“I think anybody who has in the past enjoyed reading the internet purely for fun can see that there’s a real dearth of URLs to type into one’s address bar these days,” Livingstone told me in a chat with Lavery this week. We conducted the interview in a live Google Doc — my way of allowing both of their internet voices to operate at a maximum, and eliciting comparisons of The Stopgap to “a stately pleasure barge of a site” (Lavery) or “a burnish’d throne??” (Livingstone). The Stopgap launched Wednesday morning, and you can read it here.

Don't worry, no one's going to try to make money from this one. That lesson's been learnt! This one's just for fun, and per its tagline: "Better than nothing"

That's @The_Stopgap, remember. Accept no substitutes, and watch this space.

— Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) April 27, 2023

The Stopgap’s motto: “It’s better than nothing.”

This will be an old fashioned, general interest blog, mostly written by us. We’ll make no money, produce no podcasty newslettery bullshit, and pay nothing—although readers can donate direct to guest authors thru financial socials.

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) April 27, 2023

On the way out: International news blog Parallels, education blog NPR Ed, All Tech Considered, music news blog The Record, and breaking news blog The Two-Way. The content will all be incorporated into corresponding topic pages (Education, Music, and so on), wrote NPR public editor Elizabeth Jensen.

From her post:

Sara Kehaulani Goo, a managing editor overseeing digital news operations, said the moves follow the changing way readers are finding stories. They are far more likely to follow a link posted on Facebook than to start at the landing page of one of those blogs, she said. “At the end of the day, people aren’t coming to us by topic or blog; they’re coming to us by stories; they are very interested in story by story,” she said.

An audience survey showed many didn’t know NPR had blogs. Some who did thought that those pages labeled ‘blogs’ were more personal columns (such as the Ombudsman blog) than aggregations of news stories, she said, adding, ‘It became an obvious question then: Our audience isn’t recognizing that we have these blogs, so why do we have 10 brands within NPR.org that aren’t resonating?’

‘We kind of made it hard for our audience to understand what we were doing,’ Goo said.

Other news organizations have also come to the conclusion that blogs are confusing for readers. The Wall Street Journal shut down eight last summer (the archives remain). The New York Times has closed many of its standalone blogs, including technology blog Bits and metro blog City Room. That one got a Nieman Lab oral history.

Watch out, podcasts. You may be next.

“Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice,” he wrote. “Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.”

Kottke.org, however, is decidedly still a blog. It also celebrates its twentieth birthday this year. I spoke with Kottke about the function of the blog today, how becoming a father made him better at his job, the way he talks to young people about his career, and why adding a membership program gave kottke.org new life. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.

One of the Wall Street Journal’s oldest blogs, the Law Blog launched in January 2006 with a “simple name but a novel approach to legal news in the pre-Twitter era,” the paper’s law bureau chief Ashby Jones wrote in the blog’s farewell note:

Law Blog was the first of its kind at the WSJ and was an immediate hit, attracting readers from all corners of the legal world. Its success helped usher in a sort of Golden Age for blogs at WSJ and encourage the growth of a wider, legal blogosphere.

China Real Time, launched before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and India Real Time, which came along in 2010, chronicled life in the growing economies for both local readers and an international audience. Beijing-based reporter Josh Chin noted the changing times in his blog’s farewell letter:

When this site was born, China’s GDP growth was in double digits, Beijing building toward the triumph of the Olympics and China-themed blogs were proliferating across the internet. Nine years later, China’s government is struggling to keep the economy growing above 6%, the Olympics are a fading memory and many a China blog has fallen silent.

The China story has changed, and so have the the tools for telling it. Regretfully, the time has come for China Real Time to end its run. We plan to transfer the same energy and insight that animated the blog to covering China on WSJ’s other platforms, including the main English and Chinese websites.

Wall Street Journal spokesperson Steve Severinghaus said that a total of eight verticals have been shuttered as part of the WSJ 2020 project, an internal operations review launched in October 2016. The other affected blogs are arts/culture/entertainment blog Speakeasy (last updated in March), Off Duty Daily (last updated in May 2016), breaking news hub Dispatch, sports blog The Daily Fix, and data review blog the Numbers (last updated in July 2016). “We’ll continue to cover these areas robustly through other storytelling formats and our digital platforms,” Severinghaus said in an email.

The statement sounds similar to things that New York Times staffers said around the shutdown of the City Room blog (2007–2015). “If it were 100 years ago, this would have lasted for 50 years, but the way technology changes and the way reader nature changes every five years now, its lifespan was just so much shorter,” New York Times metro editor Wendell Jamieson said at the time. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an important bridge, but it’s a different industry than it was when City Room launched. It’s truly the post-blog era, and I barely had time to get into the blog era.”

While the Wall Street Journal’s China and India bureaus and lead legal writers won’t be posting to the blogs anymore, the sites will remain live as archives. The social media accounts for the blogs will continue to be updated with relevant content from the Journal’s reporters, according to the blog posts announcing the closures. But for some followers, that’s not enough.

Self-inflicted wound at the WSJ. This will cost the organization in ways the bean-counters can't or won't measure. https://t.co/OZGCgTP9XQ

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 3, 2017

The decision to shutter these blogs is another streamlining of the Journal’s platforms, days after the What’s News digest app ceased publication. Mobile editor Phil Izzo told my colleague Joseph Lichterman that the Wall Street Journal is aiming for flexibility with platforms while still maintaining autonomy over their content.

“What we’re trying to do is set up a place where we can make changes. We’re never going to be a tech company. We’re never going to be Google or Facebook. But what we can do is have more control over our product and more control over what we put out,” Izzo said last month.

As South Asia deputy bureau chief Eric Bellman said in the note announcing Real Time India’s end, the content will keep coming — just not on the blogs.

India Real Time started in 2010 as the first attempt by a global newspaper to offer a news product for Indian readers through the internet. Seven years and crores of clicks later, The Wall Street Journal is winding down the successful blog. We will continue to offer the content Indian readers want through the more popular paths of distribution: WSJ subscriptions, apps and social media.

The Wall Street Journal will continue to maintain some blogs, such as Real Time Economics and MoneyBeat.

Um dos blogs mais antigos do Wall Street Journal, o Law Blog, foi lançado em janeiro de 2006 com “um nome simples, porém uma nova abordagem para notícias sobre leis em uma era pré-Twitter”. Chefe da divisão de notícias sobre direito, Ashby Jones escreveu na nota de despedida:

O Law Blog foi pioneiro no Wall Street e fez sucesso imediatamente, atraindo leitores de todos os cantos que se interessam pelo ‘mundo do direito’. Esse sucesso inaugurou uma ‘época de ouro’ dos nossos blogs e encorajou o amplo crescimento da blogosfera sobre o assunto.”

O blog China Real Time, lançado antes das Olimpíadas de Pequim (2008), e o India Real Time, que surgiu durante o ano de 2010, relatou a vivência nas economias crescentes para leitores locais e internacionais. O repórter Josh Chin, de Pequim, escreveu sobre a mudança na carta de despedida de seu blog:

Quando esse site nasceu, o crescimento produto interno bruto da China estava em 2 dígitos. Pequim crescia com o triunfo das Olimpíadas e blogs sobre a China estavam proliferando na internet. Nove anos depois, o governo chinês está fazendo um esforço imenso para manter o crescimento da economia acima de 6%, as Olimpíadas são uma memória em esquecimento e vários blogs foram silenciados.

A história da China mudou, e consequentemente as maneiras de contá-la. Infelizmente, chegou ao fim a trajetória do China Real Time. Nós planejamos transferir as mesmas energia e percepção que motivaram o blog para a cobertura da China no Wall Street Journal e em outras plataformas, incluindo os principais sites em inglês e chinês.

O porta-voz do Wall Street Journal, Steve Severinghaus, disse que um total de 8 ramificações do jornal foram encerradas como parte do projeto 2020, uma revisão das operações internas lançadas em outubro de 2016. Outros blogs afetados foram o Speakeasy, de arte, cultura e entretenimento (que teve o sua última atualização em março), o centro de notícias de última hora Dispatch, o esportivo The Daily Fix e o revisor de dados Numbers, atualizado em julho de 2016. “Continuaremos a cobrir essas áreas por meio de outros formatos narrativos e plataformas digitais”, disse Severinghaus por e-mail.

Essa declaração é parecida com o que os funcionários do New York Times disseram sobre o encerramento do blog City Room (2007-2015). “Se fosse 100 anos atrás, isso teria durado por 50 anos. No entanto, o jeito com que a tecnologia muda e a maneira como a natureza do leitor muda a cada 5 anos, a expectativa de vida do blog foi muito mais curta”, disse o editor Wendell Jamieson. “Não significa que ele não foi uma ponte importante, mas a indústria era diferente quando o City Room foi lançado. Isso não significa que esse fato não seja uma ponte de acessibilidade, porém pertence a uma indústria diferente da que era abrangida quando o City Room foi lançado. Essa é, realmente, a era do pós-blog. E mal tive tempo de entrar na era do blog”.

Apesar de as sucursais chinesa e indiana do Wall Street Journal e de os principais autores sobre o mundo das leis não postarem mais em blogs, o site irá manter os arquivos. Os perfis nas mídias sociais continuarão sendo atualizadas com conteúdo relevante advindo dos próprios repórteres, de acordo com o anúncio de encerramento das páginas. Para alguns seguidores, no entanto, isso não é o suficiente.

Self-inflicted wound at the WSJ. This will cost the organization in ways the bean-counters can't or won't measure. https://t.co/OZGCgTP9XQ

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 3, 2017

“Ferida auto-infligida no WSJ. Isso custará à organização de maneiras que contadores de feijões não podem ou não irão calcular“, escreveu o especialista em mídia Dan Gillmor no Twitter.

A decisão do encerramento desses blogs é outra forma de racionalizar as plataformas do jornal, dias após o aplicativo What’s News ser descontinuado. O editor de mídias, Phill Izzo, disse ao meu colega Joseph Lichterman que o WSJ tenta flexibilizar as plataformas, enquanto mantém autonomia sobre o próprio conteúdo.

“O que estamos tentando fazer é configurar um local no qual seja possível fazer alterações. Nós nunca seremos uma companhia tecnológica. Nunca seremos o Google ou o Facebook. Mas, o que podemos fazer é ter controle sobre nossas produções e mais controle ainda sobre o que publicamos”, disse Izzo em junho.

Como o sub-chefe do escritório do sul asiático, Eric Bellman, disse em uma nota anunciando o fim do India Real Time, o conteúdo continuará sendo publicado –mas não nos blogs.

O India Real Time foi lançado em 2010 como a 1ª tentativa de um jornal de caráter global de oferecer novas produções aos leitores por meio da internet. Sete anos e vários cliques depois, o Wall Street Journal está fechando esse blog de sucesso. Continuaremos a transmitir conteúdos aos consumidores indianos que desejam acessar informações por meio dos caminhos mais populares: inscrições, acesso a aplicativos e mídias sociais do WSJ.

O Wall Street Journal seguirá mantendo alguns de seus blogs, como o Real Time Economics e o MoneyBeat.

The New York Times’ John Herrman, who first reported the news, wrote:

Circuit Breaker will be edited by Paul Miller, a former employee of The Verge who is returning to the company. Mr. Miller said the new page would reach for a “core audience” of hard-core gadget fans. The Verge offers some popular gadget coverage, but Mr. Miller said many of those gadget fans “feel neglected when we’re talking about Netflix” and technology’s role in the broader culture.

The page will also steer clear of covering the business of tech, leaving industry stories to The Verge or Recode, the tech news site founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg that Vox Media acquired last year. (Some articles and reviews from The Verge, where Mr. Mossberg publishes a column, will appear on Circuit Breaker.)

Paul Miller — who’s actually been writing for The Verge for a couple weeks under the anagram Al Plumlier — introduced Circuit Breaker in a Facebook video:

This makes Facebook, via Instant Articles, basically the world's most successful RSS reader literally overnight.

— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) April 18, 2016

I also thought of Gigaom founder Om Malik’s comment to Herrman last week: He said “if he were to start the business today, it would probably be a Facebook page.” (Disclosure: I used to work for Gigaom.) Malik got some pushback from Twitter for that comment — and, indeed, on the same day, Facebook pulled down The Shade Room’s extremely popular page with little explanation, amping up fears that publishers have given the platform too much control — but it’s pretty much exactly what Vox Media is doing here.

One topic, by the way, that came up in Twitter conversations Monday: If Circuit Breaker posts are also being posted on The Verge’s website, is this idea really that new? Answer: Probably yes.

@stevekovach if there wasn’t a fb page this whole project wouldn’t exist

— John Herrman (@jwherrman) April 25, 2016

@stevekovach (which is how people would have thought about a facebook page a few years ago)

— John Herrman (@jwherrman) April 25, 2016

It’s not (yet) possible to be an Instant Articles publisher if you don’t have a web source from which to feed your articles to Facebook. That, of course, could change in the future, but for now a publisher that wants to monetize its content using Instant Articles — and it sounds as if Circuit Breaker will be monetized in other ways too — needs some other home base for that content. Malik: “I call [the version of Circuit Breaker on The Verge’s website] a web-based backup/archive.”

This post was updated Monday evening with a few more thoughts on the “Facebook-first” nature of Circuit Breaker.

“When Bits was born, blogs were the path toward a digital future. They were the only way for us to publish quickly, without the constraints of print deadlines and production. No more. We now have a home-grown publishing system that allows us to more seamlessly integrate our tech coverage across the web, apps, print, social media — everywhere you find our journalism.

So for clarity and simplicity, the blog goes away and all tech stories will now carry the label of Tech.

You will still see the Bits identifier on some of our journalism. The Bits email newsletter will continue, as will Bits special sections and daily reports that summarize the big news of the day.”

The New York Times did a big rethink of its blogs in 2014, shutting down almost half of them. “There’s little chance that our marquee blogs, ones like DealBook, Well, Bits, will be going anywhere anytime soon,” then-assistant managing editor Ian Fisher (he’s now head of the Times’ investigations department) told Poynter at the time.

Last November, the Times shut down the eight-year-old City Room. For more on how blogs sparked and changed the Times’ digital evolution, you’ll want to read my colleague Joseph Lichterman’s entire oral history, but here’s what one former Times employee told him:

The success of a lot of the blogs was, in some ways, part of their downfall. For lack of a better term, they started competing with the existing sections.

The list of remaining Times blogs is here.

My guest today is Matt Thompson. Since earlier this year, Matt has been deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, But you might know him from some of his previous career stops. He spent a few years at NPR, heading up some of its most interesting digital initiatives, like Project Argo. Maybe you know him from Snarkmarket, the influential group blog he led with fellow smart guys Robin Sloan and Tim Carmody. Or you may just know him as a provocative thinker on the shape of modern media.

