Now, on the paper’s website, you can find hosted content from four popular and well-respected blogs: “Life and Physics” by Jon Butterworth, a physics professor at University College of London who does work with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; “The Lay Scientist,” the pop-science-potpourri blog by researcher and science writer Martin Robbins; the science policy blog “Political science” by former MP Evan Harris; and “Punctuated Equilibrium,” by the evolutionary biologist known as Grrrl Scientist.

The idea is both to harness scientific expertise and, at the same time, to diffuse it. “This network of blogs is not just for other science bloggers to read; it’s not just for other scientists,” says Alok Jha, a science and environment correspondent who came up with the idea for the network and now — in addition to his reporting and writing duties — is overseeing its implementation. The network is intended to reach — and entertain/enrage/inform — as many people as possible. “We’re a mainstream newspaper,” he says, “so everything we do has to come about through that prism.” And it marks another small shift in the media ecosystem: the media behemoth and independent bloggers, collaborating for audiences rather than competing for them.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because the new network is a direct response to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s goal of journalistic “mutualization.” (Okay, okay: mutualiSation.) “It’s good to have criticism from scientists when we do things wrong,” Jha notes, “but it’s also good to have them understand how we write things — and give them a chance to do it.” Guardian reporters don’t spend days in the control room at CERN; someone who does, though, is Jon Butterworth. Having him and his fellow scientists as part of an extended network of Guardian writers benefits both the paper and its readers. “The science desk here will essentially become a channel for these guys to report from their worlds they’re all seeing,” Jha notes. The scientists “are going to lend a bit of their stardust to us”; in return, they’ll get exposure not just to a broader readership, but to a more diverse one, as well.

The Guardian network comes at time when science blog networks populated by writers with particular — and highly focused — areas of expertise are proliferating. Last week, the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals emphasizing the biological sciences, launched its own 11-blog network. PLoS Blogs joins Wired Science, Scientopia, and others. And, of course, science blogs have been in the news more than usual of late, with ScienceBlogs and the scandal that was PepsiGate. That scandal — in which PepsiCo tapped its own “experts” to contribute content to the otherwise proudly independent blog network — didn’t precipitate the Guardian’s own foray into science blog networking, which has been in the works since this spring. However, “it certainly accelerated everything,” Jha says. “I think there was soul-searching going on among the bloggers out there: ‘What do we do next? How do we do it?’ And that, in turn, gave the Guardian staff the sense that, okay, now is the time to do it.”

The general value proposition here is the most typical one: “more content” on the side of the media outlet, and “more exposure” on the side of the content providers. Many scientists are interested in writing, Jha points out; but there are far fewer who understand the mysterious alchemy required to successfully pitch stories to news organizations. The blog setup reframes the relationship between the expert and the outlet — with the Guardian itself, in this case, going from “gatekeeper” to “host.”

The upshot of all that, for the scientists, isn’t exposure in the Huffpostian sense, in which getting your name out there = money. The Guardian pays the bloggers for their work. Which is a matter of principle as much as economics: Even though some of the scientists were already writing their blogs without compensation, Jha notes, “we thought we can’t possibly just take a blog for free, because it would be exploitative.”

The solution: a 50/50 ad revenue split. The Guardian sells ads against the bloggers’ pages; the bloggers, in turn, get half the revenue from the exchange. But this being an experiment — and web ads being notoriously fickle, even on a high-traffic site like the Guardian’s — the arrangement also includes a kind of financial insurance policy for the bloggers: If ad revenues fall below target, they’ll revisit the deal.

Though the blogs’ flags vary, they feature, in their Guardian presentation, a uniform tagline: “HOSTED BY THE GUARDIAN.” Which is a way of clarifying — and reiterating — that, though the blogs’ content is on the Guardian’s site, it’s not fully of the Guardian’s site. “The idea is that this is not an internal reporters’ or editorial blog,” Jha says. “It’s these guys — it’s their thoughts, independent of all interference.”

And “independent” really means “independent.” The blogs aren’t edited — for content or for copy. Unlike some other newspaper/blog hosting arrangements (see, for example, Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight is licensed by The New York Times — and whose content is overseen, and edited, by Times staff), the Guardian’s science blogs are overseen by the bloggers themselves. For these first couple weeks, yes, a Guardian production editor will read the posts before hitting “publish.” But that’s a temporary state of affairs — a period meant to work out technical kinks and to foster trust on both sides. The goal, after this initial trial period, is to give the bloggers remote access to the Guardian’s web publishing tools — something, Jha notes, “that no one apart from internal staff had been able to do before.” The vision — a simple one, but one that’s nicely symbolic, as well — is that the bloggers will soon be able to publish directly to the Guardian site, with no intermediary. “It’s a completely new model for us,” Jha notes — because, at the moment, “nothing here is unedited.”

