That’s journalist and author Rory O’Connor’s nice way of telling big, traditional media companies that clinging to the power of their brands isn’t necessarily going to keep them afloat. As the lines between big brands, microbrands and personal brands keep blurring, O’Connor says expectations about brand value are changing.

“The very notion of what a brand is is being radically stretched,” O’Connor told me. “We’re in an age where we’re all told that we have to create our personal brand… so we have to begin to question what that very word ‘brand’ means. It meant something large and rather expansive, and I think we’re moving away from that.”

In his new book, Friends, Followers and the Future, O’Connor explores the intersection of social media, politics, traditional media and big brands. At one point, he details Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt’s controversial 2008 comments about the Internet as a cesspool where lies thrive like bacteria, and brands serve to “sort out the cesspool.”

“People like Eric Schmidt, they’re clinging to brand power as the solution,” O’Connor told me. “That the Internet is a cesspool of information is so wrongheaded as to be laughable. To say the Internet is a cesspool of information is like saying you can’t trust the telephone system because peope tell lies over it. It’s just the medium. The people who are legacy media who are clinging to this idea that brands are how you sort out this cesspool, as Eric Schmidt put it, are exhibiting all of the foresight of an ostrich.”

Schmidt’s not alone. O’Connor says he got a similarly brand-oriented response when he interviewed Paul Slavin, former senior vice president of the digital operation at ABC News.

“Paul Slavin, I asked him, I thought, a very point-blank question: ‘Why should people trust ABC News?’” O’Connor said. “He was flabbergasted. He was almost speechless. He took it as some pejorative attack. After he stopped sputtering he said, ‘Because we’re ABC News.’”

I asked Slavin about the exchange, and he said that he still believes “big brands are enhanced in this period” of media uncertainty. (Also: “As a rule, I don’t sputter,” he said with a laugh, describing his pause in the interview as a “moment of reflection” instead. It’s worth noting that Slavin is now general manager of Everyday Health, an online consortium of health coverage and information. His goal there is to increase brand power as part of Everyday Health’s “attempt to become a larger media company.” Does he miss working for a traditional media company? “No.”)

“I still maintain that The New York Times or ABC or the Washington Post, those media brands still have power in the marketplace,” Slavin told me. “It’s possible that others can very rapidly though social media learn to trust someone, and a brand can very rapidly evolve to have the power it took ABC decades to get. It doesn’t diminish the big, old brands. It just means they have more competition. They have to experiment and play in the same space as the new media people are playing in. They have to be willing to try different things. They have to be willing to share their content more aggressively.”

O’Connor argues that the power of a familiar news organization’s name — even a big, well-known, long-since-established name — has all but disintegrated as social structures based on self-organization have emerged. He sees traditional big media as dinosaurs that happen to be “still trampling around” at the beginning of an information revolution that will get even messier and more chaotic than it has already been.

O’Connor says the death of a major daily newspaper would be significant only historically, not practically. “We’re there,” he said. “We’ve already witnessed, if you will, the death of the homepage.” He’s referring to the growth of social media, which is driving higher numbers of readers to websites. (Many major, traditional news brands still get most web traffic through the front door but those numbers are changing.)

In his latest book, O’Connor quotes the Berkman Center’s Yochai Benkler — as quoted in The New York Times — describing a generation of 20- and 30-somethings who are accustomed to self-organizing: “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

In some ways, Friends, Followers and the Future reads like a sequel to Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody. That was the year O’Connor started the research for his book, a process he began with an assumption about the future of journalism that he now says he realizes was “rooted in ignorance.” At the time, O’Connor says he was biased against algorithms and “the idea that a machine would be able to play a useful role” when it comes to navigating a “crowded and chaotic news and information environment.”

“From a distance of four years it almost seems obvious,” O’Connor said. “But at the time, not only was it not obvious but it was something that was challenged by traditional journalists. But I went out there and talked not only to tech people but academic researchers and they reassured me that in fact [machines] can and they will do better. They’re in their infancy, and they will get more sophisticated.”

Put more bluntly, O’Connor says he believes that if there’s anything a machine can do that a journalist is doing, the machine should be doing it instead.

“It frees the journalists,” O’Connor said. “It’s similar with publishers. Clay Shirky said publishers have been replaced with a button…and they get very freaked out with good reason. But my message to them was the same: Anything that a publisher can do that a button can do should be done by a button. Focus on value-added.”

But also focus on getting it right. O’Connor says trust is the “No. 1 issue facing all of us” — meaning both professional journalists and people looking for accurate news and information — and that reporters need to remember their core values. You know, “make a phone call or two” before retweeting one another.  

“They’re so afraid they’re going to be scooped but they’re not bothering to check,” he said. “That’s precisely the kind of behavior that’s going to lead to poor performance, and diminished trust, and the breakdown of their brand. That’s how it works.”

By O’Connor’s measure, we’re at the very beginning stages of an information revolution that may end with us relying on filters that haven’t been invented yet.

“We’re in, like, Week 1,” he said. “Revolutions are messy and chaotic. They’re messy, and things get broken. There are winners and losers, and the outcome is uncertain. The outcome depends a large measure on what people actually do, and how they work, and whether they take responsibility. That includes the people formerly known as the audience. We do need these shortcuts and filters to assist us with the sheer volume of news and information. It is too much. But it’s not enough just to sit back and point fingers.”

Ninety-nine years ago this month, when Igor Stravinsky’s violent and inharmonious “Rite of Spring” debuted in Paris, legend has it a riot broke out. This, this! — the dissonant chords, the grotesque choreography — was unlike any performance the crowd had experienced before. There was shouting. Then fist fights. The police came. Chaos.¹

That’s pretty much exactly what happened when New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary live-tweeted her own speech in Boston last month. She was talking at BU’s NarrativeArc conference about digitally addictive storytelling, a topic itself interesting to Nieman Lab readers. As slides appeared on the big screen behind Amy O’Leary, @amyoleary would somehow — magically — tweet out expertly compressed summaries of her ideas, right on cue. They were live footnotes, a real-time narrative surprise.

