"What mystified Grove was the assertion, voiced by the economist Alan Blinder and others, “that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” This was not only inhumane, Grove declared; it was idiotic."

"The industry is inhibited by several obstacles that executives themselves candidly acknowledge. One involves the difficulty of changing the behavior of people trained in the ways of a mature and monopolistic industry. Still another is the unavoidable fact that the part of the newspaper industry that is growing, digital, continues to provide only a small part of the revenue, while the part that is shrinking, print, provides most of the money-a paradox that is difficult to navigate and hard to resist. One pervasive feeling is that 15 years into the digital transition, executives still feel they are in the early stages of figuring out a how to proceed."

The Economist – despite its unerring judgment about  books on crime control and drug policy – cannot be justly described a Democratic or liberal publication; it identifies itself as “pro-business, right-of-centre.” But, unlike the friends of plutocracy on this side of the Atlantic, the folks at The Economist believe in principles other than deregulation of enterprise and low taxes on the rich. Moreover, they remain largely reality-based, eschewing wingnut postmodernism.

"The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted."

"The News of the World staff reportedly greeted Ms. Brooks' statements in their newsroom with hoots and derision. One would expect no less. Britain now apparently faces a period without coverage of vicars with knickers before Murdoch launches the Sun on Sunday to cover the screws of the world.

Murdoch has been brought to bay by one great British newspaper, the Guardian. It devoted two years to the task. It did what frightened politicians and cowed opinion leaders dared not do -- it defied the power and the money of the Alien. Ironic, that Murdoch seems about to lose what would have been his crown jewel because he was never able to restrain the low tastes and trashy standards that wounded my newspaper in one of his drive-by shootings."

"And I think that all of this makes it one of the most exciting times to be a science journalist. It means a more diverse array of science journalism. The new approach doesn’t replace the old (that’s a straw man) but it does complement and enhance it. I call it to the Cambrian explosion of science journalism. I actually think that most people in this field get this and are excited by it."

"At The Chronicle, we’re committed to proving there’s another way to approach the business of reporting – one that assumes readers can be intelligent, with a sufficient attention span to digest more than a sound bite. It’s an approach that treats the work of individuals and institutions we cover as worthy of our sustained attention – for longer than just the time it takes to collect a few quotes and pound out a few paragraphs.

I believe it’s possible to breed something other than a media beast. That’s why, against some daunting odds, we’re working hard to make The Ann Arbor Chronicle a different kind of creature."

"First, “every author has to fill out a profile, so the reader knows who the person is and their education. And there is the additional requirement of a disclosure of any potential conflicts which might color their judgment.” Second, in response to the political question — after noting that my academics-are-liberal assertion might be a bit loaded — Jaspan replied that what The Conversation is ultimately doing is putting people in touch with “academics who are usually better informed than the general public because of their depth of knowledge and their sense of the complexity of the issue.”

Third, and most important, Jaspan sees The Conversation, true to its name, as leading to public debate. “One of the key things we want to do with a public-facing media channel is to make sure we have a range of views on something like the execution of Osama Bin Ladin, and that we have different interpretations of what happened and whether or not the means in which it was done were judicial.” The main goal, though: “We want to surprise our readers. We don’t want to give them the usual explanations, alternative insights, and viewpoints — and that will lead to lively conversation.”

Jaspan’s backers come from both the nonprofit and for-profit realms. The Conversation is backed by Ernst & Young, among other corporate supporters. And from academia, he has drawn on some of the top Australian research universities, in addition to Australia’s Department of Education. To find the academics, Jaspan and his staff did a “census” of academics based on their areas of expertise. Then, by word of mouth, they asked participating academics to recommend colleagues who would make good contributors to the site."

"WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines."

"Anyone covering Washington, not excluding me, will sooner or later turn to a phrase like “refocus its image” or “a perception that the President has come to look” or “a pitch-perfect recital of the populist message,” because they come so easily, and because they make it unnecessary to say anything substantial, which means thinking hard and perhaps suffering the consequences. Still, as an exercise in accountability, political journalists should ask themselves from time to time: Would I write this about a war, or a depression? In the same vein, a government official once told me that the best way to cover Washington is as a foreign capital—as Baghdad, or Kabul."

"But how do you present that disclosure? A link in each web article that jumps to a spreadsheet of donors and dollar signs, and let the reader judge? Conversely, many people trust NPR and PBS as a news source, but are satisfied by the simple roll call of sponsors and slogans.

So how do we present this information and context honestly and tactfully? It reminds me of a discussion at ScienceOnline2010 promoting fact-checking policy disclosures. What if you could only afford to fact-check 10% of your reporters’ articles? Does that disclosure give your readers more or less confidence in your service?"

"Under the new plan, EWA will immediately shift from a traditional membership organization to an open community, embracing a wider net of people concerned about the quality of education information. The organization will create 21st century mechanisms for supporting traditional writers in real time while adopting creative advocacy on behalf of first-rate sustainable journalism."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”"

"One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff. (UPDATE: Yes, I am aware that some print publications can, though few do, provide actual perspective. See update at end.)

That time period needs further adjustment, in two ways. The first is that an hourly news cycle is itself too long. The latest can come at any minute in an era of TV police chases, Twitter and twitchy audiences. Call it the 1,440 minute news cycle."

"You know that excellent explanatory piece you produced four weeks ago as a sidebar to a big news story on your topic? Rescue it from the archives and put it in a nice, prominent place online. Link to it with a clear, compelling headline.