Jha is well aware of the potential for legal headaches that accompanies that freedom — a potential that’s particularly menacing in the U.K., whose legal system plays so (in)famously fast-and-loose with libel. “As a news organization, we’ve been very careful to be on the right side of the law,” Jha says; then again, though, “we’d never try and censor.” Balancing freedom-of-expression concerns with their organizational imperative to protect themselves from liability is something Jha and his colleagues have spent a lot of time discussing in the run-up to the network’s launch. Ultimately, though, the vision won out over the caution. “We always err on the side of ‘let’s publish’ rather than not,” he notes; and, as far as the site’s new bloggers go, the goal is less top-down authority, not more. “Eventually, we do want them to have complete control,” Jha says. “That is the ambition.”

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One phone rings, then another, then four more, now a dozen. The 15th-floor conference room is suddenly abuzz with an eclectic mix of song snippets and audio bits, an intimate peek at their owners before each is picked up or silenced. Having impressed the audience with the telephony technology behind the product, the presenter moves on to the next demo.

The intersection of mobile and geolocation is still an unknown world, waiting to be invented by hackers like the ones at round 2.0 of TimesOpen, The New York Times’ outreach to developers, which launched Thursday night. We wrote about the first TimesOpen event last year: It’s an attempt to open the doors of the The Times to developers, technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs, who can use Times tools to help answer some of the field’s big questions. This iteration of TimesOpen is a five-event series this fall, each focusing on a different topic: mobile/geolocation, open government, the real-time web, “big data,” and finally a hack day in early December.

On the docket Thursday were Matt Kelly of Facebook, John Britton of Twilio, Manu Marks of Google, and John Keefe of WNYC. Kelly presented Facebook Places; Britton gave one of his now New York-famous live demos of the Twilio API; Marks dove deep into the various flavors of the Google Maps API; Keefe — the only non-programmer of the bunch — discussed lessons learned from a community engagement project with The Takeaway.

An API, or application programming interface, allows applications to easily communicate with one another. For example, any iPhone or Android application that pulls information from a web-based database is most likely it through an API. If you search local restaurants through Yelp, your location and query are passed to Yelp and results given in return. For any company with an API, like the three at TimesOpen, the challenge is to convince developers they should spend their time innovating on top of your platform. Strategically, when there’s an entire ecosystem living on top of your platform, your platform then becomes indispensable and valuable.

What’s most fascinating to me, however, are the approaches each company is taking to build a community around its API. The community is the most important key to the success of an API, a major source of innovation. One of the keys to Twitter’s explosive growth has been its API; rather than depending on its own developers for all new innovation, Twitter inadvertently created an entire ecosystem of value on top of their platform.

Let’s contrast Facebook and Twilio, for example. Facebook hopes Places, launched in mid August, will become the definitive platform for all location data. Interoperability can happen, but it should happen over Facebook’s infrastructure. Facebook envisions a future where, in addition to showing you where your friends are in real time, Places will also offer historical social context to location. Remember the trip through South America your friend was telling you about? Now you don’t have to, all of the relevant information is accessible through Places.

At the moment, though, Facebook’s only public location API is read-only. It can give a developer a single check-in, all check-ins for a given user, or check-in data for a given location. They have a closed beta for the write API with no definitive timeline for opening it publicly. Expanded access to the API is done through partnerships reserved for the select few.

Twilio, on the other hand, is a cloud-based telephony company which offers voice and SMS functionality as a service, and whose business depends wholly on extensive use of its API. Developer evangelist John Britton made a splash at the NY Tech Meetup when, in front of hundreds, he wrote a program and did a live demo that elegantly communicated the full scope of what their product offers. On Thursday, he impressed again: Using the Twilio API, he procured a phone number, and had everyone in the audience dial into it. When connected, callers were added to one of three conference rooms. Dialing into the party line also meant your phone number was logged, and the application could then follow up by calling you back. All of this was done with close to a dozen lines of code.

At TimesOpen, Britton stressed API providers need to keep a keen ear to their community. Community members often have ideas for how you can improve your service to solve the intermediate problems they have. For instance, up until a week ago, Twilio didn’t have the functionality to block phone numbers from repeatedly dialing in. For one company using the platform, the absence of this feature became a significant financial liability. Once rolled out, the feature made Twilio much more valuable of a service because the company could more closely tailor it to their needs. To make experimentation even easier, Twilio also has an open source product called OpenVBX and brings together its community with regular meetups.

Facebook already has the scale and the social graph to make any new API it produces a player. But for wooing the hackers — at least when you’re a small and growing platform — open and inclusive seems to win out over closed and exclusive.

