Ever since the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, we — and we do mean “we” as in “literally all of us” — have been deeply concerned about the quality of information that people were consuming on the issue. Conspiracy theories have abounded since spring 2020, and despite the urgings of the UN secretary-general and the WHO, among others, information about the pandemic in general and vaccines in particular has continued to resemble a minefield.

But the availability of junk information by itself does not an “infodemic” make. There are other steps in the influence of low-quality information that have often been assumed but perhaps not yet sufficiently empirically tested: To what degree are people consuming that junk information compared with higher-quality news? To what extent are people being cocooned in echo chambers reaffirming existing Covid-19 beliefs? And what influence is that information having on their support for pandemic mitigation efforts?

We’re starting to get some solid initial data to answer those questions, with three studies on those issues published in the past six weeks. The answers from those studies are complex and nuanced (as always), but on the whole, things may not have been quite as bad as we feared.

First, Sacha Altay and two colleagues at Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Richard Fletcher, published a paper (available for free from the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media) that sought to quantify the share of web traffic that went to untrustworthy versus trustworthy news sites in the pandemic’s early days.

They tracked web traffic and Facebook engagement in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France before and after the pandemic began and found that a vanishingly small proportion of traffic went to untrustworthy sites (as rated by NewsGuard). Those untrustworthy sites drew much more engagement on Facebook, but were still dominated by trustworthy sources there as well. Facebook engagement and traffic to news sites were up about a quarter from 2019 to 2020 overall, with most of that increase going to trustworthy sites, rather than untrustworthy ones.

There were some asterisks to that good news: The study didn’t measure traffic or engagement for non-news organizations, which may have been a major source of untrustworthy Covid-19 information. And the reach of untrustworthy information was significantly higher in the U.S. and France than in the U.K. and Germany.

In a second study, a team of 19 international researchers led by Alon Zoizner looked at COVID-19 information consumption as it related to like-minded information. In a study published in the journal Political Communication, they used a massive two-wave survey of 14,000 people across 16 European countries plus Israel to determine whether and why people were people were consuming information that challenged their political views.

Zoizner and his colleagues reasoned that the uncertainty produced by a crisis like the pandemic would lead to a more acute need for useful information, which would increase consumption of information countering one’s political views (i.e., “cross-cutting information”). The results of the study bore that rationale out: Both like-minded and cross-cutting information consumption increased after the pandemic, especially for those among whom concern about the pandemic was greatest.

The connection between pandemic concern and cross-cutting information consumption was higher in countries where Covid was more severe, where the government response was more permissive, and where democratic institutions were weaker. This, the authors suggested, indicated that when the need for quality information was truly greatest, people were most willing to go beyond their like-minded sources.

Finally, Andrew Anderson and Joshua Scacco published a study in American Behavioral Scientist looking at the effects of all this Covid information consumption. Specifically, how did people’s Covid information sources influence their level of support for Covid mitigation policies?

To find out, they surveyed 600 Florida residents in April 2020, measuring their consumption of COVID-19 information from legacy news, cable news, Facebook, government sources, and personal sources. They found that, even after controlling for partisanship, TV news consumption played a significant role in support for mitigation strategies — Fox News viewership was associated with opposition to Covid mitigation, and CNN, MSNBC, and network news were associated with support.

The control for partisanship is a key factor here. It indicates that the influence of Fox News is not simply a product of conservatives being more likely to oppose mitigation and also more likely to watch Fox News. It suggests, instead, that the cable channels (and network TV news) may have had an influence apart from simple partisan audience self-selection. On the flip side, neither Facebook nor government communication (e.g., press conferences by Donald Trump and other elected officials) were significantly associated with views on mitigation.

Taken together, the studies present a handful of emerging data points in our picture of what information consumption looked like in the early days of the pandemic. And the picture they paint isn’t as bleak as we’ve tended to fear: News consumption was way up (as we might have expected, and as other studies have shown), but it was largely trustworthy sources, and often cross-cutting sources, that got much of the attention. It may be, though, that as we’ve seen previously, the greater effect on attitudes may have been Fox News viewership than social media sources.

Research roundup

“Stories that don’t make the news: Navigating a white newsroom as a Black female reporter.” By Tyra L. Jackson, in Journalism Practice. This powerful article tells a vital story, critically examines newsroom culture, and demonstrates why we need autoethnographies in journalism and media studies. How rare are autoethnographies, such as Jackson’s? A search on the website for Journalism Practice finds just two autoethnographies, Jackson’s and another from 2007, the journal’s debut year. Jackson writes that the purpose of her autoethnography is to tell her story of workplace bullying to “better white newsroom culture” and to ask “newsrooms to consider how the actions and culture of white newsrooms can negatively affect Black female reporters.”

Explaining her methodological choice, Jackson writes that autoethnographies “help me and others share our encounters with discrimination.” Autoethnographies permit researchers to view oneself in relation to culture. As Jackson writes, “my experiences might be applicable to similar experiences Black female journalists have in white newsrooms, as my emotional recollections can help others provide meaning to their experiences via this method.”

Jackson uses the lens of critical race theory to examine her experiences in a southern newsroom. She weaves relevant literature and personal reflection to provide an inside story about unethical behavior, workplace bullying, and discrimination (including racial microaggressions). “Although the bullying I experienced was not explicitly racist (i.e., the bullies did not use racial slurs, hate speech, or have a blatant disregard for Blacks), it engaged my position as a Black woman in a white newsroom,” Jackson writes. “This type of bullying can be understood as racially motivated, even when the perpetrators may not perceive themselves as ‘racist.’”

