"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.”"

"The system in which they are relevant is not called the market economy, not the financial system or capitalism, but democracy. Democracy is about a community shaping its future together. And the media, in all its forms – print, broadcast and digital – is one of its most important creative forces. The proof of the relevance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 and continues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire history of German democracy."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In my mind, people don’t earn lawsuits. They win them. When I decided to publicly speak out against the Hearst Corporation in no way shape or form did I ever consider winning an individual lawsuit as any kind of victory. I am interested in being part of a movement that brings respectability, dignity and accountability back to the newspaper journalism profession.
I believe that the battle to do so must begin in the newsroom and not the courtroom. It must be first fought with our minds and with our integrity. This is not as difficult as some might think. We all know that newspaper publishers and owners lost both their minds and their integrity long ago."

"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."

"The resolution passed by your honorable body at your last session ordering the printing of the report of the Board of Public Works in pamphlet form and placing the distribution of the same in the hands of said board I hereby disapprove of, for the following reasons:

Such publication is not warranted by the city charter, which on page 75, section 41, prescribes the manner in which such reports shall be published, namely, in the official newspaper of the city [emphasis added]."

"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."

"From adversity always seems to come a little opportunity. The Ann Arbor Chronicle - “the community newspaper and town hall” – is somewhat the way I remember the news, it just isn’t folded as tightly as my papers. The difference is I didn’t get paid anything to write this column and you didn’t pay anything to read it, so we’re even. I don’t like to owe anybody anything."

"...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."

"It was a brilliant web-native news and information effort — BURIED three layers deep, where I couldn’t FIND it."

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