Cuts and big changes for two papers: In the past week, two American newspapers have announced major reorganizations that, depending on who you read, were either cold corporate downsizing or fresh attempts at journalism innovation. First, late last week, Gannett’s USA Today announced that it would undergo the most sweeping change in its 28-year history, transforming “into a multi-media company” as opposed to a newspaper — and laying off 130 of its 1,500 employees in the process. The Associated Press and paidContent have pretty good explanations of what the changes entail, and thanks to the feisty Gannett Blog, we have the slide presentation Gannett execs made to USA Today’s staff.

Though there are some dots to be connected, those slides are the best illustration of what Gannett is trying to do: Push USA Today further into web content, breaking news and especially mobile content (by far its fastest-growing area) in order to justify a simultaneous move deeper into mobile and online advertising. The paper is hoping to become faster on breaking news, with a web-first mindset, fewer editors, and a strategy that focuses on flooding coverage on breaking stories and then coming back later for deeper features.

Gannett Blog’s Jim Hopkins, a longtime critic of the company, wasn’t thrilled about this move, either, pointing out the lack of newsroom experience in some of its key executives and saying that Gannett touted almost the exact same strategy four years ago, to little effect. He did say a few days later, though, that Gannett’s plans to encourage more collaboration among staffers — by flattening the “silos” of the News, Sports, Money, and Life sections — are long overdue.

News media analyst Ken Doctor was much more charitable, seeing in USA Today’s overhaul echoes of the new “digital first” mentalities at the Journal Register Co. and TBD. The best way to see this, Doctor said, is to “mark another day in which a publisher is acting on the plain truths of the marketplace and of the audiences, and trying to reinvent itself.” Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin called USA Today’s transformation a bellwether for news organizations and said its harmony between news and advertising is a bitter but necessary pill for traditionalists to swallow. And media consultant Mario Garcia said USA Today’s audience-driven approach is the key to survival in a multimedia environment.

The other newspaper to announce an overhaul was the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, a for-profit paper published by the Mormon Church. The paper is laying off 43 percent of its staff, though you wouldn’t know it from the News’ own article on the changes. In a pair of posts, Ken Doctor looked at the change in philosophy that’s accompanying the cuts — an attempt to become the worldwide Mormon newspaper of sorts, along with pro-am and local news efforts and a news-broadcast collaboration — and liked what he found. News business expert Alan Mutter examined the prospects for a slashed, print-and-broadcast newsroom and came out less optimistic.

A Twitter stunt gone awry: Twitter devotees are used to seeing untrue rumors and scoops occasionally get reported there (as Jeff Goldblum can attest), but this week may have been the first time a false Twitter report was knowingly started by a member of the traditional media as a stunt. Fed up with the more-breathless-than-usual Twitter rumor-reporting that’s been going on in the sports media this summer, Washington Post sports reporter Mike Wise decided to start a false rumor about the length of an NFL quarterback’s suspension to make a point about the unreliability of reporting on Twitter.

The stunt bombed; Wise admitted the hoax an hour later and was suspended for a month by the Post the next day. Such an ill-advised prank isn’t really news in itself, but it did spur a bit of interesting commentary on Twitter and breaking news. Numerous people argued that Wise’s hoax betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Twitter as a news medium — one that many others probably share. Even after the episode, Wise maintained that it showed that nobody checks facts or sourcing on breaking stories on Twitter.

Quite a few observers disagreed for a variety of reasons. Barry Petchesky of Gawker’s sports blog Deadspin said the whole incident actually disproved Wise’s thesis: The false story didn’t gain much traction, and the media outlets that did report the story credited Wise until it could be confirmed independently, just the way the system is supposed to work.

But the primary objection was that, as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, Slate’s Tom Scocca, and several others all argued, to the extent that Wise was trusted, it was because of the credibility that people give to The Washington Post — a traditional news organization — rather than Twitter itself. As TBD’s Steve Buttry pointed out, people would have run with this story if Wise had planted it in the Post itself or on its website; what makes Twitter any different? DCist’s Aaron Morrissey put the point well: Wise falsely “assumed that there weren’t levels of authenticity to Twitter, which, just like any other social construct on Earth, features some people who are reputable concerning whatever and others who aren’t.”

Rupert’s paywall runs into obstacles: Two months after the online paywall went up at Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, The Independent (a competitor of The Times) reported this week that with a vastly reduced audience to sell to, advertisers are fleeing the site. In the article, various British news industry analysts also said The Times is killing its online brand and not adding any of the sort of value that’s necessary to justify charging for news. Stateside, too, Lost Remote’s Steve Safran saw the news as “mounting evidence that putting up a paywall is bad for business.”

It should be noted, though, that according to those analysts, The Times’ paywall is “more about gathering consumer information than selling content” — News Corp.’s primary intent may be getting detailed, personalized information on Times readers and using it to sell them other products within its media empire, including its BSkyB satellite TV. Francois Nel ran some possible numbers and determined that even with its relatively small audience (15,000 subscribers, plus day-pass users), News Corp. could be making more money with its paywall than without.