Matt’s one of the key people behind Notes, a new section The Atlantic launched last month that promises to bring blogging back to The Atlantic. It’s an interesting attempt to recapture some of the looser, voicier, more conversational structures of the early 2000s — some of which has been lost in the rise of social media and commercialized online news.

We talked about how blogging seeped into the DNA of today’s news, whether Wikipedia-ing the news is still a thing, and how Slack is creating a new context for editorial voice. Here’s our conversation.

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Show notes

Matt Thompson (his site still has an old bio on it, alas)
@mthomps
The Atlantic
The Atlantic’s Notes section
Chris Bodenner, Atlantic senior editor
“Welcome to Notes” (August 27, 2015)
“The Atlantic is returning to blogging” (August 27, 2015)
“The People Formerly Known as the Audience” (June 27, 2006)
J.J. Gould, editor of TheAtlantic.com
“For the Golden Horde” (December 22, 2010)
“The Atlantic redesigns, trading clutter and density for refinement” (April 22, 2015)
The reader survey The Atlantic used for user testing
“Two out of two news organizations recommend user research” (July 29, 2015)
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic
The Matt Thompson tag page on Nieman Lab
“Building permission structures for short content (Vox edition)” (May 19, 2014)
“The blog is dead, long live the blog” (December 19, 2013)
The Sully lede
Infocom
#thedress
Email newsletters on Nieman Lab
Podcasts on Nieman Lab
TheAtlantic.com homepage in 2011
“Facebook Begins Testing Instant Articles From News Publishers” (May 13, 2015)
“A confab with Matt Thompson: Noodling the future of context” (May 5, 2009)
Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans (March 4, 2008)
Power laws
Slack
Alexis C. Madrigal
Stewart Butterfield
Game Neverending
FiveThirtyEight makes an article out of its Slack
Snarkmarket
Project Argo, an NPR blogging initiative Matt led
Nieman Lab coverage of Project Argo
The Argolinks WordPress plugin, developed by Project Argo, now powering our What We’re Reading
“The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet” (updated September 7, 2015)
“Wikipedia-ing the news,” Matt’s RJI Fellowship project in 2008
Vox’s card stacks
Nieman Lab coverage of Circa
Parse.ly
MediaWiki, the software that underlies Wikipedia
An example of a Vox StoryStream on The Verge
Radiolab: The Rhino Hunter
Pop Culture Happy Hour
An array of Walking Dead response podcasts

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.

Maybe that’s part of why email newsletters — email! 1993 technology! — seem to have lost none of their power in our increasingly nichified media world. Why settle for hyper-targeted coverage that caters to millennials nostalgic for Dawson’s Creek who may or may not see your work, for example, when you can deliver content to an audience of individuals who feel like you’re writing directly to them, right in their inbox?

Small-batch newsletters may be a throwback to a simpler Internet — surely that’s part of the appeal — but they still work. (I first got hooked on Nieman Lab because of its daily newsletter. Same goes for Quartz, which smartly frames its morning newsletter by telling readers what to watch for in the day ahead and what they missed overnight.)

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has one. Gwyneth Paltrow has one. I have one. Yes, newsletters are everywhere.

The journalist Ann Friedman, whose newsletter is a bright spot in my inbox each Friday, recently explored whether we’ve reached “peak newsletter.” Maybe so, but they’re as appealing to some journalists as they are to subscribers. A newsletter is a branding device, a distribution mechanism — and perhaps even a viable source of revenue.

That’s what Michael Brendan Dougherty is banking on. After political reporting and editing stints at The American Conservative and Business Insider, he decided to quit his job and launch The Slurve, a daily baseball newsletter that began last March on the eve of the 2013 baseball season.

Dougherty saw the opportunity to create a bespoke editorial product for an audience that was inundated with great baseball coverage but had to traverse a huge swath of the web to find it. (Here’s a sample issue.) Besides, he was tired of politics reporting and “baseball was really attractive to me because there are 30 teams, not two,” he said.

“A great newsletter has the personality of an email from a friend and the professionalism of a magazine,” TWEET Dougherty says. “And newsletters are like the oldest format on the Internet in a way, but it has so many virtues.”

For Dougherty, starting a newsletter wasn’t a way to send readers back to the homepage of a larger website; the newsletter in and of itself is the product. That’s by design: It also means the newsletter is the central editorial focus rather than a bland afterthought of copied-and-pasted headlines, the strategy that makes so many news organizations’ daily emails feel a half-step away from spam.

“Originally, I wanted to do it as a blog,” he said. “I tried it and I found it was really hard to get an audience and to fill up enough content for a functioning must-view blog site. You had to be doing it as if it were broadcast all day.”

Instead, Dougherty obsessively tracks the outcome of each day’s baseball games and scours the Internet for quality content. (Dougherty says he drew on his own experience receiving newsletters like The Transom.) The Slurve is delivered seven days a week around 10 a.m., and starts with top news. (An opener from last week: “The big story from the fields last night is that the Cardinals have taken sole possession of first place in the highly entertaining NL Central race.”)

The Slurve also includes box scores and links to recaps from the previous day’s games, injury updates, baseball trivia, and a roundup of the best baseball news and writing from around the Internet. “There’s never been so much good writing about baseball as there is now, but it’s also buried under so much junk,” he says. “I go through an unbelievable stack [of content] and I pick out stories or articles that are provocative that carry a real piece of information. I pick out about 130 to 140 of them every morning. The amount of information is just endless.” (That sample issue linked above features 149 links and over 2,700 words.)

Dougherty also includes a handful of links that aren’t about baseball, which gives readers a sense of his personality, sets the tone for the newsletter, and offers clues as to the kind of audience he’s writing for. (Some of the recent stories he’s shared have to do with Ron Burgundy, Breaking Bad, pizza, and science fiction.)

A subscription costs $4 a month or $36 annually, and Dougherty says he’s already a significant way toward building a full-time income. He won’t say how many subscribers he has, except to say that he’s very pleased with growth since the beginning of the season. “Any one of my customers can fire me any day, but the vast majority of them are sticking with me so far,” TWEET he says.

Dougherty deliberately sought out an influential audience and says he’s had success attracting such readers, in part because he designed The Slurve to serve as show prep for sports pundits. “I thought about writing The Slurve as if I was writing for all the people in baseball media, and now a good portion of those people I like and admire are all subscribers,” he said. (The Slurve’s about page features plaudits from Chris Hayes on the left and Ross Douthat on the right.)

The newsletter is still in its infancy, and Dougherty has a lot of ideas for what he’d like to add to it: graphing charts of pitches from the previous night’s games, original photography and videography, a roster of freelance contributors. In the offseason, he’ll publish less frequently, which may give him time to work on an preseason ebook for 2014: “a season preview that would come free for all annual subscribers, preview all 30 teams, preview the story lines, provide information for people who want to get into baseball for the first time, and I think a few pure, original essays.”

For now, the goal is to hone his editorial voice, get the most interesting and useful baseball stories to his readers, and make ends meet. He picked the price point of $4 per month as a rate that felt affordable enough to draw subscribers, but high enough to keep people interested each day. Dougherty is considering a revenue sharing model with other baseball sites that promote The Slurve and send subscribers to his site. But he’s uneasy about ad-based revenue. “I want my readers to be my customers and I think advertising inverts that relationship,” he says.

The potential appeal of a newsletter goes beyond old-school simplicity and a narrow focus. They also resist the often-cluttered and complicated infrastructure of legacy media. “I sometimes wonder if we’re recapitulating the blog era with newsletters,” TWEET Dougherty says. “Blogs came out and everybody had these individual sites and it was so fresh and cool, and then gradually all of these new news websites came out, gobbled up all the blogging talent they could, and kind of professionalized it.”

Dougherty can imagine a future in which brands like The New York Times scoop up newsletter scribes the way news organizations have scouted blogging talent like Nate Silver or Ezra Klein. Dougherty’s explicit goal for The Slurve isn’t necessarily a Silverian path into a larger newsroom, but he sees the value that a newsletter’s credibility and authenticity could bring to a larger operation.

“I find a newsletter personal — more personal than a blog,” Dougherty says. “It is addressed to you. It’s also a ritual in a sense. I wanted it to have that feeling of, it’s coming to you in a place you’re going to check. This is an email that doesn’t ask you to do anything. A lot of emails come from your boss or a spouse or a parent and they’re asking for something. This just asks to be enjoyed.”

Photo by Chase Elliott Clark used under a Creative Commons license.

Media Decoder hasn’t posted any content since April 14. For the time being, “they’ve moved all media coverage over to an article format,” according to a source familiar with the situation, who added: “I think it’s part of a broader effort to prune the blogs and push everything into our own new CMS, called Scoop. Better for the coming redesign that the paper has previewed.”

Asked about the status of Media Decoder, which had become a topic of interest among media wonks on Twitter these past few days, a Times spokesperson said the blog is “dormant, not dead.” Media editor Bruce Headlam was out of the office today and didn’t immediately respond to emails.

To be fair, most Times blogs have always been home to very article-y posts — the transition shouldn’t be a hard one to make.

Ten-year-old SCOTUS Blog has been a go-to authority on the health care challenge since the beginning, which made today its Oscar night, Super Bowl, and Christmas morning all wrapped into one. But on the Internet, success comes with a darker side: server crashes. SCOTUS Blog was prepared. The traffic buildup was already intense on Monday:

500,000 hits so far today.Very grateful.#teamlyle.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 25, 2012

To put that 500,000-in-one-day in context, it had nearly 1 million over the three days of oral arguments this spring. (Other sites were prepping too; just before the decision was handed down, New York Times developer Jacob Harris tweeted a graph showing a huge traffic spike.)

For SCOTUS Blog, preparing meant investing in server upgrades, even if they would only be used for a short burst of traffic.

Here we go. 4 more web servers. 5 bloggers. 2 tech teams. $25k for 20 mins. #SCOTUS #ACA #teamlyle

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 27, 2012

Probably more traffic today than in SB’s first 5 years, combined. So grateful; a little scared. #teamlyle #dontcrash

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

To help offload the burden, SCOTUS Blog shut down its main site at peak times and redirected visitors to a dedicated page off-server. That was hosted on WPEngine, a server company that specializes in optimized WordPress installations. And the minute-by-minute liveblog was pushed off to CoverItLive, with an embed put on the WPEngine site. The liveblog page had its own special “Sponsored by Bloomberg Law” message in its header.

And for the moment of maximum interest — the seconds after the decision was announced — SCOTUS Blog publisher Tom Goldstein advised they’d be going to Twitter first. “As a purely formal matter, we will ‘break’ the story of the health care decision on Twitter. So you can follow @scotusblog, if you’d like,” he wrote in the liveblog. “But don’t follow us just for that reason, because we will have the news here on the live blog less than 5 seconds later.”

By 9:08 a.m., he said there were already 70,000 people reading the liveblog and that the site had already logged 1 million hits for the day. His guesstimate for the day’s traffic? “My best bet is 250,000 [concurrent liveblog readers] at the time of the decision.” Goldstein kept liveblog readers updated.

9:16 a.m.: “100,000 live blog readers.”

9:29 a.m.: “145,000 on the liveblog.”

9:33 a.m.: “The previous record for our live blog was 100,000, on Monday. The previous record for our daily hits was 500,000, also Monday.”

9:43 a.m.: “218,000”

9:43 a.m.: “We are at less than 1% of our own server capacity. We’ve shifted the principal processing to CoverItLive, which expects it can handle >3 million.”

9:56 a.m.: “FWIW, the count going into 10am is 344,000 contemporaneous readers.”

10:03 a.m.: “1,000 requests to the liveblog per second.”

10:06 a.m.: “520,000 contemporaneous readers.”

At 10:09 a.m., SCOTUS Blog broke the news on Twitter. At this writing, that tweet’s been retweeted 2,927 times and favorited 142 times. (Also, it was accurate.)

10:22 a.m.: “866,000 liveblog readers.”

That’s roughly the city of San Francisco.

From there, SCOTUS Blog switched into analysis, commentary, and smart aggregation of other sites’ analysis and commentary. But the traffic kept coming, if at a slower pace.

1:11 p.m.: “SCOTUSBlog just clipped over 3 million hits!”

2:17 p.m.: “Thanks to everyone for sticking with us this whole time. There are still over 80,000 people following the live blog.”

CoverItLive said it was the second most popular U.S. event they’ve hosted in 2012, behind only ESPN’s NFL draft coverage.

By 2:46 p.m., SCOTUS Blog staffers were ready to celebrate:

Appx 1M simultaneous readers. 3.4M hits so far. Survived one major hacking attack. Got it right. So grateful to all.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

And by 5:09 p.m., they were really ready to celebrate:

SCOTUSblog meetup tonight in DC @ 8pm.District Commons.2200 Penn Ave, NW.#weneedadrink

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

Photo of the Supreme Court by Kjetil Ree used under a Creative Commons license.

Bostonist failed to gain traction after more than six years on the web, he said, bringing in only about 1 percent of total Gothamist network traffic over the past six months. Editor Matthew Gannon announced the end on Oct. 7: “At least we outlasted the 2011 Red Sox.”

In an email, Dobkin told me the demise of Bostonist (and, earlier this year, Phillyist) is a pruning. “We call it a hiatus,” he said, “because we might return to the cities once we could afford to operate them the way we do in NYC, with multiple full time editors.”

Network-wide, unique visitors are up about 40 percent year-over-year, and revenue up about 50 percent, Dobkin said. According to Quantcast data, the Gothamist network attracted 3.2 million unique visitors per month, on average, over the past 12 months.

“Continuing that kind of growth requires focusing on what we do well. And what we do well seems to be the larger cities — NYC, LA, SF, CHI, and DC,” he said. “We’ve been hiring a lot of staff in those five (we’ve doubled in size the last 12 months), and we plan to continue doing that through 2012. We’d also like to expand the sales team from NYC, where the sales team is based, to also having local reps in each city.” Dobkin did not want to go into more detail about money but said he and co-founder Jen Chung fund the enterprise themselves.

For a city so large, Boston is woefully underserved by local news blogs. The most popular is Adam Gaffin’s independent Universal Hub. There are a few smaller sites. And WBUR’s Hubbub (my own failure, from when I worked at WBUR), folded in August. That’s about it.

Dobkin described smaller sites in Austin and Seattle as ongoing experiments. Gothamist’s foreign sites — in Toronto, London, and Shanghai — are independent spinoffs. Last year, Gothamist appeared set to be acquired by Cablevision, but the deal fell apart a few months later.

Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news.

Twitter on the brain: Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller got a rise out of a lot of folks online with one of the shortest of his 21 career tweets: “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.” Keller revealed the purpose of his social experiment this week in a column arguing, in so many words, that Twitter may be dulling your humanity, and probably making you stupid, too. Here’s the money quote: “But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.”

This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well online. There were a couple strains of reaction: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget and All Twitter’s Lauren Dugan argued that Twitter may indeed be changing us, but for the good, by helping make previously impossible connections.

Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick of Techdirt countered Keller by saying that while Twitter isn’t built for deep conversations, it is quite good at providing an entry point for such discussion: “What you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceberg,” Tsotsis said. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, defended Twitter’s true social nature, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gave a fantastic breakdown of what Twitter does and doesn’t do culturally and socially.

Two of the most eloquent responses were provided by Nick Bilton, one of Keller’s own employees, and by Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. Bilton pointed out that our brains have shown a remarkable ability to adapt quickly to new technologies without sacrificing old capacities. (Be sure to check out Keller’s response afterward.)

Honan made a similar argument: Keller, he said, is confusing the medium with the message, and Twitter, like any technology, is what you make it. “If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life,” Honan wrote.

Google gets more local with news: Google News unveiled a few interesting changes in the past week, starting with the launch of “News near you.” Google has sorted news by location for a while now, but this feature will allow smartphone users to automatically get local news wherever they are. ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Rowinski explained why newspapers should be worried about Google moving further onto their local-news turf, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram criticized newspapers for not coming up with like this themselves.

Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman, on the other hand, said Google’s feature is still in need of some human curation to go with its algorithmic aggregation. That’s an area in which local newspapers can still dominate, he said, but it’ll require some technological catchup, as well as a willingness to get over fears about linking to competitors.

Another change, not publicized by Google News but spotted by the folks at Search Engine Land, was the addition of an option to allow users to filter out blogs and press releases from their results. This raised the question, what exactly does Google consider a blog? Google told Search Engine Land it relies on a variety of factors to make that decision, especially self-identification. Mathew Ingram ripped this classification, and urged Google to put everything that contains news together in Google News and let readers sort it out. (Former Lab writer Zach Seward wrote about the problems with Google News’ blog label back in 2009.)

Fitting linking into news’ workflow: A discussion about linking has been simmering on Twitter on and off over the past few weeks, and it began to come together into something useful this week. This round of the conversation started with a post by web thinker and scholar Doc Searls, who wondered why news organizations don’t link out more often. In the comments, the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer suggested that one reason is that many newspapers’ CMS’s and workflows are print-centric, making linking logistically difficult.

CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson responded that the workflow issue isn’t much of an excuse, saying, as he put it on Twitter: “At this point ‘linking’ has been around for twenty years. The fact that this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring.” This kicked off a sprawling debate on Twitter, aptly chronicled via Storify by Mathew Ingram and Alex Byers. Ingram also wrote a post responding to a few of the themes of resistance of links, particularly the notion that information on the web is inferior to information gained by old-fashioned reporting.

British journalist Kevin Anderson took on the workflow issue in particular, noting how outdated many newspaper CMS’s are and challenging them to catch up technologically: “It’s an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It’s really only down to ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist.” Publish2’s Scott Karp gave an idea for a solution to the CMS mess.

AOL’s continued makeover: Another week, another slew of personnel moves at AOL. PaidContent’s David Kaplan reported that AOL is hiring “a bunch” of new (paid) editors and shuffling some current employees around after its layoff of hundreds this spring. Overall, Kaplan wrote, this is part of the continued effort to put the Huffington Post’s stamp on AOL’s editorial products.

One of the AOL entities most affected by the shifts is Seed, which had been a freelance network, but will now fall under AOL’s advertising area as a business-to-business product. Saul Hansell, who was hired in 2009 to run Seed, is moving to HuffPo to edit its new “Big News” features. In a blog post, Hansell talked about what this means for HuffPo and for Seed.

Meanwhile, the company is also rolling out AOL Industry, a set of B2B sites covering energy, defense, and government. But wait, that’s not all: AOL’s Patch is launching 33 new sites in states targeting the 2012 election. The hyperlocal news site Street Fight also reported that Patch is urging its editors to post more often, and a group of independent local news sites is banding together to tell the world that they are not Patch, nor anything like it.

Reading roundup: As always, plenty of other stuff to get to this week.

— We mentioned a Pew report’s reference to the Drudge Report’s influence in last week’s review, and this week The New York Times’ David Carr marveled at Drudge’s continued success without many new-media bells and whistles. Poynter’s Julie Moos looked at Drudge’s traffic over the years, while the Washington Post disputed Pew’s numbers. ZDNet’s David Gewirtz had five lessons Drudge can teach the rest of the media world.

— A few paid-content items: A Nielsen survey on what people are willing to pay for various mobile services, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds on The New York Times’ events marketing for its pay plan, and the Lab’s Justin Ellis on paid-content lessons from small newspapers.

— A couple of tablet-related items: Next Issue Media, a joint effort of five publishers to sell magazines on tablets, released its first set of magazines on Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor expounded on the iPad as the “missing link” in news’ digital evolution.

— Columbia University announced it will launch a local news site this summer focusing on accountability journalism, and the Lab’s Megan Garber gave some more details about what Columbia’s doing with it.

— The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Kirchner had an interesting conversation with Slate’s David Plotz about Slate’s aggregation efforts, and in response, Reuters’ Felix Salmon made the case for valuing aggregation skills in journalists.

— This weekend’s think piece is a musing by Maria Bustillos at The Awl on Wikipedia, Marshall McLuhan, communal knowledge-making, and the fate of the expert. Enjoy.

Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news.

The short, happy-ish life of TBD: Just six months after it launched and two weeks after a reorganization was announced, the Washington, D.C., local news site was effectively shuttered this week, when its corporate parent, Allbritton Communications (it’s owned by Robert Allbritton and includes Politico), cut most of its jobs, leaving only an arts and entertainment operation within the website of Allbritton’s WJLA-TV.

TBD had been seen many as a bellwether in online-only local news, as Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore documented in her historical roundup of links about the site, so it was quite a shock and a disappointment to many future-of-newsies that it was closed so quickly. The response — aptly compiled by TBDer Jeff Sonderman — was largely sympathetic to TBD’s staff (former TBD manager Jim Brady even wrote a pitch to prospective employers on behalf of the newly laid off community engagement team). Many observers on Twitter (and Terry Heaton on his blog) pointed squarely at Allbritton for the site’s demise, with The Batavian’s Howard Owens drawing out a short, thoughtful lesson: “Legacy managers will nearly always sabotage innovation. Wall of separation necessary between innovators and legacy.”

Blogger Mike Clark pointed out that TBD’s traffic was beating each of the other D.C. TV news sites and growing as well. The Washington Post reported that while traffic wasn’t a problem, turning it into revenue was — though the fact that TBD’s ads were handled by WJLA staffers might have contributed to that.

Mallary Jean Tenore wrote an insightful article talking to some TBD folks about whether their company gave them a chance to fail. Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau was unequivocal on the subject: “Some of us have been talking today on Twitter about whether TBD failed. Nonsense. TBD wasn’t given enough time to fail.”

While CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis lamented that “TBD will be painted as a failure of local news online when it’s a failure of its company, nothing more,” others saw some larger implications for other online local news projects. Media analyst Alan Mutter concluded that TBD’s plight is “further evidence that hyperlocal journalism is more hype than hope for the news business,” and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds gave six business lessons for similar projects from TBD’s struggles. Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton ripped Edmonds’ analysis, arguing that Allbritton “can’t pretend to have seriously tried the hyperlocal business space after a six-month experiment it derailed half-way in.”

Applying Apple’s new rules: Publishers’ consternation over Apple’s new subscription plan for mobile devices continued this week, with Frederic Filloux at Monday Note laying out many publishers’ frustrations with Apple’s proposal. The New York Times’ David Carr and The Guardian’s Josh Halliday both covered publishers’ Apple subscription conundrum, and one expert told Carr, “If you are a publisher, it puts things into a tailspin: The business model you have been working with for many years just lost 30 percent off the top.”

At paidContent, James McQuivey made the case for a lower revenue share for Apple, and Dan Gillmor wondered whether publishers will stand up to Apple. The company may also be facing scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission for possible antitrust violations, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The fresh issue regarding Apple’s subscription policy this week, though, was the distinction between publishing apps and more service-oriented apps. The topic came to the fore when the folks from Readability, an app that allows users to read articles in an advertising-free environment, wrote an open letter ripping Apple for rejecting their app, saying their new policy “smacks of greed.” Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman and Apple blogger John Gruber noted, though, that Readability’s 30%-off-the-top business model is a lot like Apple’s.

Then Apple’s Steve Jobs sent a short, cryptic email to a developer saying that Apple’s new policy applies only to publishing apps, not service apps. This, of course, raised the question, in TechCrunch’s words, “What’s a publishing app?” That’s a very complex question, and as Instapaper founder Marco Arment wrote, one that will be difficult for Apple to answer consistently. Arment also briefly noted that Jobs’ statement seems to contradict the language of Apple’s new guidelines.

Giving voice to new sources of news: This month’s Carnival of Journalism, posted late last week, focused on ways to increase the number of news sources. It’s a broad question, and it drew a broad variety of answers, which were ably summarized by Courtney Shove. I’m not going to try to duplicate her work here, but I do want to highlight a few of the themes that showed up.

David Cohn, the Carnival’s organizer, gave a great big-picture perspective to the issue, putting it in the context of power and the web. Kim Bui and Dan Fenster defended the community-driven vision for news, with Bui calling journalists to go further: “Let’s admit it, we’ve never trusted the public.” There were several calls for journalists to include more underrepresented voices, with reports and ideas like a refugee news initiative, digital news bus, youth journalism projects, and initiatives for youth in foreign-language families.

The J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer gave 10 good ideas to the cause, and Drury j-prof Jonathan Groves and Gannett’s Ryan Sholin shared their ideas for local citizen news projects, while TheUpTake’s Jason Barnett endorsed a new citizen-journalism app called iBreakNews.

Three bloggers, however, objected to the Carnival’s premise in the first place. Daniel Bachhuber of CUNY argued that improving journalism doesn’t necessarily mean adding more sources, recommending instead that “Instead of increasing the number of news sources, we should focus on producing durable data and the equivalent tools for remixing it.” Lauren Rabaino warned against news oversaturation, and the University of Colorado’s Steve Outing said that more than new sources, we need better filters and hubs for them.

Blogging’s continued evolution: The “blogging is dead” argument has popped up from time to time, and it was revived again this week in the form of a New York Times story about how young people are leaving blogs for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Several people countered the argument, led by GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, who said that blogging isn’t declining, but is instead evolving into more of a continuum that includes microblogging services like Twitter, traditional blog formats like WordPress, and the hybrid that is Tumblr. He and WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg shared the same view — that “people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online,” no matter the form.

Scott Rosenberg, who’s written a history of blogging, looked at statistics to make the point, noting that 14 percent of online adults keep a blog, a number he called astounding, even if it starts to decline. “As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public. Our civilization has never seen anything like it.” In addition, Reuters’ Anthony DeRosa argued that longer-form blogging has always been a pursuit of older Internet users.

Reading roundup: I’ve got a few ongoing stories to update you on, and a sampling of an unusually rich week in thoughtful pieces.

— A couple of sites took a peek at Gawker’s traffic statistics to try to determine the effectiveness of its recent redesign. TechCrunch saw an ugly picture; Business Insider was cautiously optimistic based on the same data. Gawker disputed TechCrunch’s numbers, and Terry Heaton tried to sort through the claims.

— A couple of Middle East/North Africa protest notes: The New York Times told us about the response to Egypt’s Internet blackout and the role of mobile technology in documenting the protests. And Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center gave some lessons from the incredible Twitter journalism of NPR’s Andy Carvin.

— The Daily is coming to Android tablets this spring, and its free trial run has been extended beyond the initial two weeks.

— Matt DeRienzo of the Journal Register Co. wrote about an intriguing idea for a news org/j-school merger.

— Alan Mutter made the case for ending federal funding for public journalism.

— At 10,000 Words, Lauren Rabaino had some awesome things news organizations can learn from tech startups, including thinking of news as software and embracing transparency.

— And here at the Lab, Northwestern prof Pablo Boczkowski gave some quick thoughts on how we tend to associate online news with work, and what that means. He sheds some light about an under-considered aspect of news — the social environments in which we consume it.

We’re covering two weeks instead of the usual one in this review, so there’s a ton to pack in here. I’ll try to zip through it a little more quickly than usual.

What to make of WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks made its third big document drop since this summer this week, releasing about 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables. Here’s coverage by The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and a roundup by The Columbia Journalism Review. Time talked to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange about the leak, and Forbes published an interview and long piece about Assange’s next target — corporate America.

As for the leak itself, The Guardian detailed the documents’ path from the alleged leaker, U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, to Assange, to a Guardian reporter. Yahoo’s Michael Calderone looked at The Times’ editorial process with the cables, including the revelation that they got them from The Guardian, not WikiLeaks. The Wall Street Journal and CNN both declined to sign agreements with WikiLeaks to see the documents in advance, and The Journal examined news orgs’ decisions on whether or not to publish. The Times explained its own publishing decision, then (quite eloquently) responded to readers’ objections.

The reaction against WikiLeaks was quicker and harsher than those following each of its last two leaks. Before the documents were released, its site was the victim of a denial of service attack, the U.S. and British governments issued pre-emptive condemnations, and senators called for WikiLeaks to be prosecuted. After the release, the Obama administration said it was indeed pursuing a criminal investigation, Interpol revealed it has put out a call for Assange’s arrest (ostensibly for his rape accusations), and Amazon booted WikiLeaks from its servers under pressure from U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman.

WikiLeaks’ actions left many journalists and media observers divided: An Economist blogger accused WikiLeaks of degenerating into gossip, and Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger called them enemies of the American people. Assange and WikiLeaks had their defenders, too: Slate’s Jack Shafer praised them for puncturing “the prerogative of secrecy,” and another Economist blogger made a similar argument. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins noted that “the job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment.” Meanwhile, Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy wrestled with the balance between transparency and secrecy.

Others’ primary concern was not value judgments, but classification. Is WikiLeaks espionage? Journalism? Radically open government? Or, as Lab contributor C.W. Anderson argued, is it a facilitator of real-time history documentation? NYU j-prof Jay Rosen hashed out his thoughts on WikiLeaks as a stateless news organization on video, concluding, “The watchdog press died, and what we have is WikiLeaks instead.” Paul Balcerak wondered why WikiLeaks gets so much more attention than the press’s own reporting.