@karaoehler @amyoleary Amy,you’re causing a tear in the keynoting-tweeting/space-time continuum & thoroughly freaking out audience members.

— Joe Mahoney (@fotozilla) March 25, 2012

Okay, it wasn’t a riot. But “I was surprised by how many people said they were freaked out by it,” she told me. “A bunch of people just thought it was some kind of crazy mind control. To me it wasn’t terribly complex.”

But it was pretty smart. How she did it: The night before the talk, O’Leary tried to configure a simple script for Apple’s Keynote that would fire a tweet as soon as a slide slid. Wrap the desired tweet inside a [twitter] tag in the presenter’s notes and voilà. But the hotel wifi was shaky and she couldn’t get it to work. (Actually, the problem was probably this.) So she pre-wrote all of her tweets and handed them off to a couple of friends in the audience, who fired off each one when the corresponding slide appeared.

O’Leary did not explain what she was up to. “It was funny because I had inadvertently left the Twitter beacon sound on my iPad on during the talk,” she said. “So at one point I remember laughing, thanking people for retweeting me because it was making so much noise.”

As long as speakers have given speeches, audiences have talked about them in the backchannel. In the olden days, the backchannel might have the Parisian elite whispering to each other in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913. Then Twitter came along and it was like everyone looked around and realized, whoa, we can all whisper to each other now. Now matter how well-composed a speech or sound the ideas, people are bound to utterly mischaracterize you on Twitter.

Some speakers got hip to the backchannel and decided to embrace it. They might begin a speech with “The hash tag for my talk is…” The most intrepid display the backchannel conversation on a screen behind them, sometimes with disastrous results.

Matt Richtel’s “Your Brain on Computers” Series from the NYT nyti.ms/9PBfYa #NarrativeArc

— Amy O’Leary (@amyoleary) March 25, 2012

O’Leary took the next logical step: She got into the back channel.

She gives a lot of these talks and often finds herself with this sinking feeling that people will have missed the point. “I just feel like the public record of it was much more blunt and less subtle than I’d intended,” she said. “So this was basically my stab at trying to correct that record in advance.”

It’s hard to capture subtle ideas quickly, and in 140 characters, especially if you’re listening and composing at the same time. O’Leary had the luxury of crafting each tweet in advance, serving the audience a sort of template for retweets, a framing for the live blogs. It worked. “This is the first time I left a speech and felt like all the tweets I saw afterward were a good reflection of what I was trying to say.” (See her Storify compilation.)

She also sees it as a service to people who are engaged and want to learn more. “It’s a way to kind of show your work and provide people with a record of your sources while you’re talking,” she said.

O’Leary says she’ll try this again at her next talk, in June, at the Reporter Forum in Hamburg.

And, by the way, she’s totally fine with people disagreeing with her work or thinking she’s full of it. O’Leary just wants representation in the backchannel. If only Stravinsky had had been able to jump into the #rite13 conversation…but then, he probably would have started the riot.

1. It’s quite possible none of that actually happened.

In the same way Twitter asks “what’s happening,” n0tice poses the question “what’s happening near you,” and on any given day that could include updates on Olympics-related road closures, public meeting notices or a recipe for a cocktail to celebrate the queen’s jubilee.

In releasing an API for n0tice, the Guardian is inviting businesses, journalists, and others to find new uses for all of the information residents are searching for and sharing every day. “It feels like we’re sitting on this huge bundle of potential and it’s just a matter of continuing to execute,”Matt McAllister, the Guardian’s director of digital strategy, said in an interview.

It’s probably not a coincidence n0tice asks a similar question to Twitter, both offer a deceptively simple service that has potential to offer more in return. n0tice is your newsfeed, but it’s also your CraigsList. And like CraigsList n0tice is inherently local. If you come to the site via desktop it asks you where you are, on the phone it uses GPS to determine your location. Though most of the n0tice activity takes place in the UK, you can find noticeboards internationally. “We’re certainly working with a new paradigm for users experience, where location is navigation,” he said.

The Guardian sees that as a kind of utility that has value to readers, but also to a broader network of developers who can build new tools, visualizations and applications. They’re launching the API now because they’ve built up a small but active user base and are looking to grow further, McAllister said.

The API can help with that in some ways by exposing n0tice to more people in new incarnations. The Guardian has been using the n0tice API internally for crowdmapping projects, including their coverage of the summer Olympics. As the the games’ symbolic flame makes its way to London, the Guardian is using n0tice to help map the torch route. Using an automated feed of photos and text updates from local n0tice users, those submissions supplement stories and multimedia the Guardian is already producing for the Olympics, McAllister said. “The torch route is quite fun because it just ticks a lot of our boxes,” McAllister said.

At least several of those boxes are marked “open” or “open source,” which is no surprise given the Guardian’s stated commitment to what they call open journalism. n0tice serves many needs, one for the locals as a means of connecting through news or activities, but also a need for the Guardian to continue to show what open journalism means.

The API is a clear invitation for people to wrench on the data coming through n0tice and explore what an open journalism project could look like. The Guardian is using projects like the torch map as an example for what the platform is capable of. McAllister said a company in the UK is planning to launch a branded campaign using the API soon. More than 700 noticeboards have been launched since the project started in late 2011, and most people are still discovering new uses for the platform. Though people are finding new uses for n0tice, McAllister said they’re mirroring habits from other services, essentially as another place to link to a blog or Tweet.

McAllister said the hope is for people to use the boards to cultivate public spaces they share with others. The more boards created, the richer the API becomes. “It comes down to an openness question,” he said. “When you can let go a bit and let a community run with the space you created then amazing things can start to happen.”

This is why the boards offer users a lot of ownership, they can customize their own branding and subdomain. They also can moderate the activity on the board. Another benefit to owners is the potential to make money with their noticeboards through ads, specifically having advertisers pay for prominent placement on boards.

