for one big reason in particular: WhatsApp doesn’t sell ads, and it doesn’t charge its users more than $1 a year. This kind of sky-high price for a young app without any evident revenue prospects prompted a lot of talk about desperation and a tech bubble from people like Salon’s Andrew Leonard and the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, among many others.

This, of course, led to the central question surrounding the WhatsApp deal: Why is WhatsApp worth so much to Facebook? There were quite a few explanations thrown out, starting with the official story from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: It’s growing phenomenally quickly, and its users return to it even more regularly than Facebook’s users do. Sure, but what else?

At the most basic level, it was probably fear of competition. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman explained why the new wave of simple messaging apps are so terrifying to Facebook, as they encroach on its most valuable turf of smartphone and text conversations: “It’s drawing from the same limited pool of attention, and accommodating some of Facebook’s most addicting behaviors,” he said. Still, Om Malik of Gigaom said Facebook and WhatsApp aren’t doing quite the same thing: WhatsApp is synchronous and immediate, while Facebook is still oriented around the status update, so Facebook is buying a new type of user behavior. Reuters’ Felix Salmon said Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp because it’s a particularly good app, but because it won the popularity lottery that mobile development often comes down to.

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin noted, Facebook is also buying substantial inroads to key international markets such as Europe and Latin America. Alternatively, Recode’s Kara Swisher argued that in paying a jaw-dropping amount for a must-have mobile messaging app, Facebook was essentially paying the price for not having a mobile operating system like Google and Apple have. And PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy said the deal is actually fundamentally about Facebook maintaining its dominance over the world’s shared photos, as WhatsApp processes 500 million photos a day — more than Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram.

In reality, it’s probably a bit of all of those reasons, and as Forbes’ Robert Hof noted, we probably won’t really know the utility of WhatsApp to Facebook for a long time. Swisher and The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger argued that Facebook is acting like a Disney-esque conglomerate, trying to scoop up and dominate as many forms of public and private communication as it can. As The Guardian’s Stuart Dredge put it, the average person’s smartphone is tending toward apps that do one thing well, in which case “Facebook wants to be providing as many of them as possible. And if it can’t build successful enough standalone apps, it will buy them.”

Comcast, net neutrality, and the broadband fight: Last week’s announced Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal garnered largely negative initial reactions, but its chances of getting through regulators are good, which led The New Yorker’s John Cassidy to wonder whether Comcast has Washington in its pocket. Similarly, Karl Bode of Techdirt pointed out that plenty of consultants and thinktanks (generally tied to the telecom industry) have been praising the acquisition as good for consumers.

The Comcast deal could be just the start: The New York Times’ David Gelles reported on concerns within the cable industry that Comcast’s behemoth size could lead to rash of deals by cable network companies to scale up in order to avoid being squeezed. Larry Downes of the Harvard Business Review argued that Comcast’s deal is actually a defensive one born out of weakness, though the Lab’s Ken Doctor said Comcast’s strategy makes sense as a preparation for shifts in the television industry — it’s just a matter of execution.

Several other observers focused on the deal’s implications for the broadband industry, including Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, who argued that the acquisition “would probably deal a serious blow to our ability to use the internet the way we want, not the way Comcast wants us to.” Comcast is intent on limiting competition to its cable TV business from streaming video, and The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo noted that Comcast’s broadband pricing is attempting to limit the financial advantage to cord-cutting as much as possible. Reuters’ Felix Salmon likewise compared the strategy of limiting broadband competition and keeping prices high to a newspaper’s online paywall: “they’re not so much a way of making lots of money themselves, as they are a way of persuading you to pay lots of money for something else. (Physical newspaper delivery, or cable TV.)”

This strategy sounds a lot like old-school monopolistic behavior, something the Times’ Paul Krugman argued.  But Jack Shafer of Reuters said this monopoly was a government-made one through decades of poorly implemented regulation. The key to rescuing the broadband/cable industry, he said, is to remove regulatory barriers that benefit incumbents like Comcast.

Elsewhere in the struggle between the cable industry and online video, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced it plans to issue new net neutrality guidelines after the previous ones were struck down earlier this year, and the Obama administration signaled its support for the proposal. As Recode’s Amy Schatz explained, the new rules aren’t much different from the old ones; they’re just justified through a different part of the law. Open Internet advocates, as The Verge’s Adi Robertson reported, are expressing their disappointment that the FCC isn’t going to classify broadband providers as common carriers, regulating them as public utilities.

Without a strong net neutrality framework in place, fights like the one between Verizon and Netflix will continue to get nastier. As the (paywalled) Wall Street Journal reported (summary at the free Ars Technica), that feud is flaring up as Verizon is demanding payments for carrying what it calls excessive traffic, and since Netflix is refusing, Verizon is slowing down Netflix’s streaming over its network. As Ars Technica noted, Netflix is putting pressure on ISPs itself, pushing them to connect to its distribution network in order to give its customers “Super HD” Netflix video.

— Some additional pieces of the ongoing conversation about Facebook and viral publishers: Salon’s Alex Pareene looked at Facebook’s News Feed algorithm changed and the relationship between viral content and making money in online publishing, and Mathew Ingram of Gigaom pushed back against the report that Upworthy’s traffic was crushed by that algorithm tweak, while Len Kendall defended Upworthy’s approach more generally. The Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan also examined BuzzFeed’s shift toward quizzes as its most ubiquitous form of viral content.

— LinkedIn expanded its publishing platform, which had been limited to a number of “influencers,” to all of its users. The New York Times looked at the move as a way to boost its sagging usage rate, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram noted that LinkedIn has the advantage of having an existing revenue-generating business that can subsidize its publishing arm. Meanwhile, former New York Times digital editor Martin Nisenholtz and Sulia’s Jonathan Glick wondered whether the Times should consider becoming a publishing platform, too.

— The Women’s Media Center released its annual report on the status of women in the American media, and as Sara Morrison at Poynter and Edirin Oputu at the Columbia Journalism Review both noted, the numbers are pretty dismal in every category, especially in sports. Slate’s Amanda Hess did point out a couple of organizations that are leading the way in making sure women are represented — MSNBC and ESPN.

— Boston magazine published a long profile of new Boston Globe owner John Henry, and it included the nugget, helpfully highlighted by the Lab’s Joshua Benton, that the paper is switching its paid site, BostonGlobe.com, from a hard paywall to a metered model.

— Finally, Microsoft researcher danah boyd gave interesting Q&As to Fast Company and Slate about teens’ use of social media based on her new book on the subject.

Photo of WhatsApp by Tecnomovida Caracas and image of Ethernet cable by Bert Boerland used under a Creative Commons license.

So why is Comcast making the move? As The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta and Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett pointed out, the simplest explanation is that increased size gives Comcast more leverage against networks’ rising retransmission and carriage fees, as well as a bigger buffer against the growing share of cord-cutters, especially since the two companies don’t share many markets. Om Malik of Gigaom focused on broadband, noting that it’s the most profitable division of both companies and that Comcast caps its users’ broadband data, but Time Warner doesn’t.

Comcast needs to make its case to regulators (and to the public) for allowing the merger, and Recode’s Peter Kafka said it’ll come down to the argument that cable companies don’t compete — they’re confined to specific geographical areas, carved out by local regulators. Comcast is also saying that because of the two companies’ efficiencies of scale and possibility of new product offerings, the deal is somehow both “pro-consumer” and “pro-competition.”

Comcast is expected to be able to better negotiate lower retransmission fees for networks with the deal, which might theoretically benefit users, but as Poynter’s Al Tompkins noted, could also really squeeze local TV stations. Comcast also cited competition from Google Fiber as well as online video services like Apple, Netflix, and Hulu as competitive threats justifying the deal, though James McQuivey of Ad Age argued that even with the acquisition, Comcast may not be able to hold off Google and Apple on the online video front. Likewise, The Guardian’s Heidi Moore called it a desperation move that’s “likely to be a short and unhappy marriage.”