If you really want to spend the weekend pondering the meaning of WikiLeaks, it’s best to start with two posts: Some incisive questions by Salon’s Dan Gillmor, and a brilliant post by Aaron Bady sifting through Assange’s own words to determine his motivations behind WikiLeaks’ radical transparency.

Rupert’s big tablet splash: We’ve heard bits and pieces about Rupert Murdoch’s planned tablet-based national news publication, but we got the first substantive report on the subject two weeks ago from Women’s Wear Daily. Among the key details: It’s going by The Daily, it has a staff of 100, it’ll cost 99 cents a week, and it’ll come out once a day. The New York Observer gave us some more information about the publication’s design (it’s text-first and will be published overnight, but apparently looks pretty cool). Other tidbits: John Gruber at Daring Fireball heard that it’ll pioneer a new app subscription API from Apple, and New York’s Gabriel Snyder said it will have a centrist editorial outlook.

The reasons why this project is getting so much pre-launch attention seem pretty readily evident: Murdoch, original tablet news org, iPad news subscriptions, you know the rest. As The Columbia Journalism Review noted, what’s new about this publication is that it won’t even have a website. The initial response from the media-watching world was predominantly negative, with skepticism coming from The New York Times’ David Carr, Gawker’s Ryan Tate, Scott Rosenberg, Sam Diaz of ZDNet, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, Fast Company’s Kit Eaton, The Guardian’s Emily Bell, and paidContent’s Andrew Wallenstein.

Many of those critics made similar points, so here’s a roundup of the main ones: 1) It’s trying to impose slow print-think onto the speed-oriented world of mobile media (this is Rosenberg’s main point); 2) The fact that it won’t have inbound or outbound links means it can’t share in the virality that makes news on the Web work; 3) The folks on board don’t exactly seem like the tech revolutionaries they might need to be (Wallenstein’s main point); and 4) How many people are actually going to pay for this, and can it really cover The Daily’s costs? (Carr’s main objection)

Several of those people also noted a few factors in Murdoch’s favor: Carr argued that people will be more likely to pay for news in an app world than on the web, and both Tate and Eaton noted that Apple’s Steve Jobs (who is reported to be tied to the project) is a pretty powerful guy with a history of success in ventures like these. We got a few good suggestions for Murdoch’s project, too: TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld said to make it local, real-time, and social; Frederic Filloux wanted it speedy, simple, beyond Apple, and with adjustable pricing; and at paidContent, Nic Newman wanted to see a mixture of free and paid content.

Designing apps for tablets and mobile media: Murdoch isn’t the only one with a big new tablet app to unveil: Yahoo’s Joe Pompeo summarized two others — mini-magazines called Nomad Editions and a new iPad magazine by Virgin called Project. Of those, Project, announced Tuesday, got a bit more attention. PaidContent had some details about its video cover and “living magazine” mindset, and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka pointed out the magazine’s rather intimidating instruction page, though David Carr told NPR it’s still pretty magazine-like.

Also in the process of launching: Next Issue Media, a joint venture by several magazine magnates, will launch its digital newsstand early next year and gave some details to MediaWeek, and Swedish publisher Bonnier, whose Mag+ everyone loved, is expanding into News+. Meanwhile, the Financial Times’ iPad app is doing well, but The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh remained skeptical that most newspapers’ iPad apps will be able to stand out among the sea of more enjoyable apps.

A couple more smart thoughts on mobile media: PaidContent founder Rafat Ali talked about designing for touchscreens, and Poynter’s Damon Kiesow argued that smartphones are fundamentally a mobile device, while the iPad is a leisure device, so their apps can’t be imposed onto each other: “To fully serve and engage an audience, an app needs to target one distinctive strength — either location or leisure — and make the content and experience fit that use.”

Gawker grows beyond the blog: In advance of its coming overhaul early next year, Gawker head Nick Denton wrote a manifesto explaining why the network of sites is going beyond the blog format (his post at the previous link is in the sites’ new design). Denton said he’s discovered the new formula for online media success: Not so much Gawker’s former trademark snarky meta-analysis, but a few huge juicy scoops accompanied by a steady stream of aggregation, all with a visual bent. He extended the model to include advertising and branding as well.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon responded with a meticulous analysis of Gawker’s new direction, noting that while Denton was the first person to make blogging into “a large-scale commercial venture,” he’s now aggressively dumping blogging’s defining reverse-chronological format. Ron Mwangaguhunga of eMedia Vitals compared Gawker’s new model with a TV business model, and Anil Dash said that while Gawker is still a blog, it’s borrowing Twitter’s design that emphasizes both content and the stream of news. “By allowing that flow to continue regardless of which particular piece of embedded content has caught your eye, Gawker and Twitter are just showing the vibrancy and resilience of the format.” Terry Heaton didn’t like the change, arguing that it’s a statement that Denton doesn’t trust his readers enough to find their way to the best material.

Why Twitter matters: Speaking of Twitter, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger offered a stirring defense of Twitter’s meaning for journalism as part of a lecture on the state of the Fourth Estate. His list of 15 reasons Twitter matters covers most everything: Reporting, conversation, aggregation, search, marketing, authority, writing. Likewise, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram argued that Twitter’s real cultural power “could well be that it is the simplest, the easiest and arguably one of the most efficient forms of mass publishing — or at least micro-publishing — ever invented.”

Later, Ingram took Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s apparently off-the-cuff statement that Twitter could develop a news network as an opportunity to think about how news orgs could filter Twitter into a usable crowdsourced newswire. And MediaBistro talked with Canada’s National Post to get a sense of how one major newspaper uses Twitter.

Business-model developments and discussion: A few notes on the ever-evolving paid-content front: At least two more news organizations are using the Press+ system of Steve Brill’s Journalism Online for their online revenue goals — ProPublica, which is using it to solicit donations online, and Oklahoma State’s Daily O’Collegian, which will charge outside-the-area readers. Over at The Guardian, Cory Doctorow examined The Times of London’s paywall numbers, and CrunchGear’s Devin Coldewey thought out loud about a possible online paid-content system.

Meanwhile, British journalist Kevin Anderson wrote a post arguing that value-added journalism has to be developed with specific revenue streams in mind. Howard Owens of The Batavian countered that would-be entrepreneurial journalists need to focus more on basic local events journalism than “adding value” or analytical journalism, and TBD’s Steve Buttry tried to bring the two perspectives together.

Reading roundup: Here’s what else you should see this week, in the quickest-hit form I can give it to you:

— A British court upheld a stipulation that news organizations can charge paid online news monitoring agencies for using their content. The Telegraph, TechCrunch Europe, and the Press Gazette explain why it’s bad news for aggregators.

— No less an authority than World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee joined the chorus of people extolling the value of data journalism during a panel. A somewhat related debate broke out when Mark Luckie opined on the myths about digital journalism skills. Journalist Andy Boyle disputed Luckie’s claims about what new-media skills journalists need (and don’t need) to know, and j-prof Mindy McAdams and journalist Brian Manzullo chimed in. Anthony DeBarros and Robert Hernandez turned the discussion toward data journalism, with Hernandez asserting that programming doesn’t replace the story. That got Michelle Minkoff kind of riled up.

— The New York Times ran an article looking at the ways technology is creating increased distractions for young people, which was met by smart rebuttals by Duke prof Cathy Davidson and the Lab’s own Megan Garber.

— Also at the Lab: USC prof Henry Jenkins on his concept of “spreadable” media.

— Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik wrote a great roundup of what’s going on at the intersection of investigative journalism and social media.

— Finally, if you’re looking for a single document to answer the question, “How should newspapers adapt to this new media environment?” you can’t do much better than John Paton’s presentation on how he’s turned around the Journal Register Co. It’s brilliant.

“We have a huge pool of really motivated and awesome food bloggers,” explained Joy Victory, WordPress’ editorial czar. (Yes, that is, delightfully, her official title.) Food was a natural starting place for a content vertical.

If the FoodPress model takes off, it could be the beginning of a series of WordPress content verticals covering different topics. WordPress.com currently hosts more than 15.1 million blogs, and when the FoodPress launch was announced, excited WordPress commenters were already asking for additional themed pages on subjects like art, restaurants, and beer.

(To clarify the sometimes confusing nomenclature: WordPress the blogging software — sometimes called WordPress.org — is free, open source, and installed on your own web server; we use it under the hood here at the Lab. WordPress.com is a for-profit venture offering a hosted version of WordPress software, owned by Automattic, which was founded by WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg. FoodPress is a WordPress.com project.)

For now, though, FoodPress’ creators are keeping their focus on their first blog and seeing what kind of traffic and advertising interest it attracts — the start-small-then-scale approach. And one question that remains to be answered in this first experimental effort is how WordPress bloggers will respond to the monetization of their content, and whether featured bloggers will want compensation beyond the additional traffic they’re likely to receive.

So far, the response from users has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, Victory said. While the familiar issue of blogger compensation has been raised in response to the new venture, “our users don’t seem concerned so far,” she said. Instead, they’re largely excited about the possibility of even more themed sites. Advertising is already a part of WordPress.com, Victory pointed out, popping up on individual WordPress blogs unless a user is signed into WordPress itself.

WordPress’ venture into the editorial realm is significant on its own merits, but it also provides a fascinating case study in how media jobs have proliferated even as the news industry suffers. Victory used to work for metro newspapers, as did Federated Media’s Neil Chase. Now the two are working on a project that brings atomized pieces of user-created content together as a singular web publication. (FoodPress’ tagline: “Serving up the hottest dishes on WordPress.com.”)

Victory is optimistic about this “new way of looking at journalism” — even though, she said, “I consider myself someone who has left traditional journalism behind.” But while some of the FoodPress content is aggregated automatically, Victory believes as well in the value of human curation in creating a good user experience — a sentiment shared among many in the burgeoning ranks of web curators. (Up to now, WordPress’ content curation has focused mainly on Freshly Pressed, a collection of featured blog posts on the site’s homepage, which Victory hand-selects daily.) And to bring more editorial oversight to FoodPress, Federated Media turned to one of its affiliated bloggers, Jane Maynard, to oversee the project — a paid, part-time position.

The blog won’t be just an experiment in curation, though; it will also be a case study in collaboration. “It’s the first step in what we think will be a critical partnership,” Chase noted — one that emerged organically from the collaboration-minded, conversational world of San Francisco-based startups. And just as Federated Media and Automattic have shared the duties of creating the site, he said, they will also share the revenue FoodPress generates.

As for the expectations for that revenue? Victory isn’t releasing traffic stats for FoodPress at this point — both she and Chase were hesitant to talk too much about a project still in beta testing — but noted that the site’s social media presence is growing, with, as of this posting, more than 1,400 Facebook “Likes” and 1,200 Twitter followers. The rest will, like a recipe itself, develop over time. “This is a little bit of an experiment for us,” Victory said. “And we’re hoping it’s wildly successful.”

The halcyon days of SnoodFan99 and other anonymous commenters briefly came to an end Tuesday, at least on PressHerald.com, the website for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. In an afternoon note to readers, MaineToday Media explained that it was shutting down online comments across its family of newspapers, including KJOnline.com and OnlineSentinel.com, immediately:

because what once served as a platform for civil civic discourse and reader interaction has increasingly become a forum for vile, crude, insensitive, and vicious postings. No story subject seems safe from hurtful and vulgar comments.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday, the Press Herald surprised readers by bringing comments back, using a different back-end system, Intense Debate. As the paper put it on Facebook, “Just trying to keep you on your toes!”

Comments have been a longstanding source of complaint at newspapers. And this is an issue I have some personal experience with, having worked at the Press Herald for 7 years prior to joining the Lab. I emailed publisher Richard Connor to get his thoughts on the seemingly abrupt changes over the 48 hour period where it appeared Press Herald and other papers had abandoned reader comments. In an email Connor declined to go into specifics but said this:

We switched to a monitoring and content management system to control comment abuse. We halted commenting for about 24 hours as we made the switch. There are many monitoring systems. We are testing several others as I speak. This is a fluid situation not only for us but for all media. We believe we will find a system that will correct 80 to 90 percent of the problems that can result from a totally open commenting system which we had.

Intense Debate is a popular commenting platform, owned by the company behind WordPress.com. It offers moderation settings, comment threading, a points system and integrates Facebook Connect, Twitter and WordPress logins. Intense Debate may solve some of the paper’s commenting problems from a technological standpoint — but “vile, crude, insensitive, and vicious” comments are the problem, it will take more than a technology. Here’s two points I take from the paper’s decision.

The Press Herald’s online staff, already tasked with building pages, editing news updates, Tweeting and posting Facebook updates, as well as creating multimedia, is also the line of defense for reader comments. In the past the staff relied on filtering software to block profanity or other flagged words, leaving the job of moderation with people, not an algorithm. It’s a job that could be all-consuming without any other responsibilities, as online producers could predict bad days in advance, namely any story touching on immigrants, gay rights, politics, crime or poverty.

Stop me if this is a situation that sounds familiar: Story on gay marriage/welfare/suicide is posted, anonymous commenters surge en mass to have their take and derail the discussion over the topic of the story onto something else entirely. For a small online staff (under a half dozen people) the sheer volume of responses can be difficult to manage, let alone deciding what’s acceptable under the commenting policy. For larger news organizations the solution might be to farm out moderation work or build a specialized comment system. By deploying Intense Debate the Press Herald and other sites will likely be able to better filter problem posts. But moderation, the act of applying a paper’s standards and defining the boundaries of readers speech to allow better dialog, takes people.

The original question in all of this is that newspaper reader comments are out of control. But what is it that makes comments so much worse on traditional news stories than they are for blogs, even newspaper blogs? For three years I wrote a blog for PressHerald.com, and the comments on my posts there had little in common with those at the end of news stories anywhere else on the site. Instead of attacks or random tangents, blog comments stayed largely on-topic and at times were helpful in providing new information. Even when commenters called me out or questioned my work, it never got personal. Name calling was mostly played for comedy. This pattern holds true at many newspapers.

Why are the experiences so different? It could be that a blog attracts a different kind of audience — people already comfortable engaging with social media and maybe more inclined to civility. It could be because I jumped into the comments myself from time to time and tried my best to model good behavior. Or it could be because the voice of a blog — less newsy, more human and more conversational — sets up a better relationship with readers than traditional newspaper writing.

But maybe it’s also because, almost 20 years into the web’s history, online discussion still isn’t second nature to some newspapers the way it is for blogs or online-native news outlets. There are tools and policies available for encouraging better behavior, as places like Gawker and The Huffington Post have explored. And as we’ve reported here previously, in Gawker’s case the comments are going way up, even in a more restrictive environment.