Jackson progresses through her experiences, first recalling her enthusiasm in starting at the organization. Early on, she felt that her new co-workers “would run into battle with me.” Soon, though, it just became a fight. Jackson writes about how two white female colleagues bullied her, lied to and about her, and claimed she stole their story ideas and assignments. They called her unapproachable and played to the stereotype of the angry Black woman. The managing editor, a white man and friend of the two white female colleagues, ignored the bullying and dismissed Jackson’s attempt at diplomatically resolving the issue. Jackson felt isolated.

One of the most poignant anecdotes from the piece is when Jackson writes about sitting silently during a story meeting. She had ideas flowing through her mind, but she knew it was pointless to open her mouth. “I isolated myself because I did not feel welcomed,” she writes. Even a meeting with the editor-in-chief about her colleagues’ behavior did not resolve the issue. Jackson eventually left for a public relations job: “I was happy to have a stable job and leave the newspaper behind.”

“An intersectional analysis of U.S. journalists’ experiences with hostile sources.” By Kelsey Mesmer, in Journalism & Communication Monographs. Hostility toward journalists and journalism has long been a challenge around the world, including in the United States. As the author notes in this piece, newspaper offices in the 19th and early 20th centuries often were ransacked or destroyed. However, incidents of animosity and violence against individual journalists have increased in recent years, and so has the academic attention to these issues. Studies have examined online and offline harassment of journalists, but mostly from people outside the journalistic process (e.g., social media users, television viewers, etc.). Less is known about hostility directly from journalists’ sources — the people the journalists interview for news stories.

For this study, Mesmer draws on 38 in-depth interviews with journalists who have faced hostility from sources. Using the theory of intersectionality, she categories four forms of hostility from news sources and examines editor/manager responses to the hostility and how the hostility affected journalistic routines and news products. She identifies four forms of source-based hostility as (1) stemming from a general distrust of the news media, (2) source boundary crossing, (3) safety-violating hostility, and (4) microaggressions.

First, hostility stemming from general distrust was experienced by all by one participant, a 67-year-old white freelance writer who conducts most of his reporting remotely. Examples included claims of “fake news,” accusations of bias, and having interview requests denied because sources did not trust the media. Second, participants experienced situations of boundary crossing that broke professional norms of engagement and made them feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Such hostility only happened to female participants in Mesmer’s sample. Examples included sources repeatedly calling the journalists on their personal phones, going above the journalists to complain to their bosses, and posting defamatory content about the journalists on social media. Third, participants experienced cases of safety-violating hostility, either causing the journalists direct physical and/or emotional harm or threatening physical harm. Though rare, these were the most intense and dangerous examples of hostility. One female reporter faced unwanted sexual touching and advances, and another female journalist had a phone slapped out of her hand twice by a source. Fourth, journalists faced numerous examples of microaggressions, including condescending tone or being treated as inferior.

Mesmer also examined the journalists’ editors’ responses, which too often were a lack of response. Participants even said that when they reported threats and verbal abuses to their superiors, the leaders verbalized support but then did not take action or follow up on situations. In general, Mesmer found the news leaders did not “protect and defend their reporters” and that they “valued the story” more than the personal safety of the employees.

“How people integrate news into their everyday routines: A context-centered approach to news habits.” By Tim Groot Kormelink, in Digital Journalism. Since Bernard Berelson’s landmark 1949 study on what “missing the newspaper” means, the importance of audience habit has been explored by researchers. For instance, scholars have studied what compels people to subscribe to news, what news organizations do to promote habits, and how audience members’ habits change over time (for instance, during the pandemic). However, less is understood about the critical early days of a user’s new subscription and what that pivotal period means for potential habit creation.

Groot Kormelink, working with students from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, used a novel qualitative approach to address this issue. He conducted a qualitative study of 66 participants in the Netherlands who received a free three-week subscription (either print or digital) to a publication (ranging from national to regional publications) of their choice. Specifically, the study explores how participants adopt (or not) new subscriptions into their everyday habits and what assists or hinders this adoption in the early days of subscription. Or, put another way, Groot Kormelink explored why participants receive a free subscription yet do not use it.

The study’s key finding reveals visibility is vital. The study found participants, even those with positive initial experiences, tended to forget about their new subscription and that visibility, which generates repetition, is requisite for habit formation. Visual cues — app notifications, open browser tabs, social media posts, emails, or the printed newspaper — reminded participants to read their subscriptions. This was especially important for the digital formats, which lacked the obvious visual reminder of the printed newspaper itself.

Groot Kormelink found additional key obstacles for the participants in converting the free subscription into a habit. One obstacle is theirotherhabits. For instance, participants expressed a desire to form a new habit with the subscription but failed to do so because their existing habits (watching television or videos, etc.) were too strong and won their attention and time.

Another obstacle found was the cognitive commitment, the sheer mental work, of reading the newspaper — or even motivating yourself tostartreading the newspaper. Participants considered reading the newspaper a mental hurdle, viewing the process as a full commitment or one not to even attempt at all. In short, they found it hard to commit their time and energy to their free subscription. Ultimately, this research offers an insightful inside look at why initial news use either falters or fosters a potential news habit.