With the n0tice site running and the addition of the API, McAllister said the next part of the trilogy is rolling out an iPhone app. While the site works well in mobile browsers, he said they wanted to create a unique app experience that can take advantage of the relationship between where you are and what’s happening around you. “When you’re holding a device location has much more meaning,” he said.

When reporters use social media for crowdsourcing, they’re often just cold calling in the form of a passing tweet — Did you lose your house to foreclosure? Were you the victim of discrimination in the workplace? Have you ever donated your eggs? Contact me for a story I’m working on!

ProPublica takes a warmer approach with its recently formed Patient Harm Community Facebook group. Here’s the question that ProPublica poses to the group: “Were you or a loved one harmed in a hospital? Have you seen this happen to someone else? This is a place to learn, share resources and connect with others.”

The reporters who created the Facebook group described their goals in a post to the website Monday afternoon:

With Facebook, we want to build a community of people — patients as well as doctors, nurses, regulators and health-care executives and others — who are interested in discussing patient harm, its causes and solutions…Please join us. Share your story, ask questions and provide your perspective with other members. Your contribution may help shape our reporting.

ProPublica’s hosts encourage civil, respectful discussion. “Behave in this community as if you were at a dinner party with 10 of your closest friends and family members,” they wrote in a post connected to the group. ProPublica also published explanations for why they started the group in the first place, as well as resources for those patients who have been harmed.

Reporters Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce are moderating the discussion, which Allen says will likely be a vehicle for his reporting on issues related to patient harm. He’s already reached out to some of the 175 people participating in the group, but he emphasizes that the group is its own stand-alone project. By creating a group that exists away from ProPublica, the news organization is facilitating a discussion that its reporters can tap into, but also one that participants can make their own.

“Social media creates a new layer of vulnerability for a reporter compared with what we do traditionally, which is less personal.”

Allen calls it a form of service journalism, “not so much by putting them in touch with us, but more by putting them in touch with one another.” That’s particularly important given the sensitivity of the subject matter, which Allen knows well. In his introduction to the group, he writes that he has interviewed more than 100 patients harmed in medical facilities — and often their family members because the patient is dead.

“When I talk to them, they all feel very alone,” Allen said. “It’s a very isolating experience. They often don’t know where to complain, or what they can do to protect other people…Another value for us is to listen.”

And he hopes other journalists will listen, too, saying they are welcomed to join the group and reach out to participants for their own stories. Maybe the greatest value would be the participation of lawmakers, or hospital CEOs, people who have the power to make changes that will improve patient care. But the key to this project is seeing the Facebook group as complete in and of itself. If it takes on a life of its own, that’s okay by ProPublica.

“It doesn’t need to be something else,” Allen said. “Our intent doesn’t have to be to mine it for sources.”

There’s also a potential benefit in using a third-party site as the platform. While the discussion may be hosted by reporters, Facebook is somewhat neutral territory, and participants are as prominent as hosts in discussion on the group’s wall.

“Social media creates a new layer of vulnerability for a reporter compared with what we do traditionally, which is less personal,” Allen said. “Even for people in the health care community, they can come here and they can see who I am, and see what kind of perspective we’re putting forward on these different types of issues.”

Mainly, Allen says he sees the group as an experiment that people will respond to because it’s framed openly and transparently. And that jibes with ProPublica’s larger social media strategy. At its core is the idea that journalists are not the only ones who can deliver important information, and traditional articles aren’t always the best distribution channel.

“A lot of times the readers are the ones who can deliver that information,” the site’s social media editor, Daniel Victor, told me. “Trust is a huge issue, especially when you think about [it] on a sourcing level. A lot of people aren’t going to trust a reporter they don’t know or a publication they don’t know. To me, I think people are much more willing to trust each other. But we can make the incentive: Meet people like you, discuss this with people like you.”

“Apps,” in this context, means interactive, data-driven visualizations of the news on any platform. The network was already creating these — Poisoned Places, The Fracking Boom — but with resources scattered across departments.

The new team is seven people, including Boyer, Matt Stiles, who has done database reporting for NPR’s StateImpact project and who was the founding data apps editor for the Texas Tribune, three staff designers, and two yet-to-be-filled positions. (They’re hiring, which means more great Brian Boyer job postings.)

It hardly seems strange anymore that NPR dropped “radio” from its name.

“For a long time text was a multimedia challenge for a news organiation like NPR,” said Mark Stencel, the managing editor for digital news and Boyer’s new boss. “What we’ve been able to add over the past several years is this visual storytelling…whether that’s amazing photography or video or now really robust data-driven interactive graphics and document presentations.”

News apps are the next logical step. In an interview, Boyer described the last 10 years of multimedia journalism as an “expensive conceit,” a way for news organizations to put sounds and pictures on a screen and say they’re doing something new. He feels strongly — and says so at many a conference — that multimedia journalism should be useful, not just pretty.

“I like pretty things, don’t get me wrong,” Boyer said. “I always like to make the point that I like art but I like craft more.”

Take the Chicago Tribune’s recent story about high-rise buildings that fail fire codes. “I could have made a map. And we could have made a timeline. And those would have been interesting and explanatory in some way,” Boyer said.

“I want to give people a place people can look at to see if their house is safe,” he said.

Boyer’s challenge will be in scaling up these experiences to reach a national audience. That includes working with member stations to build customized, localized versions of news apps.

“I’m a project manager masquerading as a programmer masquerading as a journalist,” Boyer said, summing up the life of anyone building news apps. He wants to create “a really rigorous process that involves user testing, that involves being ready to change things if they stink, if they don’t work, that involves failing fast and iterating toward something.” To put it in journo-friendly terms: “You could call it inverted-pyramid style of development. If you run out of time, you cut off the bottom.”