In the end, news outlets each place their own value on reader comments. Is it the natural extension of the letters page? An experiment in connecting with readers in new ways? A way to drive up pageviews and ad impressions? There’s no one right answer, but in the end a news organization has to make sure its policies line up with its values.

Joshua Braun is a media scholar currently pursuing his Ph.D in Communications at Cornell. His work is centered at the intriguing intersection of television and the web: He’s currently studying the adoption of blogging software by network news sites, and the shifts that that adoption are bringing about in terms of the relationship between one-way communication something more conversational. At this spring’s ISOJ conference in Austin, Braun presented a paper (pdf) discussing the results of his research — a work that considered, among other questions:

As journalistic institutions engage more and more fully in interactive online spaces, how are these tensions changing journalism itself? How do the technical systems and moderation strategies put in place shape the contours of the news, and how do these journalistic institutions make sense of these systems and strategies as part of their public mission? What is the role of audiences and publics in this new social and technical space? And how do journalistic institutions balance their claim to be “town criers” and voices for the public with the fact that their authority and continued legal standing depend at times on moderating, and even silencing the voices of individuals?

The whole paper is worth reading. (You can also watch Braun’s ISOJ talk here.) But one aspect of it that’s especially fascinating, for our purposes, is Braun’s examination of TV-network news blogs in the context of the sociology of dramaturgy (in particular, the work of Erving Goffman).

News organizations are each a mix of public and private — preparing information for a public audience, but generally doing so in a private way. As with a theater production, there’s a performance going on for the audience but a big crew backstage. Blogging represents a potential shift in this dynamic by exposing people and processes that would otherwise be kept hidden behind a byline or a 90-second news piece.

And the blogging interplay — between presentation and communication, between product and process, and, perhaps most interestingly, between process and performance — is relevant to any news organization trying to navigate familiar journalistic waters with new vessels. I spoke with Braun about that dynamic and the lessons it might have to offer; below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Megan Garber: I’m intrigued by the idea of theater dynamics you mention in the paper — in particular, the distinction between backstage and front-stage spaces for news performances. Can you explain that in a bit more detail?

Joshua Braun: This is Steve Hilgartner‘s idea. He took this idea of stage management from classic sociology, which has normally been an interpersonal theory, and decided it worked for organizations. He looked at the National Academy, and noticed the way in which they keep all their deliberations effectively secret and then release a document at the end that gives the consensus opinion of the scientific community. And there are two aspects of that. One is that it’s intended to protect the integrity of the process. So when you’re a big policy-advisory body like the National Research Council, you have senators who will call you and tell you they don’t want you working on something; you’ll have lobbyists who’ll want to influence your results; you’ll have, basically, a lot of political pressure. So there’s this aspect in which this system of enclosure — in the Goffman/Hilgartner metaphor — this keeping of things backstage, really is meant to protect the integrity of the process.

But it also has the other effect, which is that it also gives the illusion of the scientific community speaking with a single voice. So basically, all the messy process of sausages being made — and all the controversial issues that, by definition, the National Research Council is dealing with — you don’t see reflected in the reports. Or you see it in very official language. So it gives them a tremendous amount of authority, this illusion of the scientific community speaking with one voice, and they cultivate that. I was actually a graduate fellow at the National Academies, and they definitely want that — they recognize that the authority of the documents rests on that.

And many organizations that deal with information and knowledge production, including journalism, operate in this way, frequently. The publication of the finished news item and the enclosure of the reporting process — there’s a very real sense that that protects the authority of the process. So if you’re investigating a popular politician, you need that. And at the same time, it protects the brand and the legal standing and the authority of the organization, and bolsters that. Those things are very reliant on this process of enclosure, oftentimes.

And so what you see in the new media spaces, and these network experiments with blogging, is that sort of process. They’ve taken a medium that they themselves talked about in terms of accountability and transparency and openness and extended it to this traditional stage management process. They continue to control what remains backstage and what goes front-stage. And there are good justifications for doing that. But they’ve also extended that to the process of comment moderation. You’ll get pointed to a description of why comments are moderated the way they are — but you’ll never see exactly why a comment is spammed or not. That’s not unique to the news, either. But it’s an interesting preservation of the way the media’s worked for a long time.

And this has been described by other scholars, as well. So Alfred Hermida has a really neat piece on blogging at the BBC where he talks about much the same thing. He uses different terms — he talks about “gatekeeping,” as opposed to this notion of stage management — but it’s a pretty robust finding across a lot of institutions.

And I don’t want to portray it as something unique to journalism. This process of self-presentation and this performance of authority is widespread — and maybe necessary to journalism. I think the jury’s out on that.

MG: Definitely. Which brings up the question of how authority is expressed across different media. Does broadcast, for example, being what it is, have a different mandate than other types of journalism?

JB: Right. One of the remarkable things about broadcast news is the amount of stage management that you see in the traditional product. So if you look at an organization like ABC News, for instance — before their recent mass layoffs — they have several dozen correspondents: 77 or so people. But they have 1,500 total staff. And when you’re producing for a visual medium, you’re very selective about what appears on front-stage — this mise-en-scène of network news: what appears on camera and what ends up on the cutting-room floor, and so on. The vast majority of their newsgathering operation — the desk assistants and the bookers and the people who do all the pre-interviewing and the off-air correspondents — are people who never appear on-air. No network is its anchor.

So there’s that aspect, in which a large portion of the news ecosystem isn’t visible to the public — and there’s an argument to be made that having a small set of news personalities with whom audiences can identify is good for the product — and there are a lot of organizations where the vast majority of people involved in things don’t really speak. So that was one of the interesting aspects of looking at the blogging efforts of network news: Once that somewhat natural distinction between on-air and off-air talent and support staff disappears, who becomes visible online?

And you do have a lot of producers, a lot of bookers and other types of professionals who appear on the blogs, which is a really fascinating thing. The blogs are an extension of the stage management thing, but also a challenge to that model.

Image from daveynin used under a Creative Commons License.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymity, community and commenting: We saw an unusually lively conversation over the weekend on an issue that virtually every news organization has dealt with over the past few years: anonymous comments. It started with the news that Peer News, a new Hawaii-based news organization edited by former Rocky Mountain News chief John Temple, would not allow comments. His rationale was that commenting anonymity fosters a lack of responsibility, which leads to “racism, hate and ugliness.”

That touched off a spirited Twitter debate between two former newspaper guys, Mathew Ingram (Globe and Mail, now with GigaOm) and Howard Owens (GateHouse, now runs The Batavian). Afterward, Ingram wrote a fair summary of the discussion — he was pro-anonymous comments, Owens was opposed — and elaborated on his position.

Essentially, Owens argued that it’s unethical for news sites (particularly community-based ones) to allow anonymous comments because “readers and participants have a fundamental right to know who is posting what.” And Ingram makes two main points in his blog post: That many online communities have anonymous comments and very healthy community, and that it’s virtually impossible to pin down someone’s real identity online, so pretty much all commenting online is anonymous anyway.

Several other folks chimed in with various ideas for news commenting. Steve Buttry, who’s working on a fledgling as-yet-unnamed Washington news site wondered whether news orgs could find ways to create two tiers of commenting — one for ID’d, the other for anonymous. Steve Yelvington, who dipped into Ingram and Owens’ debate, extolled the values of leadership, as opposed to management, in fostering great commenting community. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Mandy Jenkins offered similar thoughts, saying that anonymity doesn’t matter nearly as much as an active, personable moderator.

J-prof and news futurist Jeff Jarvis and French journalist Bruno Boutot zoom out on the issue a bit, with Jarvis arguing that commenting is an insulting, inferior form of communication for news organizations to offer, and they should instead initiate more interactive, empowering communication earlier in the journalistic process. Boutot builds on that to say that newspapers need to invite readers into the process to build trust and survive, and outlines a limited place for anonymity in that goal. Finally, if you’re interested in going deeper down the rabbit hole of anonymous commenting, Jack Lail has an amazingly comprehensive list of links on the subject.

The iPad and magazines: The iPad will be officially released next Saturday, so expect to see the steady stream of articles and posts about it will or won’t save publishers and journalism to swell over the next couple of weeks. This week, a comScore survey found that 34 percent of their respondents would be likely to read newspapers or magazines if they owned an iPad — not nearly the percentage of people who said they’d browse the internet or check email with it, but actually more than I had expected. PaidContent takes a look at 15 magazines’ plans for adapting to tablets like the iPad, and The Wall Street Journal examines the tacks they’re taking with tablet advertising.

At least two people aren’t impressed with some of those proposals. Blogger and media critic Jason Fry says he expects many publishers to embrace a closed, controlled iPad format, which he argues is wearing thin because it doesn’t mesh well with the web. “With Web content, publishers aren’t going to be able to exercise the control that print gave them and they hope iPad will return to them,” he writes. And British j-prof Paul Bradshaw calls last week’s VIV Mag demo “lovely but pointless.” Meanwhile, Wired’s Steven Levy looks at whether the iPad or Google’s Chrome OS will be instrumental in shaping the future of computing.

Aggregation and media ownership in the courts: In the past week or so, we’ve seen developments in two relatively outside-the-spotlight court cases, both of which were good news for larger, traditional media outlets. First, a New York judge ruled that a web-based financial news site can’t report on the stock recommendations of analysts from major Wall Street firms until after each day’s opening bell. The Citizen Media Law Project’s Sam Bayard has a fantastic analysis of the case, explaining why the ruling is a blow to online news aggregators: It’s an affirmation of the “hot news” principle, which gives the reporting of certain facts similar protections to intellectual property, despite the fact that facts are in the public domain.

Meanwhile, the Lab’s C.W. Anderson analyzed the statements of several news orgs’ counsel at an FTC hearing earlier this month, finding in them a blueprint for how they plan to protect (or control) their content online. Some of those arguments include the hot news doctrine, as well as a concept of aggregation as an opt-in system. Both Anderson’s and Bayard’s pieces are lucid explanations of what’s sure to be a critical area of media law over the next couple of years.

And in another case, a federal appeals judge at least temporarily lifted the FCC’s cross-ownership ban that prevents media companies from owning a newspaper and TV station in the same outlet. Here’s the AP story on the ruling, and just in time, we got a great summary by Molly Kaplan of the New America Foundation of the “what” and “so what” of media concentration based on a Columbia University panel earlier this month.

Health care coverage taken to task: Health care reform, arguably the American news media’s biggest story of the past year, culminated this week with the passage of a reform bill. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz was among the first to take a crack at a postmortem on the media’s performance on the story, chiding the press in a generally critical column for focusing too much (as usual) on the political and procedural aspects of health care reform, rather than the substance of the proposals. The news media produced enough data and analysis to satisfy policy junkies, Kurtz said, but “in the end, the subject may simply have been too dense for the media to fully digest…For a busy electrician who plugs in and out of the news, the jousting and the jargon may have seemed bewildering.”

Kurtz was sympathetic, though, to what he saw as the reasons for that failure: The story was complicated, long, bewildering, and at times tedious, and the press was driven by the constant need to produce new copy and fill airtime. Those excuses didn’t fly with C.W. Anderson, who contended that Kurtz “is basically admitting the press has no meaningful role in our democracy.” If the press can’t handle meaningful stuff like health care reform, he asked, what good is it? And Rex Hammock used Kurtz’s critique as an example of why we need another form of context-oriented journalism to complement the day-to-day grind of information.

Google pulls an end-around on China: This isn’t particularly journalism-related, so I won’t dwell on it much, but it’s huge news for the global web, so it deserves a quick summary. Google announced this week that it’s stopping its censorship of Chinese search by using its servers in nearby Hong Kong, and two days later, a Google exec also told Congress that the United States needs to take online censorship seriously elsewhere in the world, too.

The New York Times‘ and the Guardian‘s interviews with Sergey Brin and James Fallows’ interview with David Drummond give us more insight into the details of the decision and Google’s rationale, and Mathew Ingram has a good backgrounder on Google-China relations. Not surprisingly, not everyone’s wowed by Google’s move: Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan says it’s curiously late for Google to start caring about Chinese censorship. Finally, China- and media-watcher Rebecca MacKinnon explains why the ball is now in China’s court.

Reading roundup: I’ve got a bunch of cool bits and pieces for you this week. We’ll try to run through them quickly.

— Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group, gives a brief but illuminating interview with paidContent’s Staci Kramer that’s largely about, well, paid content. Weisberg explains why Slate’s early experiment with a paywall was a disaster, but says media outlets need to charge for mobile news, since that’s a charge not for content, but for a convenient form of delivery.

— Since we’ve highlighted the launch and open-sourcing of Google’s Living Stories, it’s only fair to note an obvious downside: Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams points out that it’s been a month since it was updated. Google has acknowledged that fact with a note, and Joey Baker notes that he guessed last month that Google was open-sourcing the project because the Washington Post and New York Times weren’t using it well.

— Like ships passing in the night: USC j-prof Robert Hernandez argues that for many young or minority communities in cities, their local paper isn’t just dying; it’s long been dead because it’s consciously ignored them. Meanwhile, Gawker’s Ravi Somaiya notes that with the rise of Twitter and Facebook, big-time blogging is becoming more fact-driven, professionally written and definitive — in other words, more like those dead and dying newspapers.

— Colin Schultz has some great tips for current and aspiring science journalists, though several of them are transferable to just about any form of journalism.

— Finally, I haven’t read it yet, but I’m willing to bet that this spring’s issue of Nieman Reports on visual journalism is chock full of great stuff. Photojournalism prof Ken Kobre gives you a few good places to start.

Mask photo by Thirteen of Clubs used under a Creative Commons license.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The idea that you can do ‘more with less‘ is, in my view, one of the four great lies,” Keller told his staff. “What you can do with less, is less. But if you are smart and careful, you can limit the harm.” To that end, Keller said the Times is looking to streamline its copyediting and page design. He ruled out eliminating sections and said layoffs, if necessary, would be based on merit.

On the digital front, Keller said again that a decision on charging for the Times website would come soon. He described the company’s predicament:

First of all, the website earns a lot of money from advertisers — and that, by the way, has started to grow again at a healthy rate. If you charge readers to reach your content, some of them will stop coming to the site. If enough of them stop coming to the site, you lose more in ad revenue than you gain from direct payments. That’s a risk that can be minimized, but it can’t be ignored.

If you DO decide to go to a pay model, there are many intricate questions about how you charge, how much you charge, whether you do it alone or in some partnership with other papers, and how fancy a technical infrastructure you build.