As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias pointed out, on the consumer side, there really isn’t any cable competition to begin with, so this deal will take us “from zero to two times zero.” But The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik and intellectual property scholar Susan Crawford both argued that the lack of competition will continue slow companies’ investment in broadband and fiber-optic infrastructure, which results in cheaper and slower Internet connections than are standard in much of the rest of the world. Said Hiltzik: “Our fat and secure cable monopolies simply don’t feel competitive pressure to provide customers with the fastest speeds at reasonable, affordable rates. When they do get pressured, they respond.”

The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor also decried the deal as a competition-suffocating disaster for consumers, and The Verge’s Bryan Bishop also said the deal will further damage ISP competition and end any chance for new blood in the cable market. Business Insider’s Jim Edwards focused on the prospect of broadband data caps, which both companies are keen to impose.

The Lab’s Joshua Benton also expanded on this theme of social news replacing search-based news and applied it to the more emotionally oriented headlines we’re seeing at viral-content sites. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land objected to the premise that social is replacing search, sparking a smart discussion with Benton about news organizations’ emphases on social and search.

The flip side of this social ascendance of news is that the sites that best take advantage of it are also most dependent on the whims of the social networks they rely on for distribution — in this case, Facebook. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson claimed that some of the social web’s top publishers, especially Upworthy, are taking traffic hits because of a November change to Facebook’s algorithm of how often posts show up in News Feeds. Upworthy countered that the traffic hit Carlson described was merely a cyclical bump, not a function of any Facebook algorithmic tweak.

Carlson also noted that BuzzFeed’s traffic jumped at the same time its viral competitors’ dropped and speculated that it’s because BuzzFeed buys Facebook ads to drive traffic to its native ads, though as Gawker’s Adam Weinstein noted, he quickly walked the quid-pro-quo accusation back. Slate’s Will Oremus argued that it’s highly unlikely that Facebook is jiggering its News Feed algorithm in order to benefit advertisers.

Henry Taylor of The Media Briefing explained just how well BuzzFeed’s native ads do on social sites relative to other ad forms and how important they are to BuzzFeed’s strategy. And here at the Lab, Joshua Benton highlighted a discussion of Gawker’s own (apparently rather ineffective) practice of buying Facebook ads to drive traffic to its native ads as well.

There’s also the matter of buying ads on Facebook to draw users not to another ad, but to Like a Facebook page, which appears to be a problematic process as well. Science blogger Derek Muller claimed that “click farms” of people Liking hundreds or thousands of Facebook pages to boost follower counts for ad clients, puffing up page audiences with meaningless followers that actually decrease their relative engagement and push them further down News Feeds.

Facebook denied that fake Likes are rampant there, though PandoDaily’s James Robinson found some corroborating evidence for Muller’s claim in his own Facebook ad-buying experiment. Slate’s Oremus countered that fake Likes don’t help Facebook and accused writers of being too eager to believe stories of Facebook’s nefarious deeds.

Keller talked to NPR’s Renee Montagne and the Lab’s Justin Ellis about the move, telling NPR that the Marshall Project won’t be practicing advocacy journalism per se, but something more in line with the Times’ tradition of objectivity-based investigative journalism. He talked to the Lab about growing the site’s audience, and Barsky pegged its annual budget at $4 million to $5 million, with a newsroom of 20-something employees. Barsky also talked to Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld about how he came up with the idea for the site and where it’s headed.

There was some criticism about the move: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan said that as a dyed-in-the-wool old media person, Keller is “almost certainly not the best man to lead an online journalism startup of any sort” and that his jump to a startup from such a cushy traditional media gig is “a great flashing sign that reads, ‘Newspapers are the past.'” Politico’s Dylan Byers detailed the bad blood between Keller and some of the Times’ brass.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker was encouraged by the launches of both the Marshall Project and The Intercept, seeing them as two different forms (the latter with a more ambitious and troublemaking goal) of a more targeted, online-based model of public-interest journalism. Reuters’ Jack Shafer, meanwhile, noted the wealthy patrons like Barsky and Omidyar who are swooping in to fund investigative journalism as the news organizations that have housed it for so long continue to be hollowed out.

Reading roundup: There were quite a few interesting developments and pieces to check out this week. Here are a few:

— Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index, and the U.S. dropped from No. 33 to No. 46. (The U.K. dropped three spots to No. 33.) Free Press’ Josh Stearns sounded the alarm on the U.S.’ falling ranking, though The Washington Post’s Max Fisher said it’s not a significant drop in the long term. The Committee of Protect Journalists looked more closely at the NSA’s pressure on the journalists who report on it.

— One of France’s largest newspapers, Libération, announced last weekend that it would become a “social network” and would turn its newsroom into a cultural center, prompting a headline and editorial in protest, a strike, and the resignation of the paper’s editor. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram urged the paper’s staff to be more open to change and the community it serves.

— Mashable reported that Twitter is testing a very Facebook-like profile redesign, to which ReadWrite’s Matt Asay and Wired’s Ryan Tate responded by calling for the two social networks to stop trying to mimic each other. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Twitter’s biggest problem is user indifference, something a Facebookization might be trying to resolve.

— A couple of smart pieces about journalism education: Lehigh professor Jeremy Littau on navigating the tension between the journalistic goals of accuracy and truth and the educational model of learning through failure, and Nebraska professor Matt Waite on resolving the “our curriculum is too full” problem by incorporating necessary non-traditional skills (in this case, math) into basic journalism courses.

— Finally, a couple of interesting pieces from late last week: Sulia’s Jonathan Glick at Recode on the rise of the platform-meets-publisher (or, as he calls them, “platishers”), and Circa’s David Cohn on rethinking CMSes to prioritize structured data rather than simply narrative.

Photo of Comcast remote by MoneyBlogNewz used under a Creative Commons license.

Rachel Metz of Technology Review and Lauren Hockenson of Gigaom both emphasized the newsiness of Paper’s content and design. Hockensen noted that while the app seems to be designed for the minority of users who use Facebook only for news, “the dirty secret remains that Paper is probably the ideal experience for everyone, filtering the noise in a way the desktop and mobile fail to do.” The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer said Paper represents a change in direction from the Twitterization of Facebook — it’s slower, more stable, and a bit less stream-like.

Wired’s Kyle Vanhemert looked at the way Paper is part of Facebook’s effort to improve the quality of the content people post there. With its slicker layout and more sophisticated publishing interface, “posting stuff to Paper will cease to feel like anything resembling ‘updating Facebook’ at all, and more like putting out a news article.”

The New York Times’ piece on Paper focused on its potential role in aiding Facebook’s increasing dominance in driving traffic and what goes viral and what dies. Recode’s Peter Kafka highlighted data from BuzzFeed that shows how Facebook has pulled away from Google as its top traffic driver, and The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer noted that publishers may be steering toward social optimization rather than search optimization because Google is getting better at providing many commonly sought answers itself.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon broke down the formula behind Facebook-driven virality, concluding that Facebook is sure to close that curiosity-gap clickbait loophole through which Upworthy is running straight to the bank. “Facebook is the monster in the publishing room: a traffic firehose which can be turned on or off at Mark Zuckerberg’s whim,” he wrote. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom similarly cautioned sites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed that Facebook may turn on them just as Google shut off the flow to content farms.

NSA hacking, and Greenwald accused: There were a handful of new developments over the past week in the ongoing U.S. National Security Agency surveillance story: First, tech companies released their first reports since their deal with the U.S. government giving a broad idea of how many requests they’ve gotten to turn over user information. Over the first half of 2013, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo handed over data on at least 59,000 users to the NSA.