On the other hand, a new study reported by paidContent estimated that online subscribers to The Times and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal are worth only a quarter of their print counterparts. Getting rid of the print product, the study posited, wouldn’t even make up for the loss of income from those subscribers. The Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford detailed more of the research firm’s report — a rather depressing one for newspaper execs.

Google and the AP play nice: A quiet news development worth noting: Google and The Associated Press renewed their licensing agreement that allows Google (including, especially, Google News) to host AP content. The deal was announced on Google’s side via a one-paragraph post, and on the AP’s side through a short press release, and then a much more extensive article by its technology writer Michael Liedtke. The extension is significant because the two sides have had a consistently fractious relationship — their first agreement began in 2006 after the AP threatened to sue Google for aggregating its articles, AP executives have criticized news aggregators for misappropriating content, and the AP’s material briefly stopped appearing on Google News late last year.

The Lab’s Megan Garber noted that this new agreement might go beyond another truce and mark a change in the way the companies relate: “Us-versus-them becoming let’s-work-together.” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan provided plenty of background, surmising that AP has learned its lesson that Google News can live on just fine without them.

Reading roundup: This week was an especially rich one for all sorts of web-journalism punditry. Here’s a sampling:

— The American Journalism Review’s Barb Palser tried to throw some cold water on the hyperlocal news movement, using some Pew stats to argue that people don’t go online for neighborhood news as much as we might think. (That use of statistics led to a frustrated response by Michele McLellan.) And the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles added his skepticism to the discussion surrounding Patch and large-scale hyperlocal news.

— NYU j-prof Jay Rosen can be a polarizing figure, but there are few media observers who are better at pulling thoughtful insights out of the often mystifying world that is journalism-in-transition. We got three particularly thought-provoking tidbits from him this week: A sharp interview with The Economist about the American press; a lecture at a French j-school about the changing dynamic between “the audience” and “the public,” with tips for new students; and a video clip from the Journal Register Co.’s ideaLab on news production and innovation.

— We spent some time this summer talking about the merits (and drawbacks) of links, so consider this a worthy addendum: Scott Rosenberg, who recently chronicled the history of blogging, issued a three-part defense of the link this week. A great examination of one of the fundamental features of the web.

— Finally, two cool reads, one practical and the other theoretical. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal listed five lessons from the publication of Longshot, the hyperspeed-produced magazine formerly known as 48HRS, and here at the Lab, Cornell scholar Joshua Braun talked about the way TV news organizations maintain the “stage management” of broadcast in their online efforts. “They continue to control what remains backstage and what goes front-stage,” he told Megan Garber in a Q&A, giving comment moderation as one example. “That’s not unique to the news, either. But it’s an interesting preservation of the way the media’s worked for a long time.”

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It is a head-turner, which seems to be, at first, an only-in-Utah story. The Deseret Morning News, KSL TV, and KSL Radio, all owned by one company, the Deseret Management Co., a for-profit arm of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are combining operations.

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”.

Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”.

One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

Remove the religious subtext, for a moment, and I believe we see a model that will appear ordinary in many American cities, within a few years. Think about it. If we as readers, viewers and listeners want words, photographs, videos, and audio, and expect it to be served up in an easy-to-use, relevant-to-me way, then why would the companies that produce news in those various forms be separate?

They’re separate, of course, because those words/picture/audio used to be called newspapers/magazines, network and cable TV and radio broadcasters. Those words, though, describe the old world, those packages the content came wrapped in. In our digital world, we’re seeing delivery blur through the Internet. And, that inevitably, and now more quickly, means that single companies will produce words, pictures and sound — and they’ll find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently.

If you own the Salt Lake properties, or if you’re Tribune and own the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN radio, you practically have a fiduciary responsibility to rearrange assets that will make the company more efficient. If you own a broadcast station or a newspaper, you can more easily see the rationale in buying or combining with the other, to meet customer (reader/viewer and advertiser) demands of the coming age.

So the Salt Lake Experiment joins TBD’s (“The Newsonomics of TBD“) in putting together the text and video pieces. They are the next generation in this attempt to make convergence work. Call it News Convergence 2.0, with Tampa’s Tribune/WFLA experiment the best poster child for 1.0. How well the Deseret operation (or TBD) executes is, of course, the key. Journalism isn’t about white-board theories, in any era; it’s about getting the news gathered, analyzed, and distributed to readers, and doing it better than the competition.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of the Deseret decision, though. The numbers in play are curious ones, as Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert lays out a “less is more” theme in the major restructuring of his company. In fact, let’s use the more and less theme to gauge the moving pieces of the new business model.