It would only be natural for the Times Co. to consider every option, but that’s the first time I’ve seen anyone there mention a “partnership with other papers” — like, say, Steve Brill’s Journalism Online — as an option. Also, the Times has more than 70 blogs, and Keller said those “consuming considerable effort and expense with little reward” might be cut.

Here’s a full transcript of Keller’s remarks, which was posted on an internal Times server and passed along to me. Don’t miss Keller’s knock on the newly redesigned CNN.com, which he said “has hardly any news”:

Good morning. Welcome to another episode of Throw Stuff at Bill. This year we’ve added one innovation to the Throw-Stuff methodology. As usual we’ve offered foreign and domestic bureaus the ability to join us by conference call, but this year they have the ability to e-mail me questions in real time, and the questions will pop up on the laptop in front of me. Whether I have the ability to find the incoming questions, let alone answer them, remains to be seen.

In a fairer world, this would be a time for celebration. Since we last met here, The Times has won just about every prize in the world of journalism — for the brilliance of our reporting and photography, for the beauty of our graphic design, for the ingenuity of our online storytelling. We have put important but invisible subjects onto the public agenda — the dangers of distracted driving, for instance, and the alarming rates of brain damage in football, to cite two examples where our work has mobilized a government response and may well end up saving lives. We have lived up to our obligation to hold powerful institutions accountable, and to help our readers navigate the complications of life in hard times. Our reporters have unearthed scandal from Washington (the Ensign family, for instance) to Afghanistan (the Karzai family). On the big running news stories of the day — the health care debate, the attempts to rescue the economy, the strategy in Afghanistan, the political ferment from City Hall to Capitol Hill — we have been the great indispensable source. In short, when so much of our competition is in retreat, our journalism has remained astonishingly good, and readers know it.

Almost miraculously, twice this year we have had correspondents freed from captivity in Afghanistan — although in one case the rescue came with a heartbreaking price — and we have used those experiences as opportunities to bear witness. David Rohde’s seven-month hostage ordeal became a gripping narrative of life inside the place we’ve come to call Talibanistan.

We’ve launched a new local news project in the San Francisco Bay Area, with another on the way in Chicago — experiments that may become an important revenue source, but in any case are a sign of new life in print. All of this and much more should be abundant cause for pride.

But the subject that looms over all of us is the impending loss of 100 jobs — with the anxiety and sadness that brings in the short run, and the fear it arouses about the long run. So let me focus today on four questions that I’ve been hearing around the newsroom — and then turn to you for anything else that’s on your mind.

The four questions are:

Why now?

What’s the plan?

Will we get some relief by charging for our journalism online?

And, where will it all end?

Let me acknowledge up front that I operate under three constraints. For starters, I can’t foresee the future. There are also some things in the here and now that I just don’t know. And there are some things I know but can’t say without calling down the wrath of our lawyers. Within those limits I will be as candid as I can be, and I trust that in return you’ll regard this as a discussion within the family, not material for your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.

First, why now? Why, after pay cuts and furloughs that were supposed to carry us through the hard times, are we suddenly talking about buyouts and layoffs in 2009?

Of course, the possibility of another staff cut has hovered over us, really, since the last staff cut, but none of us expected it to happen before next year, and all of us hoped that with the recession bottoming out we had a chance of avoiding a staff cut altogether. Yet here we are.

The fact that we were suddenly faced with buyouts and layoffs does NOT mean that the business of the company has taken a sudden turn for the worse.

On the contrary, the national economy has begun growing again, and, as Janet and Arthur noted two weeks ago in their report on the 3rd quarter results, we have the first, tentative signs that advertising may be stirring back to life, modestly in print and more significantly online. Things seem to be looking up a little. But they are not looking up enough to support a newsroom of 1250 journalists in the years ahead. While advertising may rebound, there is still a lot of advertising that is unlikely to return to the levels of our financial heyday. Look at it this way: Advertising used to account for about 70 percent of the revenues of The New York Times. That number is now approaching 50 percent. We’ve made up for some of the lost advertising by increasing the price of the printed newspaper and by cutting costs, but there’s a limit to how deep you can cut and how much you can demand from your customers. Thus the decision to cut 100 jobs — to create a newsroom staff level that we hope will be sustainable for the long haul.

Once the decision was made to have a staff cut, the reason for doing it now rather than waiting until next year amounted to a simple, hard fact of life: under the Guild contract, anyone who is working here on January 1, 2010, is entitled to all of his or her paid vacation. By making the cuts before the end of the year, the company saves those costs. In practical terms, that means if we wait until next year, to get the same saving we would have to cut more jobs than the 100, probably another ten jobs. Certainly, I’d rather make these cuts later. In fact, I’d rather not make them at all. But if we have to face this, I’d rather face it and get it over with, and move on.

Next question: What’s the plan? How do we shrink the newsroom staff by 100 jobs? Much as we hoped to avoid it, we have not had our heads in the sand. The masthead has been at work on a variety of contingency plans to minimize the damage to a great news report in the event we had to cut staff. The idea that you can do “more with less” is, in my view, one of the four great lies. (You can Google the other three, starting with “the check is in the mail.”) What you can do with less, is less. But if you are smart and careful, you can limit the harm.

We’ve had a lot of experience in cutting budgets — and there are basically three things you can do:

First, you look for any slack in the system, any way to do what we do more efficiently, more economically. In the early days, when we began imposing tighter discipline over management of the newsroom, that meant booking travel through Expedia rather than American Express, it meant looking for cheaper meals and lodging, it meant somewhat less frequent moves of correspondents from one bureau to another, it meant having correspondents work from home rather than commuting to an office. We now run a much tighter ship than we did a few years ago, which has enabled us to save money without compromising coverage.

This time, in our quest for new efficiencies, we’re looking hard at how we move copy — from reporter to publication, whether in print or on the Web. We suspect we can save some slots by streamlining the process.

Could we for example combine some of our copy desks and save a few FTEs by gaining economies of scale and scheduling without compromising the rich, specialized expertise that resides in our cadre of copy editors? Or consider how pages get made. We have skilled designers who draw our pages, paginators who execute those designs and other production staffers who calibrate the tone and color of the pages. We’re looking at whether we can streamline some of that work. Susan Edgerley, Fiona Spruill, Patrick Laforge and Allan Flippen are deep into a study of how we handle copy, and I expect to reach some conclusions in the next week or two. Those are the kind of questions we’re examining, under the general rubric of doing things more efficiently.

Besides looking for slack, you look for things you can stop doing, or things you can do less often. Are there things that aren’t essential to the news report, features that we can live without? In the early days of newsroom cost-cutting, that meant things like stock tables and the Sunday TV book — essentially lists of raw information that were easily accessible on the web. More recently it meant doing away with the City weekly and the regional weeklies. Of course, along the way we have created new things, too. The regionals and City section gave birth to the new Metropolitan section, with zoned pages for the suburbs, and I don’t think I’m alone in regarding it as a tremendous success.

This time, one thing we are doing is taking a close look at our long roster of 70 or so blogs and our online verticals, as we call our focused packages of online content. We think we can save some slots there. Many of our blogs serve a valuable journalistic purpose. Many draw a lot of traffic to the website. Some of them are experiments that deserve more time to prove themselves. We don’t want to lose the inventiveness we have achieved by letting a thousand flowers bloom. But if we find instances where a blog or a vertical is consuming considerable effort and expense with little reward, we’re prepared to do some pruning.

In the days since we announced the plans for a staff cut, I’ve heard some speculation about other things we might be targeting. Since Metro took a hit last time, my friends in Metro wonder if they are in for another round of particular pain. I’ve heard similar rumbles from writers and editors in the features sections — Dining, Home, Travel, Styles and the rest. One of the armchair experts quoted by the public editor wondered why we don’t eliminate the Sports section. I’d like to be as clear as possible: none of those things is on the table. I can’t think of a better reminder of how much our readers count on Metro than our deep and distinguished coverage of this week’s election campaigns, or a better reminder of what we bring to sports fans than our dazzling coverage of the World Series.

I don’t know who will take the buyouts, and I don’t want to suggest that any department is completely immune, but believe we can get to 100 slots without anything so drastic as reducing Metro coverage or downsizing the Sports section — and I believe it would be unwise, at a time when we are asking readers to pay a premium price for our work, to give them conspicuously less of it. Indeed, that’s a point of view you will find echoed enthusiastically by our friends on the business side, who understand that we are more than ever dependent on satisfied subscribers for our revenues.

And, by the way, I think it may be time we stopped referring to sections as “core” or “not core.” The newsroom is a more complicated ecosystem than that. Consider this: although we are a national newspaper, New York is our biggest circulation area, a hugely desirable market for advertisers, and, you might say, our soul. That underscores the importance of Metro. But it’s not just about Metro. Covering New York is the work of Bizday reporters on Wall Street, of our theater, music and art critics, of our fashion reporters and our Dining and Real Estate sections. Folks, we’re all in this together.

So, you cut spending by getting more efficient, by shutting down things that are not essential — and, frankly, by looking for people who, for one reason or another, are not pulling their weight. This is not a newsroom of slackers; we recruit selectively, and we have gotten pretty good at managing out people who don’t live up to our high standards. But when we are forced to cut staff, we look at performance.

As you know, we have offered voluntary buyouts, and I’d be relieved if 100 of you saw a buyout as being in your interest. But if we do not get enough buyout volunteers, and we do have to resort to layoffs, let me be very clear about one thing: we intend to use merit to decide who is laid off and who is not. Nobody in the newsroom is going to get laid off solely because they lack seniority, despite what you may have heard. Our contract with the Guild allows us to go out of seniority and make cuts on the basis of merit. That’s what we did last time, and it will be my priority this time.

One final point on coping with these cuts. This is a cut of about 8 percent in our staff. But some of that lost manpower will be offset because we will not be doing furloughs next year. We’ll each be working 10 more days next year than we did this year. I leave it to you whether that is a blessing, but it will somewhat ease the strain of losing so many people.

The third question that hangs over the newsroom is, what about the website? When will we have a new business model for our online journalism? Briefly put, what is the right mix of advertising revenue and subscription revenue to build the strongest business on the Web?

Jill and I have spent a lot of hours with our colleagues from around the building, including Arthur and Janet, who will make the final decision. I don’t think there’s a variation we haven’t considered, a competing website we haven’t studied, a scenario we haven’t run through a rigorous analysis. It’s taken longer than some of us expected, because, simply put, the answers aren’t as obvious as some people think.

First of all, the website earns a lot of money from advertisers — and that, by the way, has started to grow again at a healthy rate. If you charge readers to reach your content, some of them will stop coming to the site. If enough of them stop coming to the site, you lose more in ad revenue than you gain from direct payments. That’s a risk that can be minimized, but it can’t be ignored.

If you DO decide to go to a pay model, there are many intricate questions about how you charge, how much you charge, whether you do it alone or in some partnership with other papers, and how fancy a technical infrastructure you build.

I can assure you that we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I don’t think you have very long to wait for an outcome. We are indisputably the leader in quality online journalism, and, as the leader, we can afford the time to get this right.

Fourth and last on my list of preemptive questions: will we make it?

I confess to being an optimist by nature, but I’m no Pollyanna. I don’t kid myself that advertising will rebound to the billion-dollar levels of five years ago, or that we can count on digital advertising growing at 30 percent a year again. I don’t think this will be easy. But, yes, we will make it.

You’ve all heard my riff about supply and demand — the persistent, even growing demand for first-rate journalism, and the sadly dwindling supply. That’s no less true, and it is the bedrock on which my own optimism about this place is built. The demand for our work is evident in the print subscribers who pay good money for the glory of the daily New York Times — and who stick with us through price increases and their own economic hardships. It is evident in the floods of visitors to our website — numbers we believe to be much higher than the 20 million monthly uniques counted by Nielsen.

As for the diminishing supply of real, reported news that matters, every week brings another example. Here’s one that’s fresh in my mind. The other day some of us spent half an hour looking at CNN’s redesigned website. It is the second most heavily trafficked online news site. The redesign is cleaner and brighter. Just one thing: It has hardly any news. On Tuesday, when CNN television was treating Election Day with the usual bells and whistles, the home page of CNN.com did not seem to be aware that there was voting going on. The most striking news story on the page had the following headline: “Canadian folk singer killed by coyotes.” (Now, if it had been Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen.…)

A lot of the people predicting (and in some cases unabashedly yearning for) the death of newspapers overlook the simple fact that a recession lowers the tide for all boats. Daniel Gross put it nicely in a contrarian essay last week on Slate:

“In case anybody has forgotten,” he wrote, “we’ve had a deep, long recession, a huge spike in unemployment, and a credit crunch. Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures. There are plenty of members of what I call the 40 percent club: businesses, many tethered to finance and credit, that have seen sales plummet by nearly one-half. These include automobiles, homes, luxury apparel, and diamonds. Many other components of consumer discretionary spending — hotels, restaurants, air travel — have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels? I’m not sure why we would expect consumption of a purely discretionary item that costs a few hundred dollars per year not to fall in the type of macroeconomic climate we’ve had.

“Especially when you consider that rather than discounting the product, many newspapers (and magazines) have been jacking up prices aggressively.…

“This,” he concludes, “is the new emerging model — cutting costs, raising prices. It may still fail in the end. But we shouldn’t act as if the online-only crowd has it all figured out. Every month, several million Americans pay to have newspapers and magazines delivered to their homes — a trick most online publications have yet to pull off. In fact, in some regards, print-online hybrids like newspapers and magazines have outperformed online-only publications. The Web operations of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal aren’t exactly slouches when it comes to selling online ads. And as poorly as the stock of the New York Times has performed over the past decade, most people would have preferred owning it to the stock of Salon.com, or TheStreet.com.”

Maintaining the excellence of the news report has always been a priority of the newsroom and a commitment of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. Because of the growing dependence on circulation revenue, it is more than ever a business imperative as well as a journalistic mission. If we cut the staff to the point where our readers see quality in decline, they will no longer be willing to pay a premium price for it. That’s not just an argument that I will make. It’s an argument the business side will make more passionately than ever.

To that I would add that the recession WILL end, because they always do. Consumers WILL resume spending, maybe not at the profligate bubble-fueled pace of the ’90s, but they will spend. Advertisers WILL advertise and a lot of them will continue to see huge advantage in advertising to the educated, discerning, successful people who read the NYT, in print AND online.

And, last but not least, on my list of reasons for optimism is that we have demonstrated, as a company and as a newsroom, a tremendous ability to adapt, invent, including the game-changing, game-SAVING decision to make The Times a national newspaper, including the luscious franchise of the T magazines, including the font of journalistic invention that is our website, including a cascade of ideas from the newsroom in recent months.