In addition, NBC News reported based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden that Britain’s spy unit Government Communications Headquarters has been going after the hacktivist groups Anonymous and Lulzsec using some of those groups’ same hacking tactics, though in the process they’ve disrupted other web users who have no connection to hacking or Anonymous. At Wired, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman decried GCHQ’s actions as a “shotgun approach to justice that sprays its punishment over thousands of people who are engaged in their democratic right to protest simply because a small handful of people committed digital vandalism.” Slate’s Joshua Kopstein pointed out the hypocrisy in GCHQ’s actions as well.

And in a U.S. Congressional hearing, Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, accused Glenn Greenwald of illegally selling stolen material by getting paid to write freelance stories on the Snowden documents. Greenwald, who was with The Guardian when he broke the Snowden story and is now starting up First Look Media, countered that he’s not selling the documents, but simply working on stories about the documents with freelance contracts, just like any other freelance writer reporting on national security would. Greenwald also talked to Salon’s Brian Beutler about his decision over whether and when to return to the U.S. in light of this latest accusation.

The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi briefly explored the legal case, noting that the U.S. government has never actually tried a journalist for something like what Rogers is suggesting. A few others condemned Rogers’ comments as pure intimidation: Techdirt’s Mike Masnick called Rogers’ comments “an attempt to create chilling effects and to protect his friends in the intelligence community” and Rem Rieder of USA Today said they were “a blatant attempt to intimidate journalists by criminalizing their actions.” Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic looked at why Greenwald is being perceived differently from other journalists and argued that whether or not we agree with his style or political aims, Greenwald is the face of journalists’ First Amendment protections in the U.S. right now.

Also in Snowden-related press freedom, The Guardian released video of their destruction of the hard copies of the Snowden files last summer under government compulsion and explained that incident more fully, and Amitai Etzioni at The Atlantic critiqued Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s defense of his paper’s handling of the Snowden documents.

Defining news’ personal-franchise model: Two new individually driven news organizations are continuing to take shape: Ezra Klein lured three more former Washington Post colleagues to his new explanatory journalism venture at Vox Media, and New York magazine’s Benjamin Wallace profiled Klein and gave some more details about his philosophy of using the permanence of the web and the openness of digital publishing to build his new site through a combination of breaking-news blurbs and static, Wikipedia-type explainers.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf listed some of the questions he’ll be keeping an eye on as Klein’s site develops, including the role of narrative storytelling and whether it will develop context-oriented software it can sell to other news organizations. The Lab’s Joshua Benton wondered if Klein’s site might have a search strategy built around the idea that “we’re going to build answers to questions more complex than what Google can answer.”

Meanwhile, First Look Media, the new organization owned by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar and built around a group of journalists led by Glenn Greenwald, announced it will launch its first publication next week. It also hired several people, including former NPR social media guru Andy Carvin. Carvin talked to Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram about his excitement at being part of a news organization being built from scratch, as well as his goal of carrying his open, crowdsourced form of social journalism there. A few days earlier, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple expressed some skepticism of First Look’s developing non-hierarchical editorial structure.

NYU’s Jay Rosen attempted to define this emerging model of personal franchise-based journalism exemplified by Klein’s venture (though First Look, of which Rosen is an adviser, wasn’t on his list of examples — he said it’s structured to allow for multiple personal franchise sites to emerge) and explain its rise. Among several factors, he called this the next step in the rationalization of blogging: “This is blogging, regularized and made into a sustainable business.” The Guardian’s Emily Bell explored how this entrepreneurial spirit came to infect professional journalists, while Michael Wolff at USA Today said these ventures are operating more on blind hope in journalism than solid business principles.

Reading roundup: Several other stories were worth following this week:

— Egyptian authorities finally issued formal charges against 20 journalists, including three Al Jazeera journalists who were arrested in late December and have been held in prison since then. Al Jazeera, which employs nine of the 20, ripped the charges, and the Obama administration urged the government to release them. The government also released a video of two of the journalists in an attempt to portray them as part of a terrorist cell. The Columbia Journalism Review has a good summary of the case and why it has journalists and press freedom advocates concerned.

— A few weeks after a court ruling struck down the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality protections, Verizon is facing accusations that it’s slowing traffic to Netflix and Amazon Web Services. Verizon denied the charge, though critics such as Free Press and Public Knowledge were unconvinced. Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham found a similar trend in other data from ISPs’ speeds on video streaming sites. Meanwhile, a pair of bills were introduced in Congress to keep a net neutrality status quo until the FCC resolves the issue, and President Obama pledged his continued support of net neutrality. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton explained where things stand.

— Twitter’s first quarterly report revealed that its revenue beat expectations, but its stock price still dropped after it also revealed that its user growth is relatively flat and its engagement metrics are actually down. In short, as Quartz put it, Twitter’s getting more money from less-engaged users. Forbes explained how Twitter’s going to try to jump-start its user growth.

— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported that Gannett is hinting at a concern with its new paywall plan — its circulation revenue dipped a bit, suggesting that the circulation gain from its paywalls may have been a one-time event. The Lab’s Joshua Benton argued that the paywall isn’t a long-term solution to the problem of the decline of print, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said you have to invest in journalism to make your print-centric paywalls work.

— Finally, two interesting pieces worth a read: Two ex-BBC News execs made the case in The Guardian that the new digital news environment is making 24-hour TV news channels obsolete, and here at the Lab, journalism professor Nikki Usher looked at how the Des Moines Register is using its newsroom space as a metaphor for its digital ambitions.

Photo of NSA headquarters by AP/Patrick Semansky.

Klein’s description of his new site was vague, but touched on the need to add more context, education, and explanation to news. Vox CEO Jim Bankoff talked to CNN’s Brian Stelter and Ad Age’s Tim Peterson about the business side of the venture with relatively few details, though he said reports of a $10 million investment are “way high.” Klein gave a few more hints in a Q&A with BuzzFeed — it’s not going to just be a bigger version of his Post site Wonkblog.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said it’s fine that there doesn’t seem to be much structure yet to Klein’s new project, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis voiced his excitement at the prospect of Klein specializing in the “explainer” form of news. The Post’s Matt McFarland was also intrigued by the idea, outlined in a job description for the new site, of building “the world’s first hybrid news site/encyclopedia,” wondering why those two forms couldn’t be rejoined. Mark Potts, a former Post staffer, noted that the Post kicked around an idea for that kind of hybrid back in the late ’90s.

In a perceptive column, The New York Times’ David Carr saw Klein’s move as an indicator that digital publishing has come into its own, rather than serving as an additional platform for traditional media. “In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man.” He followed that up with a look at a few varieties of the new breeds of digital media operations. Likewise, media analyst Ken Doctor explained what seems distinct about the form of digital journalism Klein is embarking on, and here at the Lab laid out the economic reasons it’s becoming easier to start a new site. NYU’s Jay Rosen argued that Klein is leaving the Post’s supply-side logic to start something based on the “keep me informed” logic of the demand side.

The New Yorker’s George Packer was skeptical of the distinctiveness and quality of this new brand of digital journalism as Carr explained it, but BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel said that many media critics like Packer are missing the fact that tech isn’t just a smokescreen or accessory for a venture like Klein’s, but “the difference between a successful new media venture and a flop.” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman pointed out that we don’t know if Vox’s ad-based business model can translate from niches like sports and tech to the drier topic of public policy. Jack Shafer of Reuters also raised some cautions about the venture, arguing that with low costs of entry and a fluid talent pool, it’s not very well protected from competition.

Inside and Facebook’s mobile news aggregation tools: Two new entries into the now-crowded field of mobile news aggregation services were announced this week: Jason Calacanis, the tech entrepreneur who founded Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., and Mahalo, launched a new app called Inside, and Facebook announced it’ll launch a social news reader called Paper next week.

At the Lab, Staci Kramer has all the details on Inside in a thorough interview with Calacanis. The app is built around updates of 300 characters — about as much as can fit on the typical smartphone screen — summarizing a single source (with a link) on a news story. The updates will be human-written by a full-time staff of 15 and a crew of freelancers, and Calacanis stressed the value of human judgment in finding high-quality sources of original reporting and summarizing them intelligently. The app has enough money from the sunsetting Mahalo to run without ads for the first two years, but when it does add them, it’ll most likely go the native-ad route.