“War of the words: How individuals respond to ‘fake news,’ ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘online falsehoods.'” By Edson C. Tandoc and Seth Kai Seet, in Journalism Practice. As the authors write in this brilliantly straightforward and important piece of research, “the terms people use matter.” That idea is at the heart of this survey-based approach to studying “fake news” and similar terms.

The term “fake news” peaked in usage (per Google search) in November 2016, around the time that Donald Trump was elected U.S. president. The term remains widely used, but academics have argued that it lost its meaning as it became politicized and weaponized. This study examines “fake news” as a concept and how the public reacts to it compared with other terms, such as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “online falsehoods.” The latter term is particularly important in Singapore, where the government uses the term “online falsehoods” and defines them as “false statements of facts.”

The authors, both from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, used an online survey of 1,015 people with a nationally representative adult sample. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups based on the wording used in the questionnaire, split virtually equally between fake news, misinformation, disinformation and online falsehoods. The participants answered the same set of questions (with the different terms) based on their perceptions of falsity, intentionality, general concern, seriousness and need for solutions.

The study found that the term “fake news” had the highest level of perceptions of falsity and intentionality and also rated the highest in level of concern, perceived severity, and requiring a solution. “Disinformation” was rated the lowest across the board in all five categories.

“Running up against a brick wall: U.S. metajournalistic discourse of gender equality in newsrooms.” By Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Tim P. Vos, in Journalism Studies. Journalism literature, both mainstream and academic, long has chronicled the industry’s failures with gender equality. An endless stream of stories highlight the lowlights — for example, that women journalists are underrepresented and marginalized in U.S. newsrooms, in particular in leadership positions.

However, as the authors here argue, there is “much we do not know about how journalists process this knowledge.” To address that, Geertsema-Sligh and Vos, drawing on institutional theory and feminist critiques, examine more than 500 online articles and blog posts in U.S. news industry publications during a 17-year period (2002-2019). Overall, the authors argue that “knowing how journalists make sense of journalism’s poor record on gender equality tells us much about the institution of journalism itself.”

The findings confirm ongoing concerns about the disadvantaged status of women journalists — attributed predominantly to workplace culture and inflexible hours. The texts analyzed do signal a need for organizational change, but the study also shows how an underlying stress is placed on individual women journalists to play the most important role in this change. As Geertsema-Sligh and Vos write, “newsroom culture was recognized as a problem, yet some of the solutions read like individual self-help advice suggesting that women have to change, not the organizations.”

Encouragingly, the analysis found that authors of industry-focused online articles and blog posts, in general, tend to challenge the institution of journalism for perpetuating gender inequality in newsrooms. They tie gender equality to larger audiences, higher revenue possibilities, and a reflection of more diverse societies. However, as Geertsema-Sligh and Vos also write, “despite these calls for change, journalism as an institution seems limited in its response to gender inequality in newsrooms.”

An RQ1 Read: Journalistic Autonomy: A Genealogy of a Concept, by Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson

This is part of an occasional series of summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Will Mari, an assistant professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

In Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson’s Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (University of Missouri Press, 2022), both authors tackle a tricky topic that has heretofore been either elusive or, at best, secondary to most journalism studies scholars and media historians. And while Örnebring and Karlsson point to some noteworthy exceptions (Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Schudson, Theodore Glasser and Marc Gunther, Michael McDevitt and John C. Merrill, among others), they are — though they would be reticent to say this themselves — exceptionally bold and clever (and winsome) in the hard work of carving out a new genealogical media history of the idea of autonomy — independence — for journalism and journalists.

They successfully make the case for its inclusion in the oldest Ur-terms (the “god-term” status of notions such as “facts,” “truth,” “reality,” “the public,” the “Fourth Estate” and, of course, “objectivity”) in journalism, building on the important scholarship of Barbie Zelizer, James Carey, David Mindich, and others. They are careful and historically grounded in making their case, and do so in intellectually rewarding and consistent ways. Their analytical approach is based on four vital ideas about the way autonomy works in journalism today, namely 1) that autonomy is relational, that 2) autonomy requires boundaries, 3) autonomy implies agency (and the use of that agency) and 4) that autonomy must have a reason — a purpose — for its existence, both within and without newsrooms, and in and out of the broader democratic, Western-centric, capitalism-funded context that it is often found.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Örnebring and Karlsson’s project. They engage with autonomy in relation to what they identify as its key attributes or aspects, including independence from the state, political interests and the market, but also from sources, how it acts in the workplace and what it means for and in relation to journalism’s audiences, along with how it functions with regards to technology — but also, crucially, they talk about what that independence should be for or to what end it should act in a world where privilege is uneven and power often wielded by elites at the expense of the weak.

In this effort, they are inspired by Isaiah Berlin. Journalism and its practitioners, its scholars and its audiences, and even, if they were more honest, its enemies, should pay attention to what will be regarded, rightly so, as a seminal work in journalism studies.

“Stick to sports”: Evidence from sports media on the origins and consequences of newly politicized attitudes. By Erik Peterson and Manuela Muñoz, in Political Communication.