• Less is More: Take that “43%” headline. The legacy news staff of the Deseret News has indeed been cut 43 percent — 85 jobs, including those of the editor and publisher of the paper. That number includes both full-time and part-time positions. So we’d expect a lot less coverage, right? With a bit of frustration in his voice, Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert tells me bluntly “That’s an Old Media world view. We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.” His point, and his plan: The combined operations of the remaining Deseret News staff and the sister news staffs at KSL TV and radio will operate smarter and more efficiently.

  “Say there’s a story on Capitol Hill [in Salt Lake City]. Right now, the paper sends a reporter and a photographer and KSL sends a reporter and videographer. That’s four people, and that story may end up on B3,” says Gilbert. “Now we’ll send one.”

  So, step one: “Reduce duplication.”

  So the news math changes dramatically. The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and “new employees expected to have those skills.” Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

  Step two: “Deepen coverage,” meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the “integrated newsroom,” with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. “You’re sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms],” explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite — so that’s going to be a busy staff.

  The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

• More Costs Less: Borrowing basic notions of getting cheap and free content from the Huffington Post and Demand Media, Gilbert is putting into action what he has long preached in academic and consulting circles. I’ve called this emerging time the Age of Cheap Content. That principle means that the new Deseret operation will leverage bigger-name writers (especially those consistent with its Mormon roots and values, like former BYU football star and current Philadelphia sports anchor Vai Sikahema) for little financial compensation. That’s the HuffPo model. And they’ll leverage Salt Lake and Utah reporters to address both topical and hyperlocal coverage, through the new Deseret Connect. That’s the Demand side of the idea, bringing together a large database of qualified writers — “not random bloggers,” says Gilbert — and keeping their payments low or non-existent. “Some of the best don’t write for money.”

  Deseret Connect already has received more than 100 applications, and Gilbert says he can see it scaling to a thousand or more contributors within the year, using management system techniques developed outside the news industry for BYU/Idaho faculty.

  Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum — though he’s clear to point out that people doing the writing won’t be looking to the company “as their main source of income.”

  So, looking at cost per content unit — a Demand-like analytic — the new company will be able to house lots more content under its brand, at a far lower cost point.

• More Beats Less: The Deseret play aims to bring together text stories and blogs, video, and audio. That supposes that readers want all kinds of coverage brought together for them. It’s a bet that products that converge video and stories for readers will beat the competition, competition like MediaNews’ Salt Lake Tribune, the biggest non-church-owned news presence in the state. One big question here: How will the customer experience be converged? In Washington, two ongoing TV stations folded their websites into the new TBD at launch. How separate and how unified will the DeseretNews.com and KSL.com sites be?

• More is More: The new Deseret operation doesn’t just focus on geography — Utah’s more than 700,000 households. It’s taking a twin approach to being a general interest news site — and a new worldwide voice for the Mormon faithful of 13 million or so worldwide. In the company’s strategy, that’s described as a values-oriented approach, and you can already read that six-point values mantra widely. The six: “the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community.” They make for a strong philosophy, but in marketing, that’s quite a straddle — one that may be difficult to pull off, especially as Salt Lake City itself has become majority non-Mormon.

The economics of it are clear, though. Pay (or don’t) to get a story written or a video shot once, and then distribute it many times over. It’s basic Internet economics, with a nichy, religious angle, one of many variations we’ll soon be seeing on these increasingly popular themes.

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Last week Adam Frucci, who is going to head up Splitsider, said goodbye to his readers at the Gawker Media site Gizmodo. Reflecting on his four years there, he asked: “What other job pays you to test drug paraphernalia and sex toys, to create goofy videos and unscientific quizzes? No other job, that’s what.” But there is still plenty in store for him at his new gig, where his colleagues will include Gawker veterans Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.

I spoke with Frucci about why moving on to Splitsidder was so appealing, considering his success at Gizmodo. “I’ve been at Gizmodo for four years,” he told me, “but I was never going to run Gizmodo.”

He’s in the process of sorting out what kinds of posts he wants to write himself and which contributors he plans to tap for regular features. “It’s been a lot of back and forth with writers,” he says. “I want people to be excited about what they write about.” Contributors will be unpaid, at least at first. (When I asked if he can guarantee book deals, like the kind Awl contributor Chris Lehmann landed for his unpaid column called Rich People Things, Frucci deadpanned, “I promise 100 percent if you contribute, you’ll get a book deal.”) He says the core of the site will be a running stream of newsy posts from him about things like which shows and writers getting deals, plus columns on specific topics.

The site will compliment The Awl, posting content that at least some Awl readers should find interesting. That cross-promotion will help push early readers to the new site. But it’ll have a slightly different tone: Publisher David Cho told me that if The Awl is all about voice, Splitsider will be all about showing they can do “newsy voicey.”