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram highlighted a few of these points, and talked to Inside editor Gabriel Snyder (formerly of Gawker and The Atlantic’s Wire) about the opportunity in mobile news that “feels akin to 2002 and the web, when everyone knew the web was going to be huge but it wasn’t clear how people would get the news.” The Verge’s Nathan Ingraham described the app’s mechanics and pointed out that Inside faces the aggregation conundrum of saving people time but also delivering clicks to their sources. Kramer also reviewed the app, calling it promising but inconsistent, particularly in its organization.

Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noticed the word “curate” in Inside’s App Store description and explored the aversion that Inside, Circa, and other news reading services have to calling what they do “aggregation.” Kirkland argued that it’s time to reclaim aggregation as a term: “Aggregation isn’t always bad, but automatically framing unoriginal reporting as curation helps these news middlemen avoid debate about whether we should be troubled by their methods.”

Facebook’s Paper is on the other end of the aggregation spectrum from Inside: It’s an automated and human-selected feed of news and content from your Facebook friends and the loads of the public content that organizations post on Facebook. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn looked at the app’s interface, concluding that its more relaxed feel “stands in direct opposition to the high-volume, high-noise vertical feeds we’re used to on Twitter and Facebook.”

Josh Constine of TechCrunch argued that Paper’s combination of content selection through editors, automation, and your friends leads to a strong sense of serendipity, and Recode’s Mike Isaac said the app taps into a broader network of discovery than the standard Facebook experience. Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff noted that Facebook still isn’t creating its own content here. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, noted that the market for social reading apps is becoming packed, and Facebook runs the risk of Paper feeling “like a tabloid stapled together from items they’ve already seen in their news feed.”

Reading roundup: A few other stories that grabbed some attention this week:

— This week’s U.S. National Security Agency surveillance happenings: The Obama administration reached an agreement with tech companies allowing them to disclose some vague information about the number of user data requests they get from the government; it was an improvement over the current information blackout, but many privacy advocates still aren’t too pleased. The NSA was also reported to be using “leaky” smartphone apps, like Google Maps and Angry Birds, to collect user information, and U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper obliquely referred to journalists as leaker Edward Snowden’s “accomplices.”

— CNN announced a partnership with Twitter and the social analytics company Dataminr that will allow it to spot breaking news stories on Twitter more quickly and efficiently. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram explained why it makes sense on Twitter’s end, and Alex Weprin of Capital New York explained what’s in it for CNN.

— A growing backlash against the preoccupation with longform journalism crystallized a bit last weekend in a New York Times column by Jonathan Mahler using the failings of Grantland’s Dr. V story to critique the fetishization of longform. Instapaper founder Marco Arment explained why he eschewed the longform push to focus on substance rather than length per se. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith broke down the backlash and explored some of the differences between longform done well and done poorly.

— The other shoe dropped at Patch, where new owner Hale Global had AOL lay off hundreds of staffers — possibly two-thirds of the editorial staff. Meanwhile, as the Lab’s Ken Doctor explained, GoLocal24 is doing its own national ramp-up of online local news.

— Finally a few resources and pieces to think on: Poynter’s Craig Silverman released a handbook for verifying digital content, particularly in breaking-news situations; NYU’s Jay Rosen gave some thoughts on how a networked beat structure might be built; and at Journalism.co.uk, Alastair Reid wondered if journalists are properly equipped to handle the massive amounts of data being released by organizations and governments around the world.

There were a ton of angles to explore and opinions to hear out on the ruling, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram collected many of them in a very thorough roundup. Several good posts explained the basics of the issue: The New York Times has a good primer on net neutrality and the FCC’s role, and The Wall Street Journal explained some of the key passages of the decision. A team of web freedom experts also answered other questions on what just happened and what happens next at Reddit.

The ruling struck down the conflicted legal framework under which the FCC attempted to regulate Internet providers — essentially, the Bush-era FCC classified ISPs as more loosely regulated “information services,” rather than the more strictly regulated phone companies, while the Obama-era FCC tried to apply the same regulation powers to those information services as the telecom companies get. The court said the FCC can’t do that, so this ruling put the ball back in the FCC’s court: They can appeal to the Supreme Court, try to reclassify ISPs as telecom services, or give up on net neutrality and try some other workarounds to enforce open access.

Nilay Patel of The Verge detailed how the FCC ended up in this spot. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung explained how reclassification might work, and The Wrap’s Ira Teinowitz noted that Congressional Republicans have already warned against that path, while consumer groups have endorsed it. Former Wired reporter Ryan Singel also offered a useful account of how the FCC got here, and said the FCC won’t pick a reclassification fight with Republicans and the ISP industry. Instead, he said, the best hope for an open web is building open-access municipal fiber networks.

With or without a protracted reclassification fight, we’re going to see preferential-access deals between ISPs and online companies soon, though the providers insisted the ruling won’t ultimately hurt customers. That’s doubtful, of course, but the bigger damage may be on the producers’ side, where the ruling allows Internet giants to pay more for better user access, crowding out startups and innovation. John Herrman of BuzzFeed has the best explanation of how the threat of a non-neutral web has evolved, noting that, on the surface, the changes might appear positive for customers, as Internet companies pay ISPs to subsidize your data use.

Others, including Tim Wu at The New Yorker, Dan Gillmor at The Guardian, John Judis at The New Republic, and Cale Guthrie Weissman at PandoDaily, made a similar argument about how the ruling will privilege tech monopolies. “The promise, and for several decades the reality, of the internet was decentralization: a network of networks where innovation would take place largely at the edges, not in the center,” wrote Gillmor. “We are on the verge of losing the internet that held such promise, at least for the near and medium term.” Venture capitalist Fred Wilson illustrated how frustrating the scenario would be for entrepreneurs, and Forbes’ Tom Watson expressed concern for the future of nonprofits and social entrepreneurship. Free Press’ Josh Stearns made the case that the end of net neutrality would be a blow to online journalism as well.

Google’s big buy, and Facebook’s small one: Two web giants made noteworthy purchases this week: The much larger purchase was Google’s acquisition of Nest, a company that makes smart thermostats and smoke alarms, for $3.2 billion. Though the price appeared to be something of an overpay, Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett and The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy have the best explanations of what Nest brings to Google: Nest gives Google a real entrée into people’s homes, something that, as Barrett noted, Google has struggled with in the past. It also ties into Google’s move into smart devices, something it’s invested a lot in with its work on self-driving cars. “In whatever form, understanding the connected device, and how people work with it, is a big part of understanding overall behavior, and that is Google’s driving ambition,” Hardy wrote.

On Nest’s end, Hardy pointed out that the company is run by Apple veterans who were already considerably wealthy, so the acquisition isn’t necessarily just about cashing out. Nest’s CEO, Tony Fadell, told Recode and The Verge that his company needed infrastructure more than anything to grow, and Google provides plenty of that.

Of course, Google’s move into smart devices built around daily behavior within the home has people understandably nervous about privacy. Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham and Salon’s Andrew Leonard both articulated those worries, and while Nest said its customer data will only be used for Nest products, John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out that its policy can change, wondering, “Does anyone seriously think Google doesn’t want the information Nest’s devices provide?”

The second purchase was smaller, but had more potential implications for social news: Facebook bought Branch and its sister service Potluck, both of which center on structured conversations around news links, for $15 million. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said Branch could help Facebook figure out how to create spaces for smart discussions, an issue with which Facebook continues to have difficulty, though The Daily Dot’s Kate Knibbs was more skeptical about the usefulness of Branch and the wisdom of the purchase.