How do people come to see areas of society, or media sources, as political where they hadn’t before? That’s the question Peterson and Muñoz are addressing in this study, and it’s one that many of us have wondered over the past several years, as subjects like vaccines and Dr. Seuss have become widely perceived as fundamentally political ones.

Peterson and Muñoz examine an interesting example in the sports broadcasting behemoth ESPN, which has seen its longstanding apolitical perception dramatically shift in the face of sustained conservative attacks on its impartiality over the past decade.

The authors hypothesize two potential routes to politicized attitudes about ESPN: viewing it as political because they perceive public opinion (and especially conservative media) as seeing it as political, and viewing it as political because of their actual experience with ESPN content. They also try to determine if politicization makes people more likely to reduce their consumption of ESPN.

Peterson and Muñoz address these issues in a remarkably thorough article consisting of three studies — two survey-experiments and a third survey. They find that people are much more likely to see ESPN as political based on consumption of political (i.e., conservative) media with commentary about ESPN than based on actually watching ESPN.

But the influence of these partisan media-induced cues doesn’t extend into action. The authors found no partisan differences in ESPN use during a time (2016-17) when they found massive partisan differences in perceptions of ESPN. (The biggest factor driving ESPN use was, of course, interest in sports.) Partisan media, they suggest, may be very effective at generating antipathy toward media sources, but much less so at changing media consumption behavior.

How investigative journalists around the world adopt innovative digital practices. By Jessica Kunert, Jannis Frech, Michael Brüggemann, Volker Lilienthal, and Wiebke Loosen, in Journalism Studies.

Investigative journalism has had a conflicted relationship with technology. It’s often seen as one of the least technologically reliant subdisciplines of journalism — the domain of “pounding the pavement” — but it’s been much more closely tied to data journalism over the past decade.

Kunert and her coauthors took an international look at how investigative journalists adopt and adapt to technology, interviewing 133 investigative journalists from 60 countries and analyzing the results through the lens of the diffusion of innovations, one of communication studies’ longest-standing theories.

They found that while investigative journalists are hungry to learn about new technological aids to their work, “they are overwhelmed with acquiring digital skills and feel helpless in the light of the complexity of the digital practices that are potentially at their disposal.” To cope, they often collaborate with specialists — largely technologists — and hang onto some traditional methods.

But the authors also found that social structures affect adoption far more than diffusion of innovations has typically held. Specifically, they characterize investigative journalism as a social system operating at two different speeds, with those in Global South dramatically limited in their ability to access advanced digital tools. “The gap between South and North is widening,” they wrote. “While in the Global North more and more digital practices are becoming part of everyday work in the newsroom, the Global South often continues to struggle with the preconditions for the use of digital practices.”

Harassment of journalists and its aftermath: Anti-press violence, psychological suffering, and an internal chilling effect. By Changwook Kim and Wooyeol Shin, in Digital Journalism.

Journalists around the world have been subject to increased amounts of derogatory rhetoric, harassment, and violence over the past decade. A wave of recent studies has examined the effects of that harassment on journalists, finding that it tends to make journalists less willing to pursue emotionally oriented tasks, cover particular types of stories, and view audiences as rational.

Kim and Shin provide a notable addition to these studies by examine the psychological and emotional effects of harassment and coping mechanisms among journalists in South Korea, where anti-press sentiment is severe. They argue that anti-press discourse has been normalized through the widespread adoption of the word giraegi, a portmanteau of the Korean words for “journalist” and “trash,” and the violent and abusive rhetoric around it.

Kim and Shin conducted interviews with 10 journalists and an analysis of 18 self-reflective articles written by journalists in response to harassment. They found that harassment, which is especially intense against women, produces senses of anger, helplessness, and fear in journalists. They try to cope through perfectionism (which isn’t effective, since the harassment rarely comes in response to actual mistakes), putting emotional boundaries between themselves and audiences, and ‘counter-hating’ and belittling them.

Kim and Shin also found that journalists are vulnerable to “mob censorship” when their organizations don’t support them against such attacks, leading journalists to choose not to pursue certain types of stories for fear of angering audiences. They conclude by posing a stark question: “Should journalists serve members of the public who deny the reason for their existence?”

Do more with less: Minimizing competitive tensions in collaborative local journalism.” By Joy Jenkins and Lucas Graves, in Digital Journalism.

Collaborative journalism has created a lot of buzz in both the profession and the academy as a means for news organizations (particularly under-resourced ones) to undertake projects and achieve impact they couldn’t otherwise. But it can be difficult in practice, especially when the organizations involved have strong competitive interests with their newfound partners.

Jenkins and Graves sought to illustrate some potential solutions to these problems through three case studies of local journalistic collaboration in Europe. Through each case, they outlined a different collaborative model: co-op, contractor, and NGO.

In the co-op model, similar news organizations (a group of 11 Finnish daily newspapers) agree to collaborate only on specific topics in which they don’t compete. The contractor model (based on a collaboration between an Italian newspaper publisher and two startups) is structured through a contract in which organizations specialize in different areas. And in the NGO model (built around a British nonprofit news organization), a coordinating nonprofit manages common data through which many outlets develop their own stories.

For each model, Jenkins and Graves detailed the main level on which tension is alleviated — the topic, the role, or the story. While each differed on where competitive tension lay and how it was resolved, each one, the authors concluded, represented a sustainable path for local collaborations among news organizations.