Cho told me that the combination of content opportunity and voice is what made this an appealing prospect. “To have a great writer and a topic that no one else owned, that’s a huge opportunity,” he said. “I think from a content perspective, it might even have more potential than the Awl.” This spring, The Awl was up to about 400,000 pageviews per day. The bread and butter of Splitsider will be the die-hard comedy nerd (“they have nowhere to congregate now,” Cho says), plus the casual reader.

Frucci and Cho are optimistic, but there’s obviously risk involved. Frucci’s contract offers him the perks of getting to build and shape the site, plus a share of site revenue. But, if the site doesn’t take off, there’s no base salary for him to rely on. His old job at Gizmodo paid him a base plus bonuses for big traffic.

Cho agreed there’s a risk, but said he wouldn’t push him into something he thought would definitely fail. He added that you pretty much need a sink-or-swim personality to make this kind of project work. If you’re looking for stability, “I don’t think that’s the type of person we’d want for a job like this,” Cho said. “That’s the type of person whose going to get burn out.”

Frucci mentioned his idea for the site to Cho, who had his eye out for talented writers and good ideas for sites. Why launch with Cho and share revenue rather than go it alone? “I have no experience launching a site or selling ads,” he told me. “Basically, it makes it possible to do.” Cho says he “can get him a significantly higher CPM than if he were trying to do it on his own.”

Cho told me back in June that he hopes to launch several new sites this year. He’s keeping his eye out for interesting ideas and great writers to lead them. The details on the other sites are under wraps, but Cho did say “in a lot of ways, this site is a pilot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image from daveynin used under a Creative Commons License.

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Watch out Tucker Carlson: Glenn Beck hires Breitbart alum to run his new news site http://nie.mn/clCMc3 »

Video recommendation tool Taboola gives publishers a 100% to 500% “uplift” in video views http://nie.mn/csqRq3 »

The Dallas Morning News considers moving staff reports, Cowboy news behind a paywall http://nie.mn/c2AgK5 »

Want to eavesdrop on smarties discussing the ins-and-outs of local news? Check the convo btw @michelemclellan @chanders http://nie.mn/cYELIX »

Journalism schools are ripe for experimentation. They’ve got students excited about the future of the industry, professors free from the profit pressures of a newsroom, and all the resources of a university.

But at the same time, there are two obvious problems with running an online news project out of a j-school: the cost (nothing’s free, even if you don’t need to turn a profit) and the doldrums of summer (universities might go dark, but the Internet doesn’t.) A few journalism programs are taking on these problems with a surprising semi-solution: high school students.

New York University’s new hyperlocal news site, The Local East Village, run in partnership with The New York Times, is starting a summer 2011 program that will both shore up content and generate income for the young project. The students will pay tuition — around $4,000 a course when you look at cost-per-unit — to participate. If their work is good enough, it’ll appear on the site and help the void that comes from summertime on the academic calendar. Publication isn’t guaranteed.

“We have a lot of ambition for the site and it’s not free,” Brooke Kroeger, the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, told me. “It’s not costless…What I find exciting about [the East Village site], rather than creating a center or a separate little institute, or something that is apart from what we do, this has been fully integrated into our curriculum — even the summer, which isn’t always the case,” Kroeger said.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University is also experimenting with a summer high school program. This summer they launched a two-week program for high schoolers interested in learning the craft of investigative reporting.

“It certainly fit our mission,” said Joe Bergantino, the director of the center, explaining that they are expected to not only produce investigative work for news outlets, but train the next generation of investigative journalists. “It’s an obvious thing to do and an important thing to do.”

This year 39 high school students participated, paying $900 per weeklong session. In the first week, students learned database reporting and other investigative techniques. In the optional second week, most students continued working on a story they selected, or did research work for the reporters at the Center. “That tuition is used to fund our work at the Center,” Bergantino said.

High school journalism programs aren’t new, although using profits from them to support news outlets is a twist. At Northwestern, Medill has long had a program called the National High School Institute that attracts top-tier high schoolers likely to pursue journalism in college. But the money raised from the program goes back to supporting it, rather than other Medill projects, according to Roger Boye, director of the program. The return comes in recruitment: Last year, 22 of the 83 participants, known as “Cherubs,” went on to enroll at Northwestern University after graduating high school.

“If the school benefits, that’s how they’re benefiting,” Boye said.

Yesterday, Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, announced the launch of its real estate-focused iPhone app. The new (and free) tool, per its iTunes description page, will allow users to:

• Browse complete listings from across Massachusetts, all of New England and Florida, including photos and floor plans.
• Search for properties by city or town, or use the built-in GPS feature to find homes for sale, rentals, and open houses near you.
• View those listings on a map or in a list format. Save listings you like, and create email alerts for your favorite searches.
• Upload and store your own photos and notes about any property you visit.
• Refine listings by property type, square footage, price, newly listed and more.
• Browse listings from Boston and Cambridge neighborhoods.
• Email your favorite listings to a friend.
• Contact agents quickly and easily by email or phone.