Pull together a page online with links to several such explanatory pieces (from your site and elsewhere), along with good, useful digests of all of them. Make it so that users don’t have to visit every link to get a picture of the story, but have places to go when they want to know more. Set a recurring reminder to check in on this page once a week. Create a shortened URL for this page and repeat it every time you cover this topic."

"The webizens, like me, will continue to follow the wisest voices, even if they are operating outside the brand of big city papers.

The news barons might think that they can restructure copyright and fair use laws to plug those niddling little holes in 'the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created', to stop us from quoting Paul Krugman's op-ed piece, but it won't hold up.

So Sokolove's piece -- entitled "What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?" -- is incongruous to me. Might as well be "What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?" or "What's An Opera Without A Volcano?"

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really."

"I love it. The AP realizes it’s made a mistake trying to assert copyright over words it didn’t write and doesn’t own, but it can’t even bring itself to admit it. No, they’re saying they’ve “revoked” the license, as though it were their choice whether to allow me to quote Jefferson in the first place. How about this, AP? Why don’t you buy a “license” from me that allows you not to be such dunderheads when it comes to copyright? I’m willing to give it to you for free if you’re interested—but somehow I don’t think you are."

"Although many use the terms "news" and "journalism" interchangeably, I think that journalism also encompasses something much more important — context. News certainly has its place. But I aim to use this site to advance the discussion of how we can better use the Web to deliver context in journalism."

"I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post."

"The press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us."

"One person who hands out a lot of leaflets these days is Lynne Price, a local activist known affectionately as “Gobby Lynne”. Yet she gets much of her information about planning proposals, crime and so on from the internet. This illustrates one effect of the digitisation of information. As newspapers weaken and die, most people probably become less informed about local affairs, but a few motivated folk grow extremely knowledgeable. Ms Price will miss the Bedworth Echo, but not as a source of news. It was, she says, a useful way of getting the word out."

"The only difficulty with this entire story was that it was not remotely true. There had been no sustained assault by the Chinese on the legations, no breakthrough, no last stand, and no slaughter. In fact, July 6th had been quiet enough that Private R.G. Cooper, one of the British soldiers holed up in the legations, had not mentioned it in his diary of the siege. The most pressing news of those few days was the discovery of a buried British cannon from 1860, which the defenders of the legations refurbished and put to use."

This is how a newspaper should work. And note: no business was closed and re-opened to escape legal obligations to pay employee benefits to create this story.

"It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story. If you think the newspapers and record companies are stupid or malevolent, then you can reassure yourself that provided you’re smart and good, you don’t have anything to worry about. But if disruption can destroy even the smart and the good, then it can destroy anybody. In the second part of the essay, I’ll argue that scientific publishing is in the early days of a major disruption, with similar underlying causes, and will change radically over the next few years."

"But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."

"The State, South Carolina's dominant newspaper, had a collection of (barely printable) emails between Sanford and his honey six months ago, and didn't publish. Remind me again why we need newspapers? Oh, yeah, I remember: to protect us from stuff we don't really need to know."

"I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them. I’ve been skillfully edited and I’ve been allowed to babble on painfully unchecked by paying and non-paying publications alike. I’ve garnered indirect material benefit from paying and non-paying publications alike. I’m not suggesting that anyone follow my example or positing that I know what The Future of Journalism entails, but I do know, barring catastrophe, what my particular future is: I am going to keep getting paid to write when I can and writing for free when I can’t. If/when this situation becomes untenable for me as a way of actually making my living, I’ll start making more of my money with my non-writing endeavors. People have been doing exactly that, and writing sad essays about the injustice of having to do exactly that, for much longer than the Internet has been around."

"While debating what makes for good journalism is worthwhile, and is clearly needed, it prevents the discussion from advancing to any analysis about the greater good that can be gained from audience participation in news. Furthermore, the debate often exacerbates the differences primarily in processes, overlooking obvious similarities. If we take a closer look at the basic tasks and values of traditional journalism, the differences become less striking."

"To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

"As for being legal, let's talk now about the dirty secret of how newspapers operate. They misappropriate content all the time.

Look, I was in a newsroom for years. A newspaper graphic needed doing? You found a book with a drawing, used that without asking the author for explicit permission because shoving in a mention in the "source" line was good enough. Following on a story that a rival paper wrote? You damn well read that other story, which got you up to speed, but heaven forbid you ever mentioned that the other publication came out with the news first. If you did, that was only if you could do a story that suggested you had the "real" scoop that the other publication had wrong."

"When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate."

"Communicate, communicate, communicate. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. Vickie Elmer has been interviewing people for an article about changes at The News that’s scheduled to run in the January edition of The Ann Arbor Observer – it’s probably already being delivered to local households. If The News itself had been frank about what’s happening there, she wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. And I would be writing a much different column than the one you’re reading today."

"What has happened with the Internet so far is that the suppliers of hardware, software, and transmission (search engines and aggregators) have built business models that effectively shut out revenue streams for the creators of the information that is being delivered. What has become absolutely clear in 2008 is that this new model for delivering information is a debilitating blow to the creation of quality news content. The companies making money from the Internet—Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and so on—are entitled to the riches they’ve amassed from their ingenuity and entrepreneurial skill. But as a society, we’ve got to figure out how news gathering and information distribution will be paid for from now on."

"...we will all soon enough live in cities and towns where politicians and bureaucrats gambol freely without worry, where it is never a risk to shine shit and call it gold."

"In this context, hyperlocal will have to be hypersocial: it will have to be biased, take sides, stand for something, and be written by networks of partisans."

seeing this as the tail-end of a much longer discussion....

We get a newspaper for my 84-year-old Mom to read.

<i>Wired</i> now has a distributed journalism site.