Recommended for you: How newspapers normalize algorithmic news recommendation to fit their gatekeeping role. By Lynge Asbjørn Møller, in Journalism Studies.

From Digital Journalism:

We’re in this together: A multi-stakeholder approach for news recommenders. By Annelien Smets, Jonathan Hendrickx, and Pieter Ballon.

Between personal and public interest: How algorithmic news recommendation reconciles with journalism as an ideology. By Lynge Asbjørn Møller.

To nudge or not to nudge: News recommendation as a tool to achieve online media pluralism. By Judith Vermeulen.

Benefits of diverse news recommendations for democracy: A user study. By Lucien Heitz et al.

Five articles on news recommendations have been published this month — four by Digital Journalism (part of a forthcoming special issue on AI and journalism), and one by Journalism Studies. Together, they form a fascinating deep dive into what role algorithmic news recommendation systems are playing in the professional world of journalists and our political and social structures more broadly.

The studies by Møller (in Journalism Studies) and Smets et al. both examine how algorithmic recommendation systems are implemented by journalists, and both find that news organizations remain cautious in their use of recommendations out of a concern for maintaining traditional gatekeeping control and the kind of autonomy that comes with manual decision-making.

Møller looks at how Scandinavian newspapers have incorporated editorial control into their recommendation products, and Smets et al., based on interviews with media professionals in the Flanders region of Belgium, propose a model that takes into account the perspective of numerous stakeholders including users and management.

Møller’s other article looks more broadly at the tensions between journalistic values and news recommendation technology, arguing that journalists can navigate that conflict by emphasizing diversity, serendipity, and editorial input in designing recommendations. Vermeulen, meanwhile, reflects on a parallel set of tensions on the users’ side — between nudging users toward higher-quality news and preserving their autonomy and choice.

Finally, Heitz and his colleagues built an app aggregating and recommending news from Swiss outlets to test the effects of news recommendations on exposure to different viewpoints and polarization. They found some indications that diverse recommendations increase openness toward opposing views and appreciation of journalism, but no effect on political knowledge or participation.

An RQ1 read: Surviving Mexico by Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly

This is the second of what we hope will be occasional summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Erin Siegal McIntyre, a professor at the University of North Carolina who previously worked as a journalist based in Tijuana. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

“In Mexico, undoubtedly, too many journalists have died, but journalism is far from dead.”

While that sentiment may be true, at least so far in 2022, the murder of reporters in Mexico has broken record after record.

This grim reality makes Surviving Mexico: Resistance and Resilience among Journalists in the Twenty-First Century, the new 288-page book by Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly, even more urgently indispensable. For the last twenty years, Mexico has “fade[d] from a hopeful moment into an era of tumult and fear,” the authors note, despite “finally reach[ing] some level of democracy” after seven decades of semi-authoritarian rule.

Based on more than 160 interviews with journalists, activists, and academics across several regions of the country, González de Bustamante and Relly present a highly readable account of the myriad dangers faced by journalists in Mexico, the impact of trauma and violence on their lives, and how individuals and collectives have organized to meet the challenges of working in such a dangerous place. Journalists are more vulnerable, so they’ve been forced to develop new mechanisms by which to cope and survive.

While the first two sections of the book focus on anchoring and quantifying violence, the third and final section offers a refreshing long gaze toward the future. Building resiliency is key to basic survival. Drawing clear connections between resistance and resilience, González de Bustamante and Relly outline various ways that journalists in various Mexican states and cities have come together, formally and informally, to protest, resist, and organize.

“Changing course will require enormous effort in tandem with the will of all sectors of society,” they write. “Some journalists and activists have started down that road … [and] many more must join them for real change to happen.”

I’ve never met an editor who was as eager as Jennifer was to show me one of her organization’s worst stories.

Jennifer (not her real name) was the senior editor of VidNews, my pseudonym for a news organization that, at the time of my visit in 2015, was largely producing short, aggregated videos on daily news events using brief third-party video clips, motion graphics, and original narration.

Jennifer was trying to demonstrate to me how much VidNews had grown by showing me a hastily produced video from 2013, about a baby accidentally flushed down a toilet in China. She pulled up the video on a desktop computer and breathlessly talked me through it, pausing every few seconds to annotate it disparagingly. The video was a haphazard mashup of lengthy excerpts from American local TV news stations and English-language Chinese publications, devoid of context. The source material served as a “backdoor way to show someone else’s pictures,” in Jennifer’s words, and the video cribbed from its sources so extensively as to render them superfluous.

Jennifer turned to me after the video ended. “We would never do anything like that again,” she said. “Ever. One, there’s no glory or honor in it. But two, it’s not a legally viable business strategy.” There was nothing specifically illegal about it, though it skirted the edges of what’s considered fair use of copyrighted material.

I was intrigued, though, by the invocation of “glory or honor.” We might not think of glory and honor as important elements in understanding news aggregation. Aggregation — the work of assembling and repackaging news from content that has already been published — is routine desk work, recycling the material of other journalists to fulfill a company’s economic goals that might feel distant and exploitative. Where, one might wonder, is the glory and honor in that, whether it’s done well or poorly?