Boyer will also help NPR move into responsive web design, something Boyer has been doing at the Tribune. For example, open the Tribune’s recent story on flame retardants and resize your browser window. The elements adapt gracefully to any screen size. “The challenge that everybody in the news apps business is facing right now,” Stencel said, “is figuring out how to make these experiences work beyond Web classic, how to get them into the handheld and tablet space, which is where our future is.”

For those of you following Boyer’s PANDA Project, it continues operating as an IRE initiative (independent of Tribune), and Boyer will remain involved part-time. (The project’s 2011 Knight News Challenge grant expires in four months.)

Boyer starts work May 28 July 9. We should see job postings in the next few weeks.

MinnPost’s new Bill Explorer tool accomplishes this with some data visualization and geolocation thrown in for good measure. The Bill Explorer is a spin on bill-tracker applications that a number of news organizations, watchdog groups — not to mention state legislatures and Congress — have developed to give people a sense of what their elected officials are up to. The Bill Explorer is something of a Frankenstein project, combining data from numerous sources: some directly from Minnesota Legislature bill index, some from the Minnesota governor’s office, and some scraped from state government websites.

I emailed Kaeti Hinck, MinnPost’s director of News Technology, and she said the Bill Explorer needed to work both for policy wonks and for average readers. “Our primary audience is civic-minded people who care about state politics in Minnesota. A majority of our readers come to MinnPost for our politics and policy coverage — it’s our bread and butter,” she said.

The Bill Explorer gives the duration of days it took a bill to be vetoed or become law, as well as vote totals and the names of sponsors. Individual senators and representatives get a rundown of votes on specific bills. Since the language around state house bills can sometimes be dense, MinnPost created broad categories to help readers zero in on what they’re looking for. To give a sense of what took up the most attention, the categories (business and economy, education, and so on) are in bubbles sized accordingly to the number of bills in the session. They also threw in a big red “controversial” category for things like recently passed bill approving public funding for a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings (SKOL! It’s a Vikings thing, trust me).

Hinck said the project took two and a half weeks from start to finish, working while many bills were still in limbo during the session. They anticipated having less time to work with, but votes got dragged on, allowing for additional time. Still, they would have launched the app earlier had the session ended on time. “With apps like this, we take an iterative approach: We’ll do as much as possible in the time frame, and launch the project on deadline even if it doesn’t have every feature we were hoping to build,” she said.

One of the biggest obstacles was the fact that the data collection. There’s no API for the Minnesota Legislature, so they had to piece together what they wanted through various sources, including the Sunlight Foundation’s Open States API. They also had to use ScraperWiki grab information like roll call votes from the legislature’s website and vetoes from the governor’s site. (For a more detailed account of how they built the app — which included some Python and a lot of JavaScript — read their write-up.) Hinck said the Bill Explorer builds on their experience from other data projects, like the “partisan lean” map they developed after legislative redistricting took place. With a project with this much information and moving parts, Hinck said it’s important to have a clear plan in mind. “You need to start by asking, ‘Who is our audience?’ and ‘What are we trying to solve here?’ Sometimes it involves analysis and investigation, and other times it’s simply making the data accessible and searchable,” she said.

Hinck said MinnPost’s tech team has spent time this year trying to better align the editorial and interactive process so projects can be produced more efficiently. They made the code available on Github for others to play with. Hinck said that’s standard practice for most of their projects.

“In my mind, it’s just part and parcel of being in the data journalism community. We’ve learned so much from the great work that others are doing — Chicago Tribune, ProPublica, and WNYC, to name a few — that we want to contribute what we can, as well,” she said.

Bissinger is probably best known for his books, which he says he was inspired to write after his year as a Nieman Fellow. He wrote best sellers like Friday Night Lights and A Prayer for the City, and is out with a memoir this summer. (In certain corners of the Internet, he’s best known for his 2008 televised blowup with Deadspin’s Will Leitch on the merits of blogging and new media, for which he later apologized, or for his invective-laden Twitter account.)

First and foremost, he’s a reporter — he hated his stint as an editor, he says — and earlier this year he wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell for leading a group of investors interested in buying Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers. (Ultimately, Rendell backed out of the investment group, which finalized the purchase last month.)

Here’s a partial transcript from Bissinger’s visit.

On the sale of the Philadelphia Inquirer

I knew Rendell, and I knew the team he had put together, and I thought it would be a blithering disaster far beyond what other papers have had to do. I mean, I understand developers have bought papers, and Warren Buffett bought a paper…[With Rendell] you have a former governor, mayor, arguably the most powerful person in the state — and I’m not saying this to be facetious, probably was [the most important person] since Joe Paterno had died — running a paper, making editorial policy.

And not only that. It wasn’t simply a matter of what Ed decided to do, it would be the thousands of people who would call Ed, every f—king day, because they would hear a rumor — and I know Ed, he would be very susceptible, sometimes out of kindness sometimes out of whatever, protecting someone, and I just felt the influence he would have had over the paper…it would be a disaster. This was the worst-case scenario of a paper being taken over. It would be local leadership, but you could not have a former governor or mayor running a paper.

So I wrote [the op-ed], so reaction was predictable. Journalists loved it. I understood that…I actually think it did have something to do with it because increasingly there was increasing criticism and Rendell actually dropped out. I think he realized that this was just going to be a can of worms that he did not want to get involved in. Every day, someone would be saying the coverage had been be slanted one way or the other by Rendell’s influence.

The consortium that bought it does include George Norcross, who’s a very powerful politician, and [former New Jersey Nets owner] Lewis Katz, who I’ve never really trusted. Norcross did do something that I actually did admire. He wrote a sort of public letter and signed it, and said I will not in any way influence coverage of the paper whether it involves me, any of my companies, or any of my family. And if he sticks to that, you know, I think that’s good.

So right now you can’t really tell. They brought back Bill Marimow as the editor. Bill is a wonderful editor. Whether or not Bill is right — because Bill is very old-fashioned and papers are changing, papers need to change — and whether that type of old-fashioned editor is good for the paper, I don’t know.