The Globe’s move into mobile real estate facilitation is of a piece with newspaper apps that Gawker might call “servicey“: tools, like The New York Times’ “Learning English” app (or, indeed, like the Times’ own real estate app), that are less about content-providing and more about…helping.

“We felt this was an extension of the real estate vertical value proposition we have for both our audience and our advertisers,” says Robert Kempf, VP/Digital for the Globe and Boston.com. The app provides a service both to users engaged in the exciting-but-often-mystifying-and-therefore-stressful process of home-buying (think Zillow, the interactive real estate platform) and to those who merely wish they were engaged in it (think Zillow, the interactive real estate porn site). Kempf highlights four main functions of the app, all of them geared toward convenience and usability: browsing listings by neighborhood, browsing listings by geolocation (“what’s near me right now?”), browsing open houses, and using an interoperable interface with Boston.com.

That last one is significant — for both users and, of course, the advertisers who love them. At the moment, Kempf told me, the Globe has about 95 percent of the area market’s real estate listings (some of which are then up-sold as premium listings). With the app, “we’re simply extending all listings, whether paid or not, onto the mobile platform. So it’s additional value for anyone who’s got a property listed on Boston.com.”

And though the paper plans to solicit sponsors for the new application, it doesn’t have one yet. Which means: “At this point, it’s additional value for our real estate advertisers,” Kempf says. Moreover, “there’s no intention at this point to charge a premium to our real estate advertisers for inclusion on this product. That’s just part of the value proposition for them when they engage with Boston.com.”

The other part of that proposition? Eyeballs. “It’s a matter of, we deliver a digital audience,” Kempf says. “We try to be agnostic about whether we deliver that audience on the web or mobile. It’s an inclusive strategy for our advertisers.” And the audience delivered by people interested in real estate — aspirationally or, you know, actually — is, of course, a potentially lucrative one for those advertisers.

The new app also provides a relatively closed area in which the Globe can experiment with and learn about the mobile space. In general, Kempf points out, apps offer two core opportunities for news organizations: use-case-specific platforms and location-based services. In the case of a real estate app, he says, “you have a very specific use-case — real estate — and you have a great opportunity to offer location-based services.” So while “we know that adoption, generally, of location-based services has been relatively low so far,” Kempf notes (true story), “we believe that real estate is on the leading edge of that as a mass-reached utility.”

The goal? While it’s still early on — and “really early to tell what the rate of adoption is going to be here,” Kempf notes — “I would like to see us be a dominant, if not the dominant, local real estate application that’s being used in the Boston market.” The same kind of penetration that Boston.com’s real estate section has had, Kempf says, he’d like to see the new app have in the mobile space. “We think it’s a great place to start.”

A Breathalyzer for headlines http://nie.mn/aQ0anv »

When to delete: confessions of an online moderator http://nie.mn/cPsvFd »

Interesting: a Kachingle concept, but with tips paid for by sponsors http://nie.mn/bOLmkd »

The Onion takes on TIME mag, reductive trend stories, and "the beloved children’s character, Joe Klein" http://nie.mn/bza17A »

10 ways data sets are changing how we live http://nie.mn/9n192o (via @nickbilton) »

"Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that’s nothing novel. There’s just more everything now." http://nie.mn/bVr3Ff »

Per the FT, YouTube will feature streaming movie rentals from major studios by the end of the year http://nie.mn/dA1rDQ »

The deal comes after months of often tense back-and-forth between the two media behemoths. With their 2006 licensing contract — which arose from an AP threat to sue Google for the content it was aggregating through its search algorithm — expiring in January, the question of whether or not a renewal would come about in the first place has been an open one. In as late as October of 2009, CEO Tom Curley denied that the AP was in licensing-contract renegotiations with Google, saying, “We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked with them in any serious way.” Then, for several weeks this winter, after the contract had expired, AP content stopped appearing on Google’s interface — a situation that ended in February with a “sort of temporary detente.”

So what might we read into today’s renewal announcement? I spoke with someone familiar with the terms of the agreement, who provided me with a bit more background on the deal and its meaning. In the absence of precise information on the renewal — about which both companies are currently keeping mum — probably the main shift of note here is the change represented not in the terms, but in their tone: a move on both sides away from “vendor,” and toward “partner.” There’s reason to think, in other words, that the licensing agreement is more than simply a contract renewal, and more even than another detente: that it marks a change in the overall relationship between the two trend-setting media organizations. Us-versus-them becoming let’s-work-together.