But in my research on news aggregation for my book, Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority (Columbia University Press), I found that the professional status encoded in this idea of “glory and honor” is central to who aggregators are and how they do their work — precisely because it’s in such short supply. Without that sense of identity, work tended to become rote, cynicism ruled, and burnout was high. In organizations that cultivated it, aggregators produced stronger work and showed more satisfaction. But the importance of professional identity isn’t limited to aggregators. In an era in which trust in news is fractured and employment is precarious, we need to look more closely at the ways that journalists’ sense of their own professional value — or lack thereof — influences the work they do and the environment in which they do it.

What makes journalists feel like journalists

The notion of professionalism has for decades been central for scholars seeking to understand the role journalists play in society and why they do what they do. As the sociologist Max Weber conceived of it, professionalism is about controlling knowledge and converting it into authority. Journalists lack many of the classic traits of a profession — they aren’t licensed (in America), they have no required education, and the primary skills they claim aren’t exclusive. But their social utility hinges on their ability to produce a certain kind of knowledge — timely, understandable explanation of important public events — and have that knowledge taken to be authoritative.

Since journalists don’t check many of the traditional professional boxes, scholars have often examined professionalism’s significance to journalism by determining the ways journalists think of themselves as — and seek to become — professionals. This approach puts professional identity at the forefront of what it means to practice journalism. Journalists have a very strong sense of this identity; they conceive of themselves as being oriented around a high calling of public service. They believe this gives their work great social value, and they fight fiercely to maintain their autonomy over it.

This professional identity holds a lot of value for journalists. In the absence of formal enforcement, it provides a central motivation for upholding ethical norms and standards. It reinforces a sense of community that helps sustain journalists’ commitment and strengthens their standing when interacting with other social groups, like politicians. And, most relevant to news aggregators, journalists’ image of themselves as savvy and noble (if unruly) guardians of democracy helps them cope with the increasingly routine, constrained nature of their work.

Professional identity comes from several places — socialization through journalism school and news organizations, discussion about journalism on Twitter and in publications like this one, and ideological values of the idealized roles journalism should play in society. But what I found in my research on news aggregators is that a primary wellspring of professional identity is the work of journalism itself — and when that work becomes more monotonous and less reliable as a source of knowledge, journalists’ identity is fractured with it.

Monotony and marginalization

I interviewed more than 80 aggregators and their editors in 2015 and 2016 and observed journalists doing aggregation in five news organizations. Most were under 30, and almost all of them spent their days at a desk, processing a torrent of information from TweetDeck, Slack, and various browser tabs at a bewildering pace to keep up with the demands of continuous publication. One told me that at the end of the workday: “You just walk away like a zombie, because you’re just focused, straight-on.”

That intense informational stimulation often produces more of a sense of monotony than a rush, in part because aggregators are working with other people’s information, not their own. Editors recognize this, and they see its effects in high turnover and low morale. Many of them adjust for it by building in on-location reporting assignments to function in part as “breaks” from aggregation. “If that was your full-time job, then I think you’d get real bored,” said one journalist who alternated shifts of reporting and aggregation. “I’d feel like I wasn’t using enough skills, almost.”

The work of aggregation is defined by a relentless pace and a juxtaposition between the constant activity and immobility of what one scholar calls “screenwork.” It tends to be exhausting, but without many of the psychic rewards of reporting — visiting new places, talking to people, observing important events, finding out things that no journalist has found out before.

This stultifying work fed a sense of inferiority that was compounded by the way aggregators knew they were viewed within their profession, and sometimes, within their own organization. Aggregation has long been derided in the news industry as cheap and ethically dubious and only marginally considered journalism, if at all. While many organizations have worked to ensure that all of their journalists feel their work is valued, that root sense of marginality continues to seep through in the way aggregators are talked to by their colleagues and the way they perceive themselves.

Consider one journalist’s contrast of the way his good aggregated and reported work was talked about in his organization:

“You’re going to get kudos for a really well-reported, smart, and well-read story. For a story that does really, really well [in drawing traffic] that you just aggregated, the most you’ll maybe get, if it’s really getting a lot of attention, is like, ‘Ha ha, hey, that story is doing really well.'”

That journalist didn’t resent the condescension toward aggregation; he shared it too. “Nobody graduates from journalism school and wants to do aggregation,” he told me. Even if he did aggregation well, it simply wasn’t fully “real” journalism, in his mind or in those of his colleagues.

Reporting and journalistic identity

So what did they consider real journalism? The answer, both to many aggregators and to the broader journalistic profession, is reporting. For decades, journalists have elevated reporting as journalism’s purest and most crucial form of work, a central part of their professional identity. “Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather Reporting is the one god an American journalist can officially pray to,” media critic Jay Rosen observed in 2015. “There can never be enough of it. Only good derives from it. Anything that eclipses it is bad. Anything that eludes it is suspect. Anything that permits more of it is holy.”

Many of the aggregators in this study seemed to believe this, too — even as it relegated them to the margins of their own profession. “You look at people who are reporting from the ground in Syria or are doing really in-depth stories about Detroit or something, and you think, ‘Wow, that’s real journalism,'” said the editor of one social news site.

Sentiments such as this evoked two main reasons that reporting has such a hold on journalists’ professional identity — and that aggregation is such a weak foundation for that identity. This editor’s statement evokes a powerful cultural myth of the intrepid reporter risking his or her safety in far-off locales. But it also expresses a wistfulness for a type of knowledge based on direct observation rather than reading others’ reports and the authority that comes with that knowledge. In journalists’ minds, reporting allows them to know and tell stories that no one has told before, something that’s central to their sense of their own social value. Aggregation deprives journalists of this sense of professional confidence. The result, especially when combined with the monotony of the work itself, is a mixture of boredom, inferiority, and even shame in some cases — a cocktail that can poison efforts to improve aggregation as a practice.