The Lab’s Joshua Benton suggested that this purchase has the distinct smell of an “acquihire,” an acquisition done more for a startup’s employees than for its product. SiliconBeat’s Brandon Bailey also reported that the acquisition was indeed an acquihire, and that Facebook is not actually getting the rights to Branch’s technology. (What this means for the product itself is unclear.) Bailey and others noted that Branch’s Josh Miller has been a critic of Facebook in the past, and PandoDaily’s Michael Carney questioned the fit, given Branch’s roots in Obvious, an incubator co-founded by Twitter’s founders.

Social media and the power to tell personal stories: Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, Emma, triggered a debate about publicness, publishing authority, and social media (along with a whole lot of criticism) when they both wrote columns about Lisa Bonchek Adams, who has been blogging and tweeting about her increasingly painful experience with breast cancer for several years. Emma Keller’s column in The Guardian, published last week, wondered if Adams was sharing too much, asking her tweets were “a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies.” Bill Keller’s column in the Times this week was a bit less severe but questioned whether Adams’ documentation was glorifying a method of dealing with cancer that isn’t for every patient.

Shortly after Bill’s column ran, The Guardian deleted Emma’s column, explaining its rationale a couple of days later. The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, issued a mild rebuke of Bill’s column, saying it struck a wrong note on tone and sensitivity and appeared to some as a double-barreled attack with his wife on Adams.

The rebuke from others was much stronger. BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, who herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, catalogued Bill Keller’s faults in both tone and fact on Twitter. Likewise, Gawker’s Adam Weinstein, Wired’s Maryn McKenna, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram all issued scathing critiques of the Keller’s condescension.

There were several smart pieces that attempt to pinpoint exactly what the Kellers weren’t understanding about social media and self-disclosure, including one by sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who wrote that the Kellers got Adams’ case so wrong because they merely perused her postings: “Social media is not a snapshot that can be understood in one moment, or through back-scrolling. It’s a lively conversation, a community, an interaction with implicit and explicit conversations and channels of signaling, communication and impression.” The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said the Kellers misidentified one Twitter user’s style of writing as some sort of “this is the way we treat death now” trend, when Twitter is anything but a monolith.

The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins said the Kellers ultimately objected to someone else without their professional or cultural cachet being able to tell their story, and NPR’s Linda Holmes made a similar point, arguing that traditional media assumes some sort of presumption of importance is necessary to public writing on personal subjects, while that presumption isn’t present in the social media environment in which Adams writes. Adams’ writing on Twitter is “not meant to announce its own heft as appearing on an op-ed page does,” Holmes wrote. “She didn’t ask for endorsement, she didn’t ask for sign-off, she didn’t ask for agreement. She’s just telling a story.”

Reading roundup: A few other stories to take note of this week:

— After years of hemorrhaging money and months of trying to find a buyer, AOL unloaded its hyperlocal news network Patch on Hale Global, “an investment company that specializes in turning around troubled companies through technological innovation,” as The New York Times put it. As Recode noted, AOL will maintain a small stake in Patch, but Hale will take over its operation and AOL is done funding Patch’s losses. Hale and AOL are both saying Patch’s 900 sites will remain open. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram noted the clear lesson here: Hyperlocal doesn’t scale.

— The Knight News Challenge announced the winners of its most recent round of grants, which focused on health and data. A total of $2.2 million went to seven projects, and the Lab and American Press Institute highlighted one of them, the Solutions Journalism Network.

— NBC News announced it’s partnering with and investing in NowThis News, a social video news startup funded by BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer. New York magazine, meanwhile, published a feature on Lerer and his son, Ben, and their growing role as tech company funders.

— New York Times reporter James Risen appealed his long legal case to protect a confidential source to the Supreme Court this week, setting up a potentially definitive fight over whether journalists have the right not to name their confidential sources in response to court orders. Vocativ also talked to Risen about the case.

— Finally, two other interesting pieces, one an interview with the AP’s Eric Carvin on the state of social media and journalism, and the other a Columbia Journalism Review piece on research into the quality of the New Orleans Times-Picayune after its digital overhaul.

Image of Ethernet cable by Bert Boerland used under a Creative Commons license.

Initial reviews for redesigns are typically notoriously bad, but early reactions to the Times’ changes were actually fairly positive. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan collected some readers’ complaints and noted that the Times is committed to continuously tweaking and improving the site. Slate’s Adrian Chen tried to explain the lack of outrage about the redesign, concluding that it doesn’t change users’ experience much. “It allows you to read the Times the way you have for years. It’s just a little prettier,” he wrote. PandoDaily’s Adam Penenberg described it as a return to the simpler Times designs of the late ’90s and early 2000s, and Poynter’s Sam Kirkland said it still feels like a desktop-first design.

The most notable part of the redesign, though, is the Times’ introduction of native advertising — ads that mimic the paper’s editorial content. As the Financial Times noted (and as the Times’ leadership promised), the newsroom isn’t involved in creation of these ads; instead, they’re being produced by a new unit within the Times’ ad department. Digiday’s Brian Morrissey explained a bit more about how the ads will fit into the site, and Ad Age’s Michael Sebastian gave a few other notes, including that the ads will remain on the site indefinitely, and that they won’t be shared by the paper’s main Twitter or Facebook accounts.

The Times had previously promised that the ads would be clearly marked as paid-for content, and the first native ad, by Dell, certainly appeared to make good. Adweek’s Lucia Moses said the Times went further than most in identifying its content as an ad, noting that if the point of native advertising is to trick readers into thinking it’s editorial content, the Times labeling will defeat that purpose.

Still, blogger Andrew Sullivan was concerned that the news/advertising distinction isn’t strong enough, noting that it could get lost when the post is viewed outside the context of the rest of the site. And at The Guardian, Emily Bell said two questions need to be answered as native advertising becomes more widespread: How long will this trend last, and how transparent these ads will be.

Yahoo moves further into mobile news: Yahoo announced several new developments this week, including the launch of an app called the Yahoo News Digest that sends a twice-daily summary of stories to users. It’s the first new app based on Summly, the news-summarizing app Yahoo bought last year. The Verge’s Casey Newton has a very good summary of what makes this app distinct: It’s not personalized, but instead offers a single curated digest to everyone. It also has a definitive ending point, in contrast to the endless stream of news that’s in vogue elsewhere. Because of those distinctive choices, Newton called the News Digest “one of the best-looking, and most quietly provocative, newsreading apps we have seen in some time.”

On the other hand, BetaBeat’s Molly Mulshine understood Yahoo’s rationale behind the app, but saw it as superfluous. (The app got some glowing early reviews, though they appear to have come straight from Yahoo employees, as BuzzFeed observed.) Yahoo also launched new tech and food sites (called “digital magazines”), with the former being led by ex-New York Times tech columnist David Pogue. Pogue’s introductory post focused on tech coverage that’s more about elegance and efficiency than devotion to gadgetry or any particular tech religion, and he talked at Yahoo’s launch event about writing about tech for “normal” people.

Yahoo also launched a new unifying ad system that allows clients to buy ads across Yahoo’s platforms in a self-service format. (Adweek and TechCrunch have the details on those changes.) And it announced the purchase of a context-based mobile app, Aviate, that’s still in private beta. Yahoo CEO explained all the changes as part of a shift a mobile-centric media company that produces more of its own content and offers it in more mobile-friendly ways. Readwrite’s Owen Thomas said the changes helpfully narrow down Yahoo’s focus from its previous days of overreach, but its mission isn’t quite as cohesive and inspiring as its rival tech heavyweights.

Reading roundup: It’s only been a few days since the last This Week in Review post, but there are few ongoing stories that have continued to develop during that time. Here’s a quick rundown:

— We haven’t gotten official word that Ezra Klein is leaving The Washington Post after the paper reportedly rejected his proposal for a standalone explanatory journalism site, but The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported that the Post has begun looking for Klein’s replacement. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram urged the Post to cut a deal with Klein, and here at the Lab, journalism professor Dan Kennedy said the situation shows why news organizations should embrace a network model rather than one based on closely guarded control. Michael Wolff of The Guardian was skeptical, however, that such individually driven news sites represented a financially stable journalistic path.

