"If you had to make a snap judgment about a Londoner, how would you do it? Start with the newspaper he or she is reading." More handy hints are within this New York Times magazine article, such as "Frequent apology is one of an arsenal of clever tricks Londoners employ to obscure their true feelings and remain opaque to outsiders and possibly even to themselves."

"Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011, I accidentally collected about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com." "As a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It's all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we're no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis."

"It has something to do with the ideal of the American Everyman. As with the military or medicine, so with museums, we are by national inclination meddlers. Europeans are not, which is why they have reacted to the Smithsonian flap with the same mildly appalled bafflement that they express toward American opposition to the health care bill. It all seems inexplicable to them." The NYT on Wojnarowicz, Sensation, Tate, the Smithsonian, and attitudes. 

"... online news is connected: it’s news that you can respond to, link to, share with friends. It is part of a back-and-forth that you are also a part of. Murdoch’s tablet thingie will be something else — a throwback to the isolation of pre-Web publications." I hope this turns out to be true.

"I haven’t found a news source I like enough to devote any time or money to absorbing. I’m too impatient to watch TV news and there’s almost no part of my day when talk radio isn’t a distraction." I'm looking forward to what emerges from Phil's work.

Interesting thoughts on news on the web. "What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer?" Lee asks, before going on to outline a scheme.

"Delivering the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture today, Rusbridger said that universal charging for newspaper content on the internet would remove the industry from a digital revolution". There's some well-argued stuff in here.

"the Swiss Post (that's the postal service, not a newspaper) and the German tech startup Syntops are making it happen with their Personal News project. This is a small experiment, but a fascinating one that offers a mashup of section fronts from select newspapers in Europe and the U.S."

An interesting article by Peter Kirwan on the unmentioned waste (about 40% of magazines, 20% of newspapers) that the structures of industry seem to show up. It's odd that the "editor who allowed himself to be lured back" isn't named when the experiment mentioned is on their blog, though. (Once I'd have said who it was; I must be getting mellow.)

"Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found. The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret. The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck." Time to read Hansard...

Phil on newspapers. Anyone can indeed regurgitate wire copy, but not everyone can write a spirited rebuttal like this.

Robert Peston on the wider journalistic practices behind the NOTW phone conversation affair. "In a series of reports and in evidence to the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, [the retiring information commissioner] made a series of disclosures about newspaper activities that he regarded as "prima facie" illegal."

"The New York Times, via its reporters acting as proxies, steals documents. It violates laws that everyone else must follow. It uses the information in these documents to sell newspapers, and profits by it. And most important, it uses this process to exercise political power [..] The fact that the Times may commit this class of crime with impunity, while I can't and you can't, enables it (with the true press, of course, as a whole) to act as almost a sovereign force. [..] This is considered a normal and ethical practice in early 21st-century journalism. It is actually a criminal practice, which any other century would recognize as such." (Title shortened for space.)

The Press Complaints Commission upholds a complaint on the Express story that used Facebook details and photos of Dunblane survivors, stating that the use of information on social networks is only justified if the people are already public figures, and that "circumventing privacy settings to obtain information will require a public interest justification". It concludes "the breach of the Code was so serious that no apology could remedy it".

"Journalists pooh-poohed the brevity of the stories, media buyers thought it too cheap, rival executives thought it was a licence to lose money. Nobody seemed to like it, except the readers, a fact Metro quickly alerted media buyers to" Have a go at the internet for dumbing down news if you like, but Metro was doing it on paper at the same time.

Ben Goldacre on the susceptibility of badly-hacked newspaper CMSes to prank URLs, something I've been doing (mainly to get them a bit shorter) for a while now. The really baffling thing to me is that, after the stories get passed around with a joke URL, they take them down, killing both the original and the gag. Of course, they never fix the underlying problem, which is that they have awful codebases and care too much about bad search engine "optimisation".

I was a bit of a fan of this back in the day. Its erratic scheduling made it a bit hard to keep watching, but it's a shame it's going. Hopefully, as has happened in the past, it'll shift channels (hell, I'd be happy if Sky News took it on).

I need to go back and look at these properly when I have time, and then decide which piece of ffffound fodder is the best. Visualisations of the news by type in the Guardian for a week earlier this year.

"Weapons against the city's intelligence. Almost no-one reads books any more. London litened, littered, public transport desolated into a time waste land." And look, almost time to brave the gauntlet down to Farringdon.

More LRB, so again a long, but worthwhile, book review, looking at the way the newspapers have become full of recycled PR instead of journalism.

I think we both hate the evening free papers. And the bus televisions. "London loves... the way we all just fall apart."

The cost of free newspapers

I should have realised the Mail would take this approach when reporting the arrival of self-printed mail postage in the UK. Ah well.

Interesting thoughts on CMSes

How not to write a paging algorithm.

I've only skimread this, but it seems a fair summation of the blackface (as opposed to redtop, or once-broadsheet) tabloids.

"How many of these headlines do you recognise and do you know the stories behind them?"

Hurrah. I'd love to see the Standard's monopoly broken. Especially if it's the Guardian, not Desmond, who gets the distribution rights; something progressive would be very welcome.