The inferiority cycle

That’s not to say aggregation is doomed to apathetic decay. Many of the aggregators I observed and talked to believed their work had substantial value, did that work the best they could, and had strong opinions about what they considered the responsible and irresponsible ways of doing it. But because of their lack of cachet within the profession and the lack of professional infrastructure built up around their work — how many j-school classes in aggregation have you heard of? — the norms they espoused had little ability to serve as a foundation for authority and professional status.

The aggregation I observed and heard about seemed stuck in a stagnant cycle. The monotonous and derivative work fed a professional ennui, and coupled with the disdain for that work in the news industry, formed a weak professional identity that led aggregators to see the avenues to fulfillment and status lying elsewhere. This, in turn, led people out of aggregation work, so that they never invested enough in it to see its standards and status improved. Which, of course, will leave it ensconced as derivative, second-class work, as the cycle continues.

This cycle is broken when news organizations make an effort to invest more value in the work and the people doing it — give it recognition, talk together about how to make it better, make it a path through which journalists can gain status in the newsroom and the profession. That starts with recognizing the importance of professional identity and its inherent connection to the work journalists do. Especially as the forms of work journalists do multiply and evolve, it’s important to consider the “glory and honor” we attach (or don’t attach) to that work, and how that esteem might influence the future of the practice itself.

Quite a bit of commentary has addressed the ‘failure’ half of that perception. Casey Newton of The Verge, Mathew Ingram of Fortune, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton each have some salient points on that, and I don’t intend to pile on those explanations. (I would note, though, that Circa was not so much The Future of News as a mobile-oriented rethinking of wire services, which have never really functioned as a consumer-facing product. Circa’s lack of traction in developing a user base was no exception.)

But we haven’t talked as much about the other half: What exactly were Circa’s new ideas about how to deliver news, and how might they contribute to the development of the news industry? The ready answer is “atomized” news — the idea that news should be thought of in smaller units than the traditional article, and that it can be broken down into smaller, more granular chunks that can eliminate the unnecessary and repeated background information for users who already know a lot about a story. That’s the idea that Circa has always emphasized as the foundation underlying its system of “following” stories and, as former Circa editor David Cohn noted, the idea that seems to have caught on more broadly within the industry since their founding.

Most of that idea has been oriented toward how news is delivered and consumed — how it’s presented to the user, and how the user experiences reading and following a news story. But we don’t know as much about the production side: Did Circa do anything that was new or distinctive in making news, or was it just ye olde aggregation?

I think it did. I studied Circa’s production process this year as part of a dissertation I’m finishing up on news aggregation, and for a week this winter, I watched over the shoulder of Circa editor-in-chief Anthony De Rosa as he worked in Circa’s New York office, peppering him with questions. I also interviewed six other current and former Circa journalists about their work. What I found was that Circa’s atomization may have had almost as large an impact on its production of news as its presentation, and in a way that actually broadened the way its journalists thought about news stories, rather than isolating them.

The “main branch” and Circa’s big picture

Let’s start with the stories themselves: For all Circa’s talk about moving away from the article as the core unit of news, Circa’s stories looked a heck of a lot like your traditional inverted-pyramid-based news article. Its writers tried to make each paragraph a discrete unit that could be understood apart from every other paragraph — each paragraph, which they called a “point,” was a distinct entry block in its CMS. But when you strung them all together into what the first-time reader of a Circa story might see, they basically formed a traditional news story not unlike one you might have seen a couple decades ago in a newspaper or wire article.

This was by design — in some ways, a concession to the form in which people are used to reading the news, even on their phones. (And, surely, in which journalists are used to writing the news.) “We still want to make it as normal a story for a regular reader as we possibly can,” De Rosa said. “It would be silly for us to try to create something that people don’t recognize as a traditional story, because then people wouldn’t understand what we’re trying to get across.”

The distinction of atomization, then, came in Circa’s practice of only showing returning readers the paragraphs they hadn’t yet seen. But that didn’t directly affect Circa editors’ work much — just write up the new paragraph, decide whether to send a push notification, hit publish, and the tech would take care of alerting the story’s followers to the new information.

Instead, the bigger distinction came in the way atomization led Circa’s editors to organize the universe of news events itself. For Circa, each news event was not a story in itself, but only a part of a broader ongoing story that stretched across numerous related news events. So if, for example, the president made a speech about a proposed piece of economic legislation, Circa didn’t see the speech as a news event itself, but as just a small piece of the larger story of the fate of this proposed legislation.

Circa kept track of all of these stories (they were originally called “storylines”) in a systematic branch system organized through the task management program Trello. Each story was part of a “main branch” that split off into a variety of stories. The main branch for Spain, for example, was a Trello card with a linked list of every ongoing Circa story on Spain, a couple dozen of them in total, divided into categories like “Politics” or “Economy.”