— A few more pieces of the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden story: Wired’s Steven Levy wrote a long piece explaining what the NSA’s surveillance has meant for the tech industry. There was also some conversation among The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson, political blogger Marcy Wheeler, and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg about whether Snowden broke the oath given to federal employees. And there were a couple of posts on the new Pierre Omidyar/Glenn Greenwald First Look Media initiative — one by Greenwald on his role in the project and another by NYU’s Jay Rosen with its new hire, Bill Gannon.

— We got a bizarre intersection between Twitter and advertising this week when the producers of the movie Inside Llewyn Davis bought a full-page ad in The New York Times that consisted solely of a tweet by Times movie critic A.O. Scott. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan checked out the story behind the ad, noting that the tweet was edited and that Scott had denied the producers permission to use his tweet in an ad. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram and Reuters’ Felix Salmon both gave some thoughts on what the episode might mean.

— The Financial Times’ Jurek Martin and Danish professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen offered smart, conflicting perspectives on whether the current state of American political journalism is something to be lamented (Martin’s view) or celebrated (Nielsen’s).

— Finally, The New York Times’ social media desk has loads of useful advice in this post at the Lab about what works for them and what doesn’t.

The Times pushes for Snowden’s clemency: U.S. National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden received some strong support from a rather unexpected source last week, as The New York Times editorial board made a forceful case for the U.S. to grant Snowden clemency, allowing him to return home to face “at least substantially reduced punishment.” The Times argued that Snowden should be given clemency because he was acting as a whistleblower who knew that the only way to reform the NSA’s abuses was to expose them to the public. “When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government,” The Times wrote.

The editorial predictably outraged Obama administration officials and some members of Congress, though other members have begun to come out in favor of clemency as well. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reported some of the background on the editorial, and Andrew Sullivan offered a sampling of opinion on the piece from the political blogosphere.

The Times’ editorial was echoed by a Guardian editorial published almost simultaneously, and others affirmed the Times’ points as well, including CNET’s Charles Cooper and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. Slate’s Fred Kaplan disagreed with the Times, arguing that Snowden’s revelations and associations with Russia and other U.S. adversaries go beyond a whistleblower’s actions, and that clemency is highly unlikely anyway. On the other hand, Jack Shafer of Reuters noted that the NSA has publicly floated this clemency idea before, too.

The political blogger Digby voiced her surprise that anyone thought a newspaper would or should believe other than the Times board does, drawing from past words by The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman on the proper attitude of journalists toward government secrecy. Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola wondered why The New York Times hasn’t given the same support to WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, while Kalev Leetaru of Foreign Policy noted that Snowden has displaced WikiLeaks in the public eye.

Making sense of the NSA news: There was plenty of other NSA surveillance-related news over the holidays, starting with the continuing stream of stories about newly revealed NSA surveillance programs and capabilities: The NSA has a catalog advertising back-end break-ins for a variety of common electronic gadgets, it’s intercepting laptops to install malware that gives them remote access, it generated these back-door routes through a secret contract with computer security industry giant RSA, and it’s trying to build a quantum computer that could break most types of encryption in existence.

In case all of these NSA revelations are starting to blur together for you, The Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson put together a brief summary of the main things we learned about NSA surveillance this year, and NYU’s Jay Rosen listed three of his bigger-picture takeaways, including the the role of freedom rather than privacy as a core value of anti-surveillance activism and the value of Snowden’s going public. Arizona State’s Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, said the Snowden case shows what’s possible when journalists collaborate to create a critical mass of attention to an issue.

A federal judge upheld the NSA’s phone surveillance program, countering a ruling against the NSA by a federal judge in a different case earlier last month; The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson offered a good explanation of the two rulings. Others called attention to corporate surveillance: At All Things D, Michael Dearing criticized tech companies’ cooperation with the NSA, and The Guardian’s John Naughton and journalist Dan Conover both said we need to be more concerned about the surveillance tech companies are doing in addition to the NSA.

Snowden made a couple more public statements — an interview with The Washington Post in which he declared “mission accomplished” and a Christmas message on the U.K.’s Channel 4 in which he called for a restoration of privacy. Based on the interview, The Post’s Ruth Marcus derided Snowden as insufferable. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wondered whether we’re now getting information from non-Snowden NSA leakers, and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf suggested that NSA staffers voice their willingness (via the media) to meet with members of Congress as a way to blow the whistle without leaking.

Two other NSA-related media stories that continue to develop: 60 Minutes’ soft piece on the NSA spurred more criticism, this time from The New York Times’ David Carr. John Miller, who reported the story, left for a New York Police Department job. And Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden leaks for The Guardian and is now starting up First Look Media, promised many more Snowden documents to come and defended himself against charges that he’s become a spokesman for Snowden.

Personality-driven subsites break away: Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s AllThingsD made its long-awaited separation from News Corp’s Dow Jones, whose banner the tech site has been operating under since it was founded in 2007. Mossberg said farewell at AllThingsD’s site on New Year’s Eve, then the pair relaunched as Re/code the next day. The New York Times has more of the details: The investment firm Windsor and NBCUniversal News Group are minority investors, and News Corp’s Wall Street Journal launched a replacement tech news site called WSJD.

Another personally driven brand within a news org may be on the move as well, as The Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein was reported to be looking to start his own site elsewhere. Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post reported before the holidays that Klein was talking to people both inside and outside the paper about launching his own site, and two weeks later, The New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya reported that Klein’s proposal of an eight-figure site dedicated to explanatory journalism was turned down by The Post, so he’s planning on starting it with someone else.

Calderone gave some more details about the situation and compared it to the birth of Politico in 2007 after it was a rejected proposal by Post journalists. Klein’s proposal, Calderone said, represents the first test of new owner Jeff Bezos’ stewardship. BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel speculated that Klein’s recent Twitter follows might be a clue to a jump to the growing Vox Media.

Meanwhile, Neetzan Zimmerman, the viral content guru who accounts for a large chunk of Gawker’s traffic, announced he’s leaving to become editor-in-chief of the social sharing app startup Whisper. We also got an update on the progress of last year’s personal-brand media departure, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Sullivan finished the year with $851,000 in gross subscription revenue from 34,000 subscribers, just short of his initial goal of $900,000, and talked to Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram about his lessons learned and plans for the future.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that you might have missed over the holidays:

— A British study of social media use by teens led to a handful of attention-grabbing headlines about Facebook being “dead and buried” for young people. Several others, like the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and David Brake at The Conversation, warned that such a characterization of the study’s conclusion was overblown, since the study was based on data from students at just a few U.K. high schools. The lead researcher himself, Daniel Miller, also explained why his study shouldn’t be interpreted that way. Meanwhile, Pew released its newest survey numbers on social network use, which TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden broke down, and music technologist Ethan Kaplan argued that the phone, rather than the various platforms like Facebook that are used on it, is becoming the main technological form of identity for young people.

— There were no shortage of media-related reflections and lists as 2013 came to a close — you can check out Mathew Ingram of Gigaom’s list of 2013’s media ventures to watch, Josh Stearns’ list of the year’s best online journalism and storytelling, or the Future Journalism Project’s much more arbitrary best-of list. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman argued that this year was the culmination of Internet giants’ domination, while Quartz declared this a lost year for tech, an assertion Ingram disagreed with.

— Y Combinator founder Paul Graham gave an interview to the tech news startup The Information in which he was quoted as saying that he can’t make women see the world from a hacker’s perspective because “they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.” The quote was breathlessly picked up by Valleywag and briefly turned into a controversy, with debates and opinions about women and coding popping up all over. Graham responded that he was misquoted and was only referring to women who aren’t programmers, and The Information’s Jessica Lessin acknowledged that the quote in question was edited but denied that her organization did anything unscrupulous. Tech bloggers like John Gruber and Michael Arrington supported Graham, and tech PR exec Sean Garrett offered some lessons from the episode.