On entering journalism in the 1970s

What was great about journalism when I entered it — it was literally, really, right after Watergate, it was 1976 — papers were hot. Papers were making money. But beyond that, they all wanted investigative reporting. They all wanted long-form reporting. So when I was at the Norfolk Ledger Star, I was doing 125-inch stories as a kid reporter. Even there, I began to learn narrative, how to tell a story. When I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I wrote 35,000-word stories. You know, seven full pages in the paper.

So even before [working at the Philadelphia] Inquirer, the tools of interviewing, the tools of developing character, the tools of telling a story, the tools of drawing the reader in were things that, you know, I had already learned. They were certainly honed at the Inquirer, which gave a tremendous amount of time to stories. And also by the stimulation, which for me was good and bad, of being around other reporters, who really were superb. [Former Philadelphia Inquirer Editor] Gene Roberts is a complex man, and he was great at the Inquirer. He wasn’t so great at The New York Times. He did [say], and it’s a nice aphorism but I think it’s true, which is the key to reporting is to zig while everyone else zags.

On the turmoil of the printed word

I was never an expert but I don’t follow newspapers as closely. I think, and this is a generalization, I think the writing is not very good a lot of the times. A lot of it is fewer copy editors, fewer editors, the 24-hour cycle which I never had to deal with. You’re writing for the web, you’re writing for this, you’re writing for that, you’re updating here, you’re updating there. So I think the writing has really gone down, and that was one thing that was really coveted at the Inquirer.

Are papers — some papers — still doing good investigative reporting? I think that’s the case. But they just, papers don’t have the same relevance. Of course neither do books. Neither do magazines. I don’t really know where we are headed. The book businesses — every portion of the printed word is in turmoil. News holes are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But you know what, a lot of good things are still being done. And I think it all depends still on the editor.

On what gets lost in the editing process

Newspaper editors are very cautious — too cautious. One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant — as it goes up the food chain, one editor after another, after another, after another, and what happens is it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie. I think it’s better if you just stick with one editor. But none of us know what the future is going to be.

I still think papers can be great places to work at. They’re different beasts now but you know what, you’re in good company or bad company. So are magazines. I write for Vanity Fair which doesn’t have nearly the buzz that it once had. You almost never hear anything about it anymore…These are scary times. I can’t predict.

On why newspapers need to innovate

Papers have to think out of the box. It’s hard for journalists to think out of the box. One of the reasons I left print journalism was because I got a little bit bored of being reined in. But they have to — and they still may fail — but they have to. What I worry about the most is — because there’s been so much negative that’s been written — that readers have just said, ‘Well, f—k it. They’re dead.’ And I’ll tell you, if they die, our world will be a hell of a lot different. A hell of a lot different. We’ll have no news. You know, we’ll have these little websites, but we’ll have no news, and we’ll have no vigilance, and we’ll have no reporting of any kind, and it will be f—king chaos. That’s just more than a tragedy. That’s a social disaster.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo laid out the picture of how that ad blitz might begin, but Facebook’s inevitable ad ramp-up took a hit already this week when The Wall Street Journal reported that GM plans to pull all of its ads from Facebook, saying they just don’t work. Web marketer Rex Hammock noticed a couple of interesting points from the story: First, GM pays other companies three times what it spends on Facebook ads to market through Facebook’s “free” channels — Facebook-related marketing dollars that Facebook isn’t getting. Second, if GM is spending .05% of its ad budget on Facebook and thinks that’s too much, Facebook will have an extremely difficult time capturing a significant share of the overall ad market.

But All Things D’s Peter Kafka said there’s a lot of evidence GM’s social media marketing failure was GM’s, not Facebook’s, and argued that Facebook is big enough that it might not have to get advertising figured out to make gobs of money off of it. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici and Robert Hof made similar points, with Bercovici noting that other automakers are doing just fine with Facebook ads and Hof saying companies have work to do in learning to adjust their marketing to social media.

Others put the onus on Facebook: Nate Elliot of Forrester said Facebook needs to take its features for marketers as seriously as it does its features for users. And tech investor Chris Dixon argued that Facebook is behind the eight-ball when it comes to advertising — while Google gets a lot of its ad revenue based on consumers who are already intending to buy something, Facebook users are generally just socializing. “You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.” Like Dixon, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram urged Facebook to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertising.

Meanwhile, an AP-CNBC poll revealed more trouble, finding that more than half of Facebook users don’t trust the company to keep their data private and wouldn’t feel safe conducting financial transactions there. SiliconBeat’s Chris O’Brien reflected on the idea that many Facebook users seem to cast themselves as the victims of its addictive powers rather than fans of the company. Interestingly, Twitter’s favorability numbers in the poll were even lower than Facebook’s, a finding Forbes’ Kashmir Hill tried to explain.

Knowledge Graph and “disintermediating the web”: Google had an announcement of its own this week — not nearly as big as Facebook’s IPO, but pretty big nonetheless. The company launched its Knowledge Graph, which provides basic facts about search queries alongside search results. As usual, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has the definitive take on Google’s new feature — he called it a bigger change to Google search than he anticipated and looked at the traffic impact on publishers who typically provide those facts. (Google assured him that the information provided will lead users to do more exploring, keeping traffic strong, but he said it’s something to keep an eye on.)

Several observers were quite impressed. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois called it Google’s most ambitious move yet toward putting its semantic search knowledge to use, and ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell praised Google for making a big search change that had nothing to do with Google+ or its attempts at social media, describing the Knowledge Graph as “a kind of search that would have made the old Google proud.” Christopher Dawson of ZDNet said the Knowledge Graph is made possible by the data from Google’s privacy policy change earlier this year, and the improvement in search quality is well worth that change.

Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web explored the other side of this change: Every time Google gives you information directly, it’s not taking you to a page it’s indexed, but instead is acting as a content provider, rather than a conduit. He compared it to the way Apple’s Siri relies on partnerships with Wolfram Alpha and Yelp to bypass Google, and said, “Google has begun the disintermediation of the web, but it’s starting small.” GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts also saw in Knowledge Graph a bid to get users to spend more time on its own pages and fewer on other people’s, and PC Mag’s Mark Hachman looked at the feature as a response to a similar recent upgrade to Microsoft’s Bing.

Should everyone learn to code?: The movement to encourage average non-developers, particularly journalists, to learn to code has gained quite a bit of momentum over the past year or two, and a dissenting voice drew a lot of attention this week. Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood made the case against having non-professionals learn programming, arguing, among other things, that the “everyone should learn to code” movement “assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems.”

The post provoked a set of sharp responses from across the programming and developing communities. If you want to dive deep into the discussion, you can check out this Y Combinator thread. Several others disagreed with Atwood’s point: One Github poster argued that Atwood falsely conflated learning to code for personal and professional reasons, and expounded on the value of learning to code as a form of digital literacy. Zed Shaw of Learn Code the Hard Way asserted that Atwood’s post was rooted in professional resentment of a flood of new coders.

Ilya Liechtenstein of MixRank explained how teaching herself to code helped give her insight into how the technical side of her startup works and what to work toward, and French designer Sacha Greif said learning to code is an extremely empowering exercise. App developer Gina Trapani did agree with one big part of Atwood’s post, affirming his argument that software development is about finding solutions, not coding.

Twitter’s emailed digests: Twitter made a bit of news this week, too: It announced a new partnership with ESPN to create custom campaigns for various brands built around sporting events, and also announced that it’s allowing users to opt not be tracked. The announcement that got the most publicity, though, was the launch of a new weekly “Best of Twitter” email sent to users.

TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler wondered about whether the weekly email would outlast the shelf life of a tweet, though All Things D’s Mike Isaac countered that this could be a smart way to help teach newcomers how to navigate Twitter’s sometimes confusing interface and get the most out of the platform. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said Twitter continues to toe the line between serving and competing with media companies, and AllTwitter’s Mary Long pointed out that we’re now seeing what Twitter did with Summify, the startup it bought in January.

More criminal charges for News Corp.: The investigation into News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal pushes on with one important development this week, as Rebekah Brooks, the former head of the company’s British newspaper division, was charged with perverting the course of justice over allegations that she tried to hide evidence from investigators. Her husband and four others were also charged. The couple was defiant, with Charlie Brooks saying his wife was the “subject of a witch hunt.”

Before her charge came down, Brooks testified last Friday to the British government’s Leveson Inquiry, which was summarized well by The New York Times. Here in the States, Free Press’ Tim Karr criticized Congress and the FCC for not challenging News Corp., and the Times’ Ravi Somaiya gave a bird’s-eye view of the case.

Reading roundup: Here’s what else you might have missed in the past week:

— Toronto’s Globe and Mail announced plans for an online paywall, prompting GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram (a former Globe and Mail journalist) and Dave Winer to express their problems with paywalls.

— A couple of other important pieces of news from the newspaper industry: Just months after buying the Omaha World-Herald, Warren Buffett plunged a lot deeper into newspapers, buying 63 dailies and weeklies from Media General (Dan Conover has a sharp analysis), and former CBS digital head (and MarketWatch founder) Larry Kramer was named USA Today’s publisher. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon looked back at Kramer’s past statements about how the newsroom should be rethought.

— ‘Tis the season of commencement speeches, and Andrew Beaujon chronicled the speeches given by journalists across the U.S., while Free Press’ Josh Stearns challenged Ted Koppel’s assertion in one of those speeches that Twitter is a neutral tool. Stearns also followed up with a critique of what he called Koppel’s concern with “hindsight journalism.”

— A few interesting or helpful pieces to leave you with: AP journalist Jonathan Stray did some more thinking about his “solution journalism” concept — specifically, agreeing on the problems; media scholar Alfred Hermida talked to Craig Silverman about verification on Twitter; and Digital First’s Steve Buttry gave his guidelines for aggregation — link, attribute, and add value.

Facebook “meh” button by Ken Murphy and Spanish BASIC code by Beatriz Martin used under a Creative Commons license.

About six months ago, Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall had a realization.

It was something that had been bouncing around in his head for a while, but only then was he sure: It was time to formally deconstruct the idea of TPM as a website first — even though it was a website first, some 12 years ago when he started it.

“If someone were to ask me a year ago, I would have said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re not just a website — it’s this, and we have that, and the other.’ But I think it was when I saw mobile growing as fast as it was that it just sort of hit me at a different level,” Marshall told me. “Inevitably, as long as mobile was something like five percent of traffic, it was just something you made available on the side. But you start to see, this is going to be half of our audience. We can’t be approaching it in a way that the website is the thing, and we’re making imitations of it — because this thing is losing its primacy. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t until late last year that it hit me at a different level. It hit me as more than a concept. It was really true.”

“My only question is at what point tablets overtake smartphones.”

As of late March, mobile — smartphones and tablets — accounted for 19 percent of TPM traffic. By early May, when I sat down with Marshall in his New York office, mobile traffic to TPM had passed the 20 percent mark.

“I don’t have much doubt that that number will be 30 or 40 percent in the next year or two,” Marshall said. “My only question is at what point tablets overtake smartphones.”

So what does this realization mean, from a practical standpoint, for TPM?

“More than anything else we had to shift our own thinking, because that was constraining with how you do things on mobile,” Marshall said. “Realizing that TPM is not a website — it’s a bundle of knowledge and expertise and ongoing coverage that exists inherently on no particular platform, and we are consitently trying to find ways to make it adaptable on as many platforms as possible.”

But the rethinking process also means rejecting the idea that TPM content can be one-size-fits-all, which deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer calls “a game-changer for all publishers.”