Through this system, Circa essentially built a systematic taxonomy of every news story it had ever covered. Every incoming news event was slotted somewhere into this existing structure, or in some cases, added to it as a new branch. This gave Circa’s editors a bigger, more integrated picture of news than other journalists tend to have. When encountering a new news event or development, they didn’t just have to ask, as every other journalist does, “Is this news?” As part of that question, they also had to ask, “What story does this fit into?”

This led to a view of news events as a more interconnected whole, with Circa editors thinking about each story in relationship with other stories. If they misclassified an event as part of one story when it turned out to be a better fit with another one, it might require substantial rewriting to clean up the mess in both stories. It also led them to think about the way stories developed over time as a core part of those stories. Understanding when to branch a new story off a major news issue required an ability to see the story’s trajectory over time and judge whether enough might happen to the story in the future to make it a new story worth following.

Seeing structured data at work in news

This approach introduced some new problems: Because events’ newsworthiness couldn’t be determined based on the event by itself, it sometimes became more difficult to see the newsworthiness of stories that didn’t have a clear place within Circa’s story structure. Circa editors could always start a new story for an event that didn’t fit, but if that story didn’t have much of a chance at substantial updates in the future, it wasn’t as likely to be seen as news by Circa standards.

But in general, the ability to see virtually every news event as inherently part of a larger whole was a valuable part of Circa’s news production that has tended to elude most journalists. Scholars dating back to the sociologist Robert Park in 1940 have found that news comes to the public “not in the form of a continued story but as a series of independent incidents,” and anybody who’s tried to follow big-picture or long-running news stories has likely reached the same frustrating conclusion. But Circa’s branch system required its journalists to view every event as inseparable from some broader social or political context, which seems much closer to the way things function in reality than the way they have traditionally been presented in news.

Circa’s branch-based taxonomy of news stories also hints at the potential of an idea that’s a conceptual sibling of the “atomic unit” — the importance of structured data in news. Circa’s branch system wasn’t truly structured — it wasn’t a relational database, or even a spreadsheet — but it was an attempt to systematically organize all of the events Circa had ever covered as individual pieces of one holistic network of news.

Circa wasn’t the first news organization to try to incorporate this idea into its basic structure — it was a big part of Matt Waite’s inspiration in his development of PolitiFact, with its database of politicians’ veracity. But Circa demonstrated the result when events are treated as individual, atomized units capable of being structured into larger wholes: It leads journalists not to break them down into isolated occurrences, but the opposite — to think of them as more thoroughly connected to broader ongoing stories and issues.

Where could a news organization with more reporting resources, a larger informational reach, and a stronger editorial voice take this idea? How much institutional knowledge could it capture and organize, and how many insightful links could it create between seemingly disparate events for readers? How could it change the way a newsroom saw the news it covered? Could it even lead a news organization to create a functional archive system? Circa won’t get to answer these questions; it wasn’t able to turn this type of structure into a sufficiently compelling editorial product. Still, it could prove a valuable initial attempt to use structure to push journalists toward a broader and more integrated vision of the news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lab’s Joseph Lichterman looked more closely at the study’s data on mobile news consumption, highlighting the findings that people use fewer news sources on mobile and prefer text to video overall, though very few of them pay for news in any form. (Also at the Lab, Joshua Benton wrote about the challenges in engaging the growing number of mobile news users, and the American Press Institute’s Jeff Sonderman wrote about some best practices for gaining new mobile revenue from news.)

And British journalism professor Richard Sambrook examined the study’s finding that most users said they trust organizations with traditional, objectivity-based reporters more than ones that practice alternative forms. “Audiences appear more attached to the traditional norms of balanced and impartial news than some might suppose,” he said. “The question going forward is how well that sits among the growing range of digital services seeking to establish themselves by adopting a point of view to maximise impact.”

— A few notes on Vox and explanatory journalism: Vox executive Michael Lovitt talked about how the site was built and launched in just nine weeks, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton marveled at how quickly they did it. Vox’s Melissa Bell explained why the site is still using a homepage, despite the homepage’s widely discussed decline. The Economist looked at why explanatory sites are becoming more popular, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Corey Hutchins called for more Vox-style explaining in local news.

— The Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia shut down its nonprofit news site AxisPhilly late last week, but will launch a new news venture called Brother.ly run by Washington Post, TBD, and Digital First veteran Jim Brady. Here’s the article on the move from Technically Philly, and announcements from AxisPhilly and Temple.

— BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti gave a mammoth, 22,000-word interview to Fusion’s Felix Salmon, and fortunately, the Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram rounded up the most interesting pieces of it for you.

— Finally, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wrote about the spate of new sites that are devoted to a particular method, rather than a topic or subject area. “It seems absurd to say that we need some more publications that are about something,” Madrigal concluded. “But that’s where we’re at.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— New York magazine published a long story by Joe Hagan going deep inside Lara Logan’s tenure at CBS News and raising doubts about whether she will ever return to the network after being put on indefinite leave for her erroneous 60 Minutes report last fall on the Benghazi attack of 2012. Slate’s Amanda Hess flagged the story for its sexist characterization of Logan in various spots.

— Finally, two more pieces to take a look at this weekend: The New York Times’ David Segal went deep into the paltry numbers of people actually watching online video ads and the difficulty in measuring them, and at the Lab, News Corp.’s Raju Narisetti offered a variety of creative ways to make the Pulitzer Prizes more useful in promoting good journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo of NSA headquarters by AP/Patrick Semansky.