— News Corp bought the social news site Storyful, which focuses on social photos and video, just before the holidays. News Corp’s Raju Narisetti explained to Poynter and to Gigaom that Storyful will give News Corp an ability to verify, use, and syndicate viral video, giving it a new revenue opportunity and a building block toward a social news agency. Poynter’s Craig Silverman gave several reasons Storyful is worth our attention.

— Finally, the tech story everyone was talking about last week was Alexis Madrigal’s captivating piece at The Atlantic on how Netflix comes up with its extremely specific movie genres. It’s long, but well worth the time.

Photo of NSA headquarters by AP/Patrick Semansky. Photo of Kara Swisher looking badass by Lois Le Meur used under a Creative Commons license.

Mike Isaac of All Things D said Facebook’s actions illuminate a gap between what Facebook wants its News Feed to be (a tightly crafted “personalized newspaper” of useful information) and what its users want out of its News Feed (a lighter, more junk-foody stream of whatever’s popular at the moment). Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici tied Facebook’s changes to the difference between clicking and sharing — or between “the kinds of content we want to be seen as consuming and the content we actually like to consume.” The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer characterized Facebook’s changes as part of a fight with Twitter over being the ultimate feed, one publishers are caught in the middle of.

Mathew Ingram of Gigaom highlighted the nervousness of publishers regarding the changes and said Facebook will do whatever it has to do to boost its sagging engagement, publishers’ desires be damned. Both he and Slate’s Matthew Yglesias cautioned publishers about relying on Facebook for their traffic, with Yglesias noting that the economic value from that traffic will ultimately be captured by Facebook — if someone wants to advertise to an audience interested in that type of Facebook-oriented content, they’ll just advertise on Facebook.

And there are indeed publishers relying heavily on Facebook for their content’s distribution: Derek Thompson of The Atlantic pointed out some data showing the degree to which Facebook engagement dominates Twitter engagement in volume, with viral-oriented sites like Upworthy leading the way there. Social media consultant Suw Charman-Anderson offered some tweaks to Thompson’s analysis, saying that the observation that meme-based content is popular on Facebook “isn’t an insight, it’s a tautology,” and noting that Facebook users tend to prefer polarized, meme-y, and outrage-inducing content, while Twitter users are heavier on nonpartisan and tech news than outrage.

The other aspect of the viral-content issue that people discussed this week had to do with its veracity, or lack thereof. After the rash of viral hoaxes that hit us over the past few weeks, The New York Times looked at how web-based news organizations are navigating their responsibility to verify stories whose main value is simply their popularity and found a lot of ambivalence. Reuters’ Felix Salmon defended that ambivalence, arguing that it’s perfectly reasonable for news organizations to use journalistic standards for certain types of harder, newsy content but not for other types of softer, viral content because “the reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true.”

Gigaom’s Ingram, meanwhile, argued that since the decentralized nature of online media has now made each of us a member of the media, we all need to employ higher verification standards ourselves rather than blaming “the media” when false stories are spread. And at American Prospect, Paul Waldman expressed concern that the you-have-to-see-this-now headline style of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy is going to start generating skepticism from its overuse.

C is for cookie hacking: Six months on, the revelations of U.S. National Security Agency spying based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden continue to roll out weekly. This week it was The Washington Post’s report that the NSA is secretly using private companies’ cookies and location trackers to target people for surveillance and hacking.

As The Post and PandoDaily’s Nathaniel Mott noted, online data-tracking companies have argued that their surveillance is different from and more benign than the government’s, but now the government has united the two. Princeton’s Edward Felten and Mike Masnick of Techdirt urged Google and other companies to find ways to protect cookie data from NSA interference. Meanwhile, The Guardian also reported that the NSA has tried to infiltrate online gaming communities like Xbox Live and World of Warcraft. The Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson explained why news organizations could but don’t protect users’ browsing data through encryption.

Several anti-surveillance campaigns surfaced this week, led by a campaign by numerous tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook, to demand changes in U.S. surveillance law as well as an international ban on bulk collection of data as a way to restore trust in Internet services.

The New York Times and The Guardian have thorough coverage of the initiative, and CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis applauded the companies while urging them to go further and write standards to govern their own behavior. In addition, 500 leading authors called on the UN to create an international bill of Internet rights protecting civil liberties, and privacy groups petitioned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to discipline phone companies that sell customer information to the CIA.

Snowden would have been a logical choice for Time’s Person of the Year, but he was named runner-up (with a fine big-picture essay by Michael Scherer) to Pope Francis, to the consternation of media observers. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy and The Post’s Andrea Peterson both made the case for Snowden as person of the year based on his immense international impact, while Business Insider’s Adam Taylor noted that Time likely made the choice at least in part because a cover with the pope was likely to sell many more copies than one with Snowden.

Reading roundup: A few other stories and thoughtful pieces floating around this week:

— A New York appeals court ruled that Fox News reporter Jana Winter doesn’t have to go to jail for refusing to reveal her sources for a story about last year’s Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting. The New York Times has a good summary of the ruling’s shield-law implications, as did The New Yorker. The Columbia Journalism Review explained what the case cost Winter, and what she gains by winning it.

— YouTube issued a slew of copyright claims on producers of videos of video gameplay, both professional and amateur. YouTube issued a brief explanation, and Forbes’ Paul Tassi sorted through what might be at work here.

— Twitter announced it’s adding photos to its private direct messaging feature, which, as BuzzFeed’s John Herrman and Wired’s Mat Honan noted, appears to mark its official entry into the private messaging wars against Facebook and Instagram. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram argued that it’s a war no one will win.

— The Huffington Post, perhaps the most-commented-on news site on the web, announced it would end its anonymous commenting system, requiring commenting through Facebook. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland looked at what goes into verifying a Facebook account as HuffPo will require, and Meranda Adams of 10,000 Words wondered if we’ve reached the tipping point against anonymity on the Internet.

— Finally, two thoughtful articles from The Atlantic: Alexis Madrigal on why the constant stream of newness-focused, reverse-chronological content is beginning to wear on people, and James Bennet on why ‘long-form journalism’ is a pretty pointless (and unenticing) name for good magazine-style writing.

Images of dengue virus by Sanofi Pasteur and of “C is for Cookie” (1974) by epiclectic used under a Creative Commons license.

The two biggest stories, however, have been about the journalists that have published the stories on the leaks. The first was regarding The Guardian, whose editor, Alan Rusbridger, was called in to testify to a Parliament committee about his paper’s reporting on the leaks. The paper’s staff could be charged with terrorism offenses related to their publication of the leaks.

Rusbridger gave a vigorous defense of The Guardian’s handling of the documents, saying that the paper has only published about 1% of Snowden’s documents and that he doesn’t expect to publish many more. He also detailed the efforts the British government has taken to intimidate the paper, including prior restraint on publication, the forced destruction of the paper’s Snowden data, and calls from lawmakers to prosecute the paper.

Not surprisingly, journalists from Britain and elsewhere rose up in Rusbridger’s defense. Mike Masnick at Techdirt mocked some of the members of Parliament’s questions, including one that asked, “Do you love this country?” Trinity Mirror journalist David Higgerson used that question to warn of the dangers of giving government even more control over the press. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade marveled at the fact that Rusbridger was even called to testify before Parliament, and from the U.S., Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and USA Today’s Rem Rieder both expressed alarm that The Guardian is facing scrutiny at a time when the true scrutiny should be on excessive government surveillance and secrecy. Rusbridger also made his own case before the hearing in an interview with The Washington Post.

Monopolizing the Snowden documents?: The second big story revolved around Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who is launching his own news organization with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and others. The Rolling Stone’s Janet Reitman wrote a long, rich profile of Greenwald and Snowden, and The Independent profiled his new colleague, Jeremy Scahill. NYU’s Jay Rosen, and adviser to the new organization, talked to The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf about how it will manage reporting with an open perspective as opposed to traditional objectivity.