As you know, Jill and I have spent a lot of our time the last few weeks immersed more than ever in our digital journalism, and it is invigorating to spend time with the amazingly inventive producers, product managers, software-builders and others — many of whom have chosen to be at this place rather than in some online startup because they believe in the work as much as those of us who come from the world of ink on cellulose.

Most of you know me well enough to know that standing up in front of crowds is not my VERY favorite thing to do, but there is one reason I relish these occasions. They give me an opportunity to say something that doesn’t get said nearly often enough, and it is this:

The value of The Times, ultimately, is the people here who, through thick and thin, manage to create journalism that is fearless, intelligent and rich — literally in a class by itself. Even during these tense weeks since we announced the news that we would have to have another round of staff cuts, just look at the glorious news reports we have published, day by day, hour by hour. I’d like to end with a simple but deeply felt thank you to everyone here who works their hearts out to create and support the singular mission of The New York Times. It’s an honor to work alongside you.

Now, I welcome your questions or comments.

Now Google News is asking publishers to label themselves. In an update to its sitemap standards announced today, Google News is requesting that publishers explicitly tag content that’s published on a blog. Same goes for press releases, satire, opinion, user-generated content, and any articles that require registration or payment to read. The technical details are here.

Most of those labels will be visible to users of Google News, as they are now. Opinion and user-generated content won’t get a label but will presumably affect search results. And while tagging is voluntary, Google reserves the right to “add such designations to certain articles as necessary.”

I still don’t see why it matters if news is published on a blog or some other platform. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt ventured a distinction yesterday.) But allowing publishers to self-identify their content is a big improvement that should resolve most of the complaints Google News has been hearing — and which have been voiced to me in private. It’s a small issue with much bigger implications for how we consume, sort, and, yes, identify news in the future.

He took questions from reporters this afternoon at Google’s offices in Cambridge, and I asked him, among other things, why Google News had recently begun attaching a “(blog)” label to some news sources — a move I criticized last month. Schmidt resorted to bringing up bloggers’ moms:

Me: A very small question. Google News very recently added a label for blogs, to differentiate from non-blogs. It seemed weird in 2009 to make that distinction. I wondered, did you have any input on that or —?

Eric Schmidt: I was not directly involved in that. There seems to be a difference between blogs and traditional news. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish because many people in the traditional news are also bloggers.

Me: Or they use a blog platform.

Schmidt: Or they use a blog platform. So we’re trying to find that line. And it’s hard to articulate what that difference is.

Me: How would describe that line if it’s not based on the tech behind the publishing platform?

Schmidt: No, it’s not the technology. My guess is — again, I’m speculating, which is always a mistake — it has a lot to do with the infrastructure around the writer. So a blog that’s associated with a major, legitimate organization — of which, I think, the majority, if not everyone, in the room is associated with — would be, I think, treated differently than an individual blogger who’s using his or her right of free expression to say whatever he thinks. So the presence of an editor, as an example. You know, an editor that’s not your mom.

That is, for what it’s worth, not the distinction Google News is making: The “(blog)” label is supposed to be attached to any news published with blogging software. At the time, I thought Google might be throwing a bone to newspaper companies that don’t like being lumped with amateur news sources. And while I’m sure the new label was not important enough to reach Schmidt’s desk, his framing of that distinction — “the infrastructure around the writer” — is an interesting one.

I also asked Schmidt about the concept of a “hyperpersonalized news stream,” coined by Google VP Marissa Mayer to describe a customized flow of information from a broad range of news sources. Does Google have aspirations to build on that concept?

Schmidt: We have about ten news stream ideas, of which hyperpersonalization is one. And, again, I’d rather not talk about specific products or even prioritize them, but I would make the following observation: In five or ten years, what will the primary news reader look like?

Well, that person will be probably on a tablet or a mobile phone, probably the majority of the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it. It’ll be highly personalized, right? So you’ll know who the person is. There’ll be a lot of integration of media — so video, voice, what have you. It’ll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you’ll probably have a mixture. Think of the Kindle as an example. The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around.

So if you start thinking about that, it becomes pretty obvious what the products need to be: more personalized, much deeper, capable of deeper navigation into a subject. Also, show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don’t repeat everything.

As some news organizations begin charging for digital content, I wondered, how is Google positioned to aid or take advantage of those moves? I mentioned the company’s proposal to power micropayments for news sites with Google Checkout.

Schmidt: The first question: What percentage of news organizations will charge for content? And it’s entirely their decision. If they do so, then we want to make sure that we have products that they can use to help them charge. Right? Because we’re in the infrastructure business. We respond. But, to me, that’s a relatively straightforward infrastructure decision. Could we get them to use Google Checkout, other payment systems, and so forth? But I think it’s early to talk about that.

We also, for newspapers that are trying to solve the revenue gap problem, we’re working hard on stronger advertising products for newspapers. And we’ll see how well they do, but it remains an unsolved problem. That’s probably all I — everything else is tied up in discussions with specific —

David Beard, editor of Boston.com, asked about a remark Schmidt made last month regarding Google’s “moral responsibility” to aid the news industry. Schmidt’s reply:

Schmidt: We have a responsibility. We have not yet figured out how to exercise that responsibility…We’re looking for new ideas. It’s a hard problem because, as everybody knows, printed circulation has declined, and the online use of newspapers has exploded positively. So you’ve got a bridge problem between one and the other, and we want to help. We really do.

A few other tidbits outside our purview:

— Schmidt said invite-only Google Wave is “getting ready for a much broader distribution…very soon,” which he clarified to mean within weeks.

— Surveying the laptops of reporters in the room, he said, “We’ve got a couple Macs — always my favorite.”

— And asked about something Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, Schmidt replied, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.”

When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.

Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.

It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.”

What the Judge Ate for Breakfast (the name comes from a quote attributed to Jerome Frank) launched in early 2008 as an ancillary outlet to Sylvester’s court coverage. It initially featured interesting asides and courtroom miscellany, all delivered as regular text-based blog posts. Sylvester started mulling bigger ideas about a year into the site, and his growing interest in video dovetailed serendipitously. “I was kind of jealous of TV,” Sylvester said. “I wished people could actually hear some of this testimony and see the expressions instead of me describing it to them.”

With the help of colleagues in the Eagle’s photography and web departments, Sylvester cobbled together equipment and started learning. The first video in the series — which runs under the title “Common Law” — appeared in July, and he’s now posting a minimum of one new clip per week.

Juggling platforms and coverage

What the Judge Ate for Breakfast is part of The Wichita Eagle’s website, Kansas.com, but it isn’t Sylvester’s full-time gig. He juggles platforms, producing coverage for print, web, Twitter and the Common Law series. When journalism schools teach “multimedia journalism,” Sylvester is the kind of reporter they’ve got in mind.

The essential skill of multimedia reporting, Sylvester told me, is knowing how to match content, medium, and audience. Twitter requires brevity. Long-form print and web demand context. Blog posts, particularly those driven by video, need to be short and engaging.

That’s why you won’t find Common Law videos in Sylvester’s traditional coverage. The point is to offer something different for the audience and appropriate for the medium. Take a look at one of Sylvester’s favorite clips as an example: it’s a piece that follows sheriff’s deputy Dioane Gates as he unexpectedly arrests someone he knows. This is one of those slice-of-life tangents that typically gets cut when space is limited and a deadline looms. Recognizing that this is a story and then finding a place for it is where a skilled multimedia reporter shines. Otherwise, you’d never see this stuff.

A look inside the tool box

The role Sylvester plays varies with the subject matter. Big cases require a team, so for something like the upcoming trial of Scott Roeder, Sylvester tweets from the courtroom and provides print and web copy, while one photographer manages pool photos and a second grabs video from the TV feed and sends it to the website.

Sylvester handles all the coverage for smaller trials and hearings. His equipment needs can shift from case to case, so he rolls around a briefcase that holds a Canon HV20 camcorder, a Sennheiser EW100 wireless microphone, a MacBook Pro with Final Cut Express, and a collection of wires and A/V accessories. The jumble of gear occasionally raises eyebrows at the courthouse’s x-ray machine. (It also summons memories of a certain senator’s previous career.)

Posting new Common Law videos is a simple process: Sylvester uploads clips to VMIX, a video encoding service used by McClatchy papers, and then he adds video embed code to a new blog entry. The hardest part is the editing, which can take up to two hours. “It’s like writing a story,” Sylvester said. “You’ve got to try to get it down to two minutes, but capture the essence of what’s going on.”

Watch a few videos and you’ll see that Sylvester weaves in B-roll shots (e.g. a judge listening to an attorney). Sylvester only has one camera, so a “listening judge” clip may come from earlier or later in the hearing. That’s not a huge issue since most Common Law clips revolve around a concept rather than strict coverage, but Sylvester does limit B-roll footage to shots from the same hearing.

How Sylvester gets in

Kansas allows cameras in the courtroom at the judge’s discretion, so Sylvester coordinates his weekly coverage needs in advance. Whipping out a video rig isn’t a surprise most judges would welcome.

Access is made easier because Common Law clips almost always revolve around a de facto “cast”: public defender Lacy Gilmour, prosecutor Marc Bennett, sheriff’s deputies David Rank and the previously-mentioned Dioane Gates, and Judge David Kaufman, whom Sylvester has known since before he wore a robe.

Sylvester credits his 30-plus years in journalism and nearly 10 years on the court beat as keys to greasing the skids. “They’re letting me into places and through doors that normally we wouldn’t go [through],” he said. “You have to have trust in order to do that.”

Forget the numbers

Sylvester declined to share website stats, citing corporate policy. You can get a rough sense of traffic to Kansas.com’s blog section here, and Sylvester did note a gap between his regular coverage, which is often among the most popular stories on Kansas.com, and the limited gravitational pull of What the Judge Ate for Breakfast. That’s the big problem with the long tail of content: small audiences lead to tiny metrics, and those are tough to swallow even when you can rationalize the results.

Sylvester, who knows the humbling sting of web traffic, has a solution: when it comes to beat reporting, forget the numbers. “I’m like everybody else, I like to look at the numbers every once in a while,” he said. “But on this one I’ve stopped. I want to concentrate on producing good content, because I really do believe that as more people get their information on the Internet, I think that good content is going to win out.”

That’s not to say Sylvester disregards all forms of measurement. He just places more importance on the feedback he gets from readers and courthouse staff. “This blog is an extension of the beat,” he said. “This may not get huge numbers, but the people I deal with everyday like it, and it’s building credibility.”

This was all sorts of weird. On both technical and philosophical levels, there’s no meaningful difference between blogs that publish news and news sites that aren’t published as blogs. Many news organizations place material on both types of platforms without considering the content any different. Some use blogging software like WordPress to produce sites that look nothing like blogs.

Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether they were baked in aluminum or glass pans. There’s no difference, and it obscures what you really want know: if they contain chocolate chips.

Weirder still is the slipshod manner by which Google News has deployed the labels. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of inaccurately labeled news sources, and it’s inconsistent even within companies like Gawker Media: Deadspin is a blog, but Gizmodo isn’t. Also not labeled a blog, despite identifying as such: West Seattle Blog and Talking Points Memo’s Editors Blog.

The latter was actually labeled a blog until September 24, when Google switched TPM back to non-blog status, as you can see below. Asked to explain, Chris Gaither, the spokesman for Google, said the company doesn’t comment on individual publishers. TPM declined to comment as well.

The “(blog)” label is small and may not affect the user experience, but I actually think it’s pretty significant. Splitting up content by subject matter makes sense, but why would Google want to classify news by platform? The only other label it applies to content in Google News is “(satire).” [UPDATE, 3:15 p.m.: Gaither helpfully points out that Google News also labels press releases, subscription content, and videos, among other content.]

The company describes this new label as “highlighting the diversity of content in Google News.” It’s hard not to wonder if Google sees this as a gesture to newspaper publishers who have occasionally complained that their content isn’t privileged over blogs. (Of course, the “(blog)” label is supposed to apply to newspaper blogs, too. But that’s also wildly inconsistent: Blogs like The New York Times’ Media Decoder are sometimes labeled correctly and sometimes not.) Google has been unusually public of late in positioning itself as a friend of the news industry, and that could be the context here.

If so, and even if not, we should be worried. Google’s neutrality when indexing and displaying news sources is critical to allowing new systems of news to flourish. Already, Google News has run into trouble by occasionally excluding neighborhood news sites and popular blogs like Boing Boing.

The new “(blog)” label may not be about creating a hierarchy of content, but if there are no corresponding labels for “(newspaper article)” or “(front-of-the-book squib in a biweekly magazine),” and if they can’t even identify blogs correctly, why is Google even going there?

I asked Gaither, the spokesman for Google News, about all my concerns, and he provided this statement:

We added the “(blog)” label after receiving feedback from some Google News users who told us they’d like to know whether a listed story is a blog item before they click on it to visit the publisher’s website. Our goal is to give users as much information as possible so they can choose what kind of news content they’d like to read.

The study in question demonstrates a fascinating technique, borrowed from genetics research, for tracking memes in media coverage, and produces some surprising results that I’ll get to below. But part of the paper is based on a flawed methodology that totally discredits the findings highlighted by the Times. Here’s the illustration of that two-and-a-half-hour gap between peak coverage of memes — in this case, phrases from the 2008 presidential election — in the mainstream media and on blogs:

In order to determine whether a news source belongs on the red curve or the green one, the authors look to whether it’s indexed by Google News. If so, the source is labeled as “mainstream media.” But Google News indexes loads and loads of political blogs, from conservative Hot Air to liberal Talking Points Memo. It includes Daily Kos, Power Line, AMERICAblog, and the celebrity news site Just Jared. Even the Nieman Journalism Lab is in there, so by the study’s reckoning, you are currently consuming mainstream media.

So it may be true, as the Times reports on the front of its business section, that “the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow,” but the study doesn’t support that conclusion. What it finds is a surprisingly narrow gap between 20,000 prominent news sources, of all stripes, that are indexed in Google News and 1.6 million websites that don’t make the cut. Or, as Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, told me: “This shows how important it is to look at blogs and news media as one single organism.”

From that perspective, the paper has quite a bit to add. First, it’s fascinating that memes in political reporting can be tracked with methods drawn from bioinformatics and genetic sequence analysis. As Bill Wasik explains in his new book on viral culture, And Then There’s This, the term meme was coined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote in The Selfish Gene:

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about it its primeval soup…The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

Perhaps owing to those biological origins, we have come to describe particularly fast-moving Internet memes as viral, which evokes the image of passing through a population (and doesn’t, for what it’s worth, have anything to do with genetics). In New York magazine’s discussion of Wasik’s book, Times culture critic Virginia Heffernan questions whether the virus metaphor is “misleading — and ripe for retirement.” The meme-tracking study provides an alternative analogy: the heartbeat.