“We’re giving a lot of thought to three different kinds of consumption: Active consumption being at the desktop, on-the-go consumption being on your mobile phone, and passive consumption being in your bed, on your tablet, something like that,” Schweitzer said. “For me, it’s literally about the physical way you’re doing it. You can certainly actively consume at all of those different places but when you’re reclining, looking at a beautiful visual on an iPad, it’s very different than being on a mobile phone or sitting at a desktop.”

It’s with this kind of thinking that TPM is approaching its election-year coverage, and another expansion planned for next year. In June, TPM is set to launch some new “basic features to make election coverage awesome.” Over the course of the next year, Marshall says they’ll roll out “some mobile-only stuff” (and that’s as specific as he’ll get for the time being). In 2013, you can expect new verticals that will fall broadly into categories like business, technology, and telecommunications. The mobile shift is also a driving factor behind TPM’s decision to return big to video after scaling back in the past.

“There are some places that video can go that text can’t, and there are times of the day that you watch things,” Marshall said in a later conversation. “We’re taking that bundle of ever-evolving knowlege and expertise and putting it into a video format. It’s all part of that same rethink…That’s the core reason we’re making such a push back.”

With the launch this month of weekly mini-shows like The Set-Up (Mondays), Polltracker Crosstabs (Wednesdays), and The Wrap (Fridays), TPM is delivering bite-sized news and analysis with the quality production sheen that some smaller news outfits forgo.

Each show is about three minutes long, which Marshall says is the “logical attention span.” Here’s an example:

“These are supposed to be quick updates on contained questions, so we think that’s sort of the sweet spot,” Marshall said. “We’ll do some longer than that…but we think that’s sort of the normal length. You don’t write a 5,000-word op-ed in The New York Times, and you don’t write a 300-word profile in the New Yorker.”

Political coverage is TPM’s bread and butter, so as the election season progresses, Marshall says there will be more and different kinds of video. That includes live video from conventions and election night, as well as video interviews with newsmakers. Marshall says he’s been wanting to get TPM back into video for years.

“We were heavily involved in original video in 2007 and 2008,” Marshall said in an email after our initial interview. “I did a daily show for almost two years. The reason we ramped back was because it was a strain on our staff capacity — there were many fewer of us back then — and we didn’t feel like the video ad market was mature enough for us to effectively monetize it. Now makes sense basically because both things have now changed. We have a much more robust video production capacity now. So it’s not so deeply reliant on me the way it used to be. The other part of the equation is monetization. Certainly lots of sites have been running pre-roll for a long time. But until relatively recently, the market for pre-roll for us was just spotty.”

In recent months, that’s changed “dramatically,” Marshall says. After growing his staff in recent years, he now has a combined force of 28 full-timers between TPM’s New York and Washington offices, and the ad revenue is available to help foot the bill. (Most videos are preceded by 15-second pre-roll ads.)

“If you look at the third-party studies that ad agencies look at, there’s just a lot of great data about how much more powerful pre-roll advertising is,” Marshall said. “Basically one of the big triggers why we’ve moved ahead [with video] is because — whereas in the past the market for pre-roll video was kind of inconsistent, now it is very different. Even in the last six months, it’s changed.”

Yet video ad revenue remains a relatively small piece of the pie, and Marshall says he expects it will stay that way because “so much of endemic advertising is non-video, the things on pages.” He views the growth of mobile and video as simultaneous more than causal, but both drive home the same point for him: News organizations need to embrace the idea that “disruption is the norm now,” and explore content distribution through multiple channels.

“Hypothetically, if you have, say, six basic platforms and maybe one of them accounts for 75 percent of your revenue — as a publisher, you don’t know how that mix is going to evolve as things go forward,” Marshall said. “In the same way that mobile has gone from low single-digits up to almost a quarter of our audience, it’s very important to have good profit margins and a good model across a bunch of platforms because you wouldn’t want the platform that you have not invested in to be the one that people go crazy for. That would be perilous.”

What’s the difference between being informed and being educated?

What’s the line between learning something new and being taught something new?

Are news media and universities just two ways to do the same thing: gain knowledge?

As Coursera, Udacity, edX, and several other offerings begin to unravel everything we thought we knew about post-secondary education, we can’t help but make links to the world of news.

You gotta love the geeky name that applies to this new hybrid for-profit/nonprofit industry: MOOCs, or massively open online courses.

For top-rank universities, the embrace of online education promises to be transformational, upending many of the millennium–old rules of academe, as education, learning, certification, payment for services, and measurement of teaching effectiveness all inevitably succumb to major rethinks. For daily newspapers, themselves becoming mainly digital news products ever more quickly, it’s a time ripe for redefinition, for declaring new and expanded roles as the digital age removes long-ago built barriers — some real, some always imaginary.

At first glance, the question of whether professors and journalists are in the same business seems almost absurd, doesn’t it? We know what a college is, and we know what a newspaper is. One’s got ivy-covered walls, demands on-site instruction, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and grants certificates of completion, or degrees. The other is a physical, throwaway product that until lately cost a quarter a day and now can go at the top end — in print — for $650 a year. No prizes are awarded for reading daily — or for 50 years.

Online, though, these historic differences seem to fade rather quickly. We read to learn, whether it’s a course on European history or the latest twists and turns of current European economic drama. Greek tragedies of two different era. We read to understand and make sense of things.

What indeed, then, might media’s greater role in society be, and how can it now harness technology to multiply its impact? MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, among others, are wandering into that territory — testing the reach of technology — without knowing where their travels will take them in this terra incognita. We know that news media may be well suited to new educational roles. Why? It’s what we produce — information and perspective, building blocks of learning — and it’s what we believe when we talk about “public service.”

This emerging blur between media and education joins others. In its mischievous disruption, that’s much of what digital does. It blurs.

As the tablet makes mincemeat of the historic differences among newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, we see another bright line ready to dim: that seeming line between what a news organization and what a college each do. This is still another stopping point for all those leading the craft of journalism into the new age to ask what business we’re really in. What business does it make sense for us to consider, test, or ply? What fits with our mission?