Greenwald and Omidyar faced several criticisms of their possession of Snowden’s documents. First, Greenwald refuted an accusation by a Wall Street Journal reporter that he failed to properly disclose the nature of his freelance relationship with the CBC. Then came a more substantial critique from Mark Ames at PandoDaily, that Greenwald and Omidyar’s possession of the documents amounts to their privatization by a tech mogul who will be running a for-profit news organization. “Information of national importance, such as which major tech companies colluded with the US government to spy on private citizens, will be published at the discretion of the founder and largest shareholder of one of those companies,” Ames wrote.

In a lengthy response to Ames, Greenwald argued that no one has monopolized the documents and that the way he and the others with access to the documents have handled them has been the best of several options. PandoDaily’s Paul Carr responded back to Greenwald, particularly his accusations about Ames and PandoDaily.

The Berkman Center’s David Weinberger also delved into the debate, concluding that the fact “that the charge that Glenn Greenwald is monopolizing or privatizing the Snowden information is even comprehensible to us is evidence of just how thoroughly the Web is changing our defaults and our concepts.” Also at PandoDaily, David Sirota looked at why The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman has been received better for his reporting on the documents than Greenwald, and blogger Marcy Wheeler examined Bob Woodward’s role in the monopolization debate.

How much value does viral content have?: A number of different issues and stories converged into a wide-ranging discussion on the value of viral content over the past week or two. The first was Michael Wolff’s column in USA Today criticizing the traffic-based business model of Business Insider and suggesting that the site’s owner, Henry Blodget, sell before that model collapses. Blodget responded that the overpriced high-end digital ad market actually works in his site’s favor, as more advertisers will gravitate to his low-cost model. Reuters’ Felix Salmon, meanwhile, critiqued Wolff’s numbers as “unreasonably bearish.”

At PandoDaily, Bryan Goldberg also criticized the effectiveness of a business model that relies on viral traffic (especially through social networks like Facebook), arguing that it doesn’t mesh well with the precision of a well-planned advertising campaign. Likewise, Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said chasing after pageviews is a fool’s errand when the value of pageviews continues to drop. “That’s not just because there are more and more sites doing it, but because the value of incremental pageviews is sinking inexorably towards zero,” he wrote. (Facebook also released a change to its News Feed that will make it more difficult for viral content to spread as quickly or ubiquitously there.) Blodget also defended Business Insider’s infamous slideshows as a form of native digital storytelling, something PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie balked at, though Ingram offered a defense of the humble slideshow.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo wrote a profile of Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman, who generates an absurd amount of viral traffic there. (Later, Capital New York reported that Zimmerman is getting his own section of the Gawker website.) The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein highlighted several lessons from Manjoo’s piece, noting that it shows that garnering huge traffic via social media isn’t a crapshoot, but a skill that can be mastered. PandoDaily’s McKenzie also drew attention to the “mechanics” of viral content being used by Zimmerman and sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, calling it “annoying as hell.” At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ann Friedman offered some tips on doing viral content well within a journalistic context.

In addition, several viral stories were revealed to be hoaxes last week, led by a Huffington Post column on poverty and a Thanksgiving airplane note-passing story. There was both hand-wringing and ambivalence over all the falsehood being passed around online. “If there’s a great reward, and little downside, to be had in publishing B.S., the Internet’s going to get more B.S.,” wrote Slate’s David Weigel, and The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman saw it as indicative of the “immature overexcitement that engulfs some people” online. Vice’s Harry Cheadle urged us all to be a little more skeptical, because the false information online isn’t going away. On the Media’s PJ Vogt, on the other hand, said he’s starting to treat these viral stories as “pieces of culture rather than pieces of reporting.”

Yahoo brings Katie Couric aboard: Yahoo announced this week that it’s hiring Katie Couric as its “global anchor” — another big traditional media name jumping to an online-only organization, though not necessarily the poaching maneuver we’ve become used to. Couric, the former anchor at CBS News, has been working as a special correspondent for ABC and has a syndicated daytime talk show (which will continue, at least initially).

Couric told The New York Times her new job hasn’t been fully defined, but will involve shaping Yahoo’s growing news operation and told Capital New York that she and Yahoo would be very flexible with the possibilities of her new position, though they’d bring a broadcast journalism sensibility to the web. All Things D’s Kara Swisher said bringing a broadcast news heavyweight to the web is a flashy but risky move.

The Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson argued that Yahoo is bringing in Couric and former New York Times tech writer David Pogue because it’s looking for established brands with a history of bringing in video audiences around which to anchor advertising, and the Lab’s Ken Doctor saw the move as part of a broad set of experiments with the nature of the newscast on the web.

A leave of absence for Lara Logan: CBS News completed its internal review of 60 Minutes’ faulty October report on Benghazi (for which it offered a terse apology last month), and it resulted in the report’s lead journalist, Lara Logan, and its producer, Max McClellan, taking leaves of absence. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple denounced the leaves of absence as “worthless” as a punishment, and Mother Jones’ David Corn questioned why 60 Minutes’ executives hung onto the story long after they had reason to believe it was false.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier wondered whether Logan was being made a scapegoat for malfeasance higher up 60 Minutes’ editorial ladder, and Mediaite defended Logan, arguing that CBS’ action “sends a message that the idiom ‘What have you done for me lately?’ is not only true, it’s become CBS network policy.” In a staff meeting, CBS News chairman Jeff Fager reportedly denied scapegoating Logan. Elsewhere, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein called for more attention to the possible role Logan’s husband, former intelligence agent Joseph Burkett, may have played in connecting her to the story, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Brendan Nyhan chastised 60 Minutes for its lackadaisical correction efforts.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that have sprung up this week and last:

— The fallout from Bloomberg News’ self-censorship of news about Chinese corruption continues: Chinese authorities conducted unannounced “inspections” of Bloomberg’s Chinese bureaus, and one of Bloomberg’s reporters in the U.K. was barred from attending a press conference with a Chinese leader there, to the disapproval of the British government. The New York Times looked more closely at Bloomberg’s transition as a news organization and its dilemma in China, and meanwhile, a prominent Hong Kong journalist called for Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff to resign his chairmanship of a prominent international press freedom dinner, while American journalists defended him. (Doctoroff ended up chairing the dinner.)

— As The New York Times’ David Carr reported, New York magazine will drop from weekly to bi-weekly print publication next year. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan called the print cutback “a process of right-sizing,” though The Awl’s Choire Sicha noted that New York still makes a lot of money off of print advertising. Harvard Business Review’s Sarah Green said the reporting on the print cuts shouldn’t characterize them as a failure, but simply an adaptation that’s more good than bad.

— The Beastie Boys fought a parody of their song “Girls” in a viral online ad by the toymaker Goldieblox, igniting a brief but intense debate on the correct application of fair use. Goldieblox filed a lawsuit defending its right to use the song, but took the video down a bit later with a conciliatory letter to the band. In the few days in between, the lines were drawn quickly and sharply. Arguing in favor of Goldieblox’ use of the song: Tech entrepreneur Andy Baio, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stanford’s Julie Ahrens, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram. Arguing against Goldieblox: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum (twice) and Reuters’ Felix Salmon.

— The U.S. Federal Trade Commission held a conference this week on native advertising, urging advertisers and publishers to more clearly mark native advertising as sponsored content and make it less deceptive. Ad Age, Forbes, and the Columbia Journalism Review have more detailed descriptions of the discussion at the conference.

— Longtime New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died at 59 this week, prompting remembrances of the man and the vanishing style of journalism he represented from many of those who knew him, including Gawker’s Tom Scocca, Observer publisher Jared Kushner, BuzzFeed’s Doree Shafrir, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller, and The Guardian’s Michael Wolff.

Image of dengue virus by Sanofi Pasteur used under a Creative Commons license.