Back to Kleinberg’s idea of the web as a “single organism.” The study found that, yes, memes peak on prominent websites — that is, those indexed by Google News — before less prominent ones, but both of those peaks are generally preceded by a blip on the less prominent sites. Here’s how it’s illustrated in the paper; we’re looking at the percentage of each meme’s mentions that occur on sites not indexed by Google News. Zero hour represents the meme’s overall peak:

The authors describe this as a “‘heartbeat’-like dynamic” or a series of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. My hunch is that the heartbeat would be even more visible — healthier, you might say — if the study had made a more-precise distinction between mainstream media and blogs. But in any event, the finding explodes that worn-out notion, furthered by today’s Times piece, of parasitic blogs merely reacting to the work of professional journalists.

It also complicates Wasik’s description of viral culture: “This telltale spike, this ascent to sudden heights followed by a decline nearly as precipitious.” He attributes that fleeting attention span to the Internet, but the meme-tracking study finds that, if anything, obscure blogs dwell much longer on a meme — in that heartbeat-like fashion — than the more-prominent news sources indexed by Google News.

There are a few other findings that I’ll highlight tomorrow because, despite some flaws in the methodology, the study is totally fascinating — and worth exploring on its dedicated web site. When I talked to Kleinberg two weeks ago, he acknowledged that Google News was an imprecise measure of mainstream media but argued, reasonably, that they had to draw a line somewhere to produce any meaningful results. He also noted that the paper was, in part, intended to demonstrate the meme-tracking technique they’ve developed, in which case, the distinction isn’t important.

And while I was writing this post, Scott Rosenberg weighed in with many of the same criticisms, while concluding:

Nonetheless, I fully expect to see it taken as conventional wisdom from this point forward that “news starts with the traditional media and then moves into the blogosphere.” Perhaps the Memetracker folks can follow the phrase “2.5 hours” and show us exactly how that happens.

“We seem to have been able to buck the advertising recession,” he wrote to me with British understatement. And with the upswing comes what Denton described as a “pretty cautious reintroduction” of a practice he suspended last year: paying bonuses to writers based on pageviews. He explained the system in a memo to staffers:

Each writer on a site will have a (pretty demanding) individual pageview target…That target will be proportional to a writer’s base compensation. i.e. the more your monthly pay, the more people you’re expected to reach. If you go 10% over target, you get a 10% bump in pay. The target will rise as the traffic of the site as a whole increases. Your site’s editor-in-chief will be in touch to discuss the details later this week.

Writers won’t see less money if they miss their targets, and Denton also included this caveat: “Don’t all get excited: the levels will be modest; aimed at the writers who aren’t paid as much as their traffic would warrant; and we’re only committing to bonuses for the second half of this year.”

Paying for pageviews adds on obvious, if controversial, incentive for writers to create popular content, but in our IM conversation, Denton described the move as “a way to reward young and highly productive writers who might have come in at a low rate that doesn’t reflect their real value.” He said that even without paying bonuses, his bloggers have felt an incentive to perform because Gawker Media displays pageview statistics alongside every post and on a page that breaks down the stats by writer.

“Just having the numbers in public — and so prominently displayed — is enough to motivate any egomaniac writer,” Denton told me.

It was a busy day at Gawker Media, which just introduced a new, “tiered” commenting system, so I was cutting our conversation short when Denton wrote, “Oh, one other little thing.” Yes? “By bringing back pageview pay, we also open up the possibility of web-style checkbook journalism.” By that, he meant paying tipsters for the pageviews generated by posts based on their tips, which is something he briefly tried last year, offering $7.50 per 1,000 views.

Denton noted that Gawker paid $10,000 for the original version of a Faith Hill photograph that appeared on the cover of Redbook with extensive retouching. “Worth it?” I asked him. “Definitely!” he said. “Probably 2m pageviews.”

Two things are certain: Media ethicists will decry that practice, and Denton won’t care. My perspective: While I wouldn’t want my trusted news sources paying their sources for tips or paying their reporters by pageviews, I don’t get why Gawker is held to the same standard. The web has room for scrupulous and unscrupulous news sites, and as Denton recently explained to The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz: “We don’t seek to do good. We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.”

But at a time when online advertising has declined 5 percent in the U.S., any website with 35% ad growth is worth paying close attention to, no matter its journalism ethics. Denton’s memo, which he forwarded to me after I inquired, is below, along with some traffic statistics that were attached. Links were added by me. (There’s also lots of interesting information about today’s changes in commenting policy, which Denton calls “reinstituting the class system” on sites, particularly Deadspin, where commenters run wild.)

Subject: Traffic record, traffic targets, resumption of bonuses — oh, and sex tapes

Well, finally we’re growing again. June was an excellent month — with 334m pageviews.

Sure, we were helped by the launch of various smartphones, E3 and the amazing constellation of affairs and deaths at the end of the month. But we generally made the most of those stories. Special mentions to Kotaku (which ended the month 11% ahead of target) and io9 (which has increased its pageviews by 139% in the last twelve months.)

We’d have done even better but for a couple of technical factors: the move to the new slideshows hurt pageviews on galleries on sites such as Jalopnik until we got Sitemeter to count them; and the fancy ajaxy updating of the iPhone 3GS liveblog on Gizmodo was lauded by readers precisely because it didn’t force them to click so often to refresh.

And my hat goes off to AJ for bringing new writers into Deadspin and taking back the site from some commenters who thought they were in charge. Every transition is painful. AJ found that early when he started banning last month. But commenters on every site will be restive after we reinstitute the class system in comments tomorrow midday.

The favored commenters will be silent; and the illiterate ones will rant, well, illiterately. But we’ll be able to encourage the kind of discussion that *we* want — not one that is dominated merely by the most prolific of our commenters. It’s our party; we get to decide who comes. (More on this tomorrow from each site’s lead editor.)

So with these sidenotes, I’ve included the table of each site’s traffic in June — compared both to the number this time last year and the projections that each site’s editor-in-chief has made. I’ve included these targets — and the outcomes — because we’re bringing back some pageview bonus.

Don’t all get excited: the levels will be modest; aimed at the writers who aren’t paid as much as their traffic would warrant; and we’re only committing to bonuses for the second half of this year. Chris Batty’s sales and creative services teams have done an impressive job in bucking the advertising slump; but we have no idea how long we can continue to out-perform competitors.

But broadly the system will work like this. Each writer on a site will have a (pretty demanding) individual pageview target. (Remember, individual pageviews are viewable at http://gawker.com/stats etc.) That target will be proportional to a writer’s base compensation. i.e. the more your monthly pay, the more people you’re expected to reach. If you go 10% over target, you get a 10% bump in pay. The target will rise as the traffic of the site as a whole increases. Your site’s editor-in-chief will be in touch to discuss the details later this week.

I wouldn’t want you to think this was all about the numbers. It’s about the stories; the pageviews are just a way to keep count. In that spirit, here are some of the gems you could find if you were superhuman and read every post on every Gawker site. (That’s about 10,000 items a month.)

io9’s awesome Transformers review
Exclusive photo set of Stoya and Joanna Angel
John Cook uncovered the writer who took a Central Park cyclist on a Death Ride
He finally caught up with Fox News’ Jesse Watters
Ryan very succinctly explained how to destroy Bill O’Reilly on his own show
Gawker had fun discrediting Perez Hilton as he bizarrely tried to claim some higher purpose in life
Wayne Ellington’s hot 19-year-old girlfriend and other stories on Deadspin
Stephen Totilo’s chain interview on Kotaku
And that sex tape I teased in the subject line

I’m reliably informed that the current issue of Vanity Fair contains a lengthy, engaging, and revealing profile of Sarah Palin, full of unflattering details like an email she wrote to friends and family in the voice of God, signed, “Your Heavenly Father.” But I must confess: I haven’t read the piece. I’ve read about it.

So it goes with lengthy magazine articles and the scarcity of time these days. I read what I can but, like most consumers of digital media, rely on blogs to brief me on the rest. For the Palin profile, I quickly digested a post by New York’s Daily Intel, which “pulled out the ten most unflattering ways that Palin was depicted in the article for your convenient perusal,” and scanned The Daily Beast‘s “top 10 quotations from the nearly 10,000-word article.” (If there were 11 items of interest, well, I guess I’d have to read the piece.)

This new reality must drive the creators and publishers of long-form content nuts. Their nuanced reporting is reduced to atomized bits and peddled by rivals. But the key word is “reality,” as in unavoidable, and I wonder why publications like Vanity Fair don’t do more to serve casual readers. There’s no reason, except pride, that the magazine couldn’t have offered a precis or top-10 list to accompany the Palin piece.

In the video above, I talk to Bill Wasik about a similar situation that’s documented in his new book on viral culture, And Then There’s This. During the 2008 presidential campaign, The Boston Globe ran a 10-part profile of its hometown candidate, Mitt Romney, but the only piece of that reporting to catch much attention was the colorful tale of poor Seamus, the Romney family dog who was tied to the roof of a station wagon and made to suffer other indignities during a vacation in 1983.

Wasik coins the term “nanostory” to describe how blogs seized on the Seamus anecdote and turned it into the hottest story of the campaign for two weeks in the summer of 2007. (See Ian’s review of the book for more on this.) In the process, the Globe undoubtedly lost traffic to political blogs, including many by other mainstream news organizations, that chose to focus on the nanostory. The original Globe story doesn’t even appear in the first 10 pages of results on a Google search for “mitt romney dog.”

Wasik thinks this is awful and decries the state of American political discourse, but I prefer to think about how news organizations could best operate in this inevitable online landscape, awful or not. My proposal: that the Globe should have atomized the content itself, running the 4,500-word article and a separate blog post with only the nanostory of Seamus and his cruel treatment at the hands of the Romneys. Something to link to. (Something like this Globe blog post, “Introducing Seamus Romney, ‘Mr. Personality’,” which the paper ran after the nanostory caught fire, when it was too late.) For Wasik’s critical take on my proposal, check out the video, a transcript of which is below.

But before you do, it’s worth noting that not all nuance is lost in the era of the nanostory: Even without my help, Vanity Fair’s profile of Palin generated nearly 2 million page views in its first six days online — not quite the traffic enjoyed by the magazine’s photo essays of Jessica Simpson or Miley Cyrus, but excellent for a 10,000-word political piece.

Zach Seward: One example from the book that seemed worth looking a little closer at was Mitt Romney’s dog. That began in, I think it was, a 4,500-word profile. It was part of a ten-part series —

Bill Wasik: That’s right.

Seward: — in The Boston Globe. And they, they knew they had something because they put it into the lead, but I think it didn’t — you know, it didn’t really get to the, like, you know, the dog, you know, the scatological parts of the story until, like, the fifth or sixth graf. And it was presented the way a newspaper would present a story, which was as an anecdote that speaks to a broader profile of Romney as a man and so on. But as soon as they put it out there, the Globe kind of lost control of the story. I mean, I think they probably didn’t get very much — I mean, they probably got a ton of traffic at first, but it was lost to blogs that essentially, that picked up on that one particular anecdote.

Wasik: Right, exactly. They seized on this one tiny, little corner of, as you say, it was a ten-part series — and, you know, full of all these complications and all this nuance, and the idea was, here, you’re going to get from the hometown paper of, you know, this leading candidate, this very sophisticated idea of who he is. And, literally, the thing that everybody seized on was this one tiny, little funny detail. And, of course, it involved the dog. So, back to the cute animals.  

But, and that, yeah, essentially is the process that I write about in the book. I sort of coin this term “nanostory” to talk about what I see is like the basic unit of cultural transmission in this, like, very, very intense, like, like, information-saturated conversation, which is everything gets boiled down to these tiny, little stories that then become, you know, passed around and satirized, and twists and turns are made on them. It’s the football that gets kicked around, you know, over the course of a week or less. […]

Seward: I wonder if the Globe, if there’s even room to criticize the Globe, too — that they had something that they lost. Because they present a ten-part series, and that’s great, and I’m sure that got, you know, a significant readership. Bu that maybe there was a way to package the dog story — because it was pretty obvious this was going to be something of interest that might be viral — and, package it in a way that would have, that would, for instance, mean that, that that would still be on the first page of Google results for, for that query.

Wasik: Yeah, well, I mean, no, I’m sure there would be. It’s, you know. But gosh, I mean, well this is back to the earlier point, like, do I want to live in a world where, I mean, would I rather lose The Boston Globe than have them make that decision? Like, I might rather lose the Globe. Like, I might rather lose — you know, because when the authoritative institutions go that way, it’s almost worse than when they fail to go that way and somebody else eats their lunch instead. ‘Cause I can’t imagine a packaging of that anecdote in The Boston Globe that would have seemed anything more than embarrassing for the Globe. Like, the idea that they would take — ’cause it happened so many years ago, and it happened as part of their reporting, the really big-picture reporting on it. It would have been probably very weird vis-à-vis the source and the sources. Like, you know, the idea that they would take something so petty out of the story and put a box around it or put a thing about it online, like, it would have seemed, it would have seemed a little weird.

And, of course, this conversation speaks to the heart of the dilemma of papers like The Boston Globe, which is that it’s like your lunch gets eaten, and you can’t even do anything about it because you are constitutionally structured as an organization that’s not supposed to eat that lunch.  […]

You know, one of the things — and this is obviously something you guys must think a lot about here at the Nieman Lab — is, everybody’s talking in these very kind of, you know, flippant terms about how the Internet is eating newspapers’ lunch. But, meanwhile, there are no business models yet for any of these places to make money. I mean the Politico is, is subsidized by Allbritton Communications, which owns TV stations. I would be shocked — maybe, through their content. I mean, do you guys know anything about the finances of the Politico?

Seward: They make money some months and not others. They probably will achieve profitablity, but I think that’s a fair point.

Wasik: Yeah, and because they’re a lean organization. They’re doing, I imagine they’re making money from their content-sharing stuff where they’re, people are paying for it.

Seward: And advertising.

Wasik:  Yeah, but the point being that the Internet advertising market has been suffering to the same extent or maybe even worse than the print advertising market. And so, you know, I do think that it’s weird that old media organizations are being asked to leap into this pool that we don’t really even know if it’s full of water or not.  Like, that, that there is — and a lot of the organizations that we think of as successes in the online space are being borne aloft by, you know, VC money or by inflated stock prices and that kind of thing. So I’m not sure if the time is even right for those kinds of decisions to be made.

Photo of Seamus by Mitt Romney’s sister, Jane, via The Boston Globe.