If so, that’s a significant shift. Google has been on a partnership kick of late, going out of its way to work with media organizations in a way that, much more than before, integrates news content with news platform. The most prominent examples — Living Stories, Fast Flip, Editors’ Picks, etc. — suggest a Google that is trying to mend fences by way of breaking them down. And the AP, for its part (perhaps in response to the 10 percent drop in revenue, and 68 percent drop in profit, it has endured since 2008), has stepped down its most heated rhetoric about appropriated content and the like. So we’re seeing some kind of renewal today; we’ll be interested to learn, as time goes on, whether it’s of a marriage of convenience or something more truly companionate.

One of the most recent additions to the world of media-outlet-Tumbling comes courtesy of The Atlantic, which marked its entry into that world earlier this month. With this:

Since then, the outlet’s fledgling Tumblog has been populated with ephemera both serious and less so: a mix of images and blurbs and links to content from around the web, from TheAtlantic.com to far, far beyond. Today, for example, finds images of Macchu Picchu and New Orleans; last week found, among other posts, a link to AtlanticTech’s story about competitive lock-picking; an image of real-world renderings of keyboard shortcuts; a post pointing us to the photo site 2 4 Flinching and its compendium of photographs “detailing life on and in the New York City subway in the 1980’s”; a link to an Atlantic photo essay documenting the decay that remains in New Orleans five years after Katrina; a link to Karim Sadjadpour’s list of five key points about the wisdom of an Iranian military strike that, had he the chance, he’d convey to Benjamin Netanyahu; and a YouTube video, via Newsweek’s Tumblr, of “Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democratic nominee for gov, who somehow manages to spend 30 seconds of film time in the shower without being sensual or pathetic.”

In other words, The Atlantic’s Tumblr, like its media-led peers, reads a bit like the world itself: messy and arbitrary and yet, somehow, sensical. There’s an internal logic to it — but one based on the core illogic of, simply, “what’s interesting.” There’s a good amount of madness…with very little method in it.

And that’s the point.

“If our approach is anything, it’s just experimental,” says J.J. Gould, TheAtlantic.com’s deputy online editor, who’s helping to think through the outlet’s Tumblr presence. The goal is to interact with the quirky new platform — to get to know its rules and rhythm and tones — and go from there. Sure, “we should be smart in the way we approach Tumblr as we aspire to be smart in the way we approach anything,” he says. “But it’s not something that needs to be over-thought.”

So will The Atlantic’s Tumblr end up looking like The Economist’s (a slick affair filled with crisp images and content curated mostly from the magazine’s own website)? Or will it be more like Newsweek’s (which, even after the departure of former-proprietor Mark Coatney, remains witty and snarky and, in feeling if not in branding, separate from its parent outlet)? Or something in between?

Again: TBD.

And, again: that’s okay. In fact, that’s how it should be. The newness — and, as of now, the relative unknown-ness — of Tumblr offers a certain freedom for media outlets concerned, now more than ever, with the demands of their brands. “One of the things we’re interested in is just the question of what a media institution with a 153-year-old history might be able to do with Tumblr that it can’t do with other things,” Gould says. Tumblr, he notes, is “to some extent a different medium — it plays differently. That’s what’s awesome about it.” Newsweek’s Coatney-led account, the (yeah, I’m going to say it) trailblazing Tumblr, established the freewheeling-because-separate (and separate-because-freewheeling) relationship between the Tumblog and its parent outlet — and that assumption of separateness is one that other outlets are now benefiting from. Coatney recalled for me the leniency he received from his higher-ups at the then-still-WaPo-owned magazine: “Experiment. Do whatever you want. Don’t embarrass us too much. And see how it goes.”

That’s the attitude that has come to characterize the Tumblr accounts of even The Most Serious News Organizations. “I don’t think the Tumblr is something that one needs to or even should bring too much strategy to,” Gould says. “You should just sort of learn what it is, and learn what works well.” And that process, undertaken with a platform whose very infrastructure encourages caprice, requires a level of lightheartedness. Sure, The Atlantic can use its Tumblr to push Atlantic content — people who are following the magazine on Tumblr, Gould points out, are presumably also interested in the work it produces — but, ultimately, “we’re interested in approaching Tumblr as its own thing.”

The broader interest is one you don’t often hear discussed in the rarefied air of our national magazines-of-ideas, but one that could stand to get a little more traction in that world: in a word, whimsy. “We certainly think it looks like a lot of fun,” Gould says of his magazine’s new platform. Tumblr’s family status — both of the brand, but independent of it — makes it an ideal platform for, among other things, finding out where that fun fits into the new world we’re forging. Tumblr’s rapid growth, Gould notes, “says something to us. It’s speaking to people in some way.”

Update: This post originally said that The Atlantic’s Tumblr “doesn’t employ Peter Vidani’s free — and quite popular — Atlantic theme.” In fact, that’s exactly the theme it uses. Sorry, Peter! (And thanks, J.J., for pointing out the error.)