Let’s take “mission” for a moment.

Our history offers lots of punchy “raise hell and print the news” missions. But scratch deeper and you find a commitment to learning and its cousin, community building — one that reaches beyond simply pitching the news.

How about The Wall Street Journal’s simply elegant, “The daily diary of the American dream.” Or: “The Scotsman. It’s thinking time.” Or The Everett (Wash.) Herald: “If It Matters To You, It Matters To Us.”

While we all know about The New York Times’ “All the news that’s fit to print,” consider its deeper declaration: “The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”

Beyond mere words, we can see small educational extensions of the news companies’ basic businesses. Most every paper has participated in Newspaper in Education programs, providing papers and, sometimes, lesson plans for elementary and secondary students. The New York Times sponsors many talks, lectures, and other learning events in the city. Education in the pre-online sense has long been part of its brand, and its Knowledge Network has offered “adult and continuing education opportunities.” Consider the Texas Tribune’s forays in events, both as a business line and a way of extending its journalistic raison d’etre beyond publication. Many newspapers sponsor candidate forums or public debates on an issue.

Largely, though, newsies inhabit an industry focused on the day. We trot out the well used quote, “News is the first rough draft of history,” but we let others make sense — and value — out of the incredible riches of newspaper archives. Let others create courses, connect the dots, and create knowledge. We’ve always been into a snapshot approach to the world. What’s news today lacks sufficient lineage to yesterday — or to tomorrow. We see such innovations as Storify and a few Google efforts (Living Stories, Timeline) that are efforts to connect the dots of news time.

All these efforts, though, are piecemeal, not intended as new ways of gaining mass impact, as in massive — think thousands or hundreds of thousands of people — open online courses.

So in the emerging age of the democratization of education, let’s consider how news companies could rethink their role in news, and education. Let’s call it the newsonomics of News U. [Update: I should have noted Poynter Institute's long-time and well-used News University, sometimes called NewsU, in the original post. The program, headed by Howard Finberg, offers more than 150 courses in journalism and multimedia.]

Coursera, which has gotten a huge amount of press, is more than a collection of online courses. Working with the University of California, Princeton, Penn and, of course, Stanford, the Palo Alto-bred company has pioneered an “interactive online learning system.” Read its near-revolutionary mission statement of this Kleiner Perkins-funded company:

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

What if we take the Coursera’s thoroughly democratizing aspiration and apply it to a modern news media company that wants to stake a greater claim to learning and community as part of its mission?

We are an entrepreneurial company that takes advantage of the best sources of news, information, and knowledge in our area to maximally inform our citizenry, at prices that bring civic literacy to everyone in our community. We envision a future where media and citizens work together, building on fact-based knowledge to better the community and tackle long-standing issues. Our technology enables us to broadly engage community as never before possible in building on community knowledge, feeding the democratic process of debate and decision.

We believe that civic learning and engagement are lifelong pursuits, and we are dedicated to using the most contemporary techniques, technological and otherwise, to empower people to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities in which they live.

Too high-minded? Or is that simply another way of saying, with the aid of technology, what The Guardian, Journal, and Times first said more than a century ago?

What’s increasingly possible here — recognized by the pioneering elite educational institutions, but available to media institutions as well — is the ability to both increase the institutional reach of their brands and to provide transformational learning opportunities at small incremental cost.

Few traditional media have the know-how internally. One fascinating exception: U.K.-based Pearson. It owns the global Financial Times news franchise, Pearson Education is a leading K-12 publisher, and Penguin Books is positioning itself well to extend ebook links between “media” and “education.” While at Pearson, the press and the educational press share a home, most media will have to partner to test forays into learning, or to position themselves as Pearson does as “always learning.”

Beyond high-minded mission statements, what are some practical ways we can test media/education links? How about these to start:

• Build on in-depth series you’ve done or have in the works. Think of “courses” as an extension of the work. Pulitzer- (and other award-) winning series are naturals here and can take students into environmental science, health policy, hydrology, engineering, sociology, business management, and history, just to name a few academic areas.
• Take a page from One Book projects, in which communities settle on single books to read and discuss, by trying One Series courses that try to achieve maximum community reach. Topics like immigration, bullying and water planning come to mind, will draw new audiences.
• Add courses to the kinds of community engagement initiatives such companies as Digital First Media (and Steve Buttry, its leader in that area) are championing.
• Match up burgeoning ebooks initiatives (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”) to coursework. Sell the book; provide the course at a low cost? Local history courses are a natural here.
• Think next-gen Newspaper in Education program. While some newspapers put real effort in bringing the news alive in the classroom, many long regarded it as just another way to add a percentage point or three to circulation numbers. What would a digitally revitalized, 2012 NIE program look like?
• Membership programs — think “you’re more than a subscriber to me” — are all the rage from Boston to L.A. Membership needs to have some real benefits, and news-based learning opportunities can be among them.

So where do media companies look for partners?

Consider that this is much more than putting words into lesson plans, or creating education replicas of news products. At the MIT/Harvard-based edX, video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and much peer interaction. So these new MOOC companies themselves could be partners.

Other natural partners would be educators themselves, as school districts and community colleges, as well as the bigger, more prestigious colleges in the forefront of this movement.

The Knight Foundation — the funding pacesetter of the new journalism — should be of help. Its DNA is media and community-building. Just last Friday, Knight’s Eric Newton challenged journalism school educators to adopt a “teaching hospital” model to create greater community engagement and betterment. If transformative technology needs to be applied to enable media to become educators as well, maybe Knight would be a source of aid.

So where is the money here? Is there a business model to be found? The facile Silicon Valley answer may seem unpalatable to current newspaper company owners: Become more essential to people, and the money will follow. And what can be more essential, and more relationship-building, than lifelong education?

We see three other major web concepts in the business thinking of the MOOC founders: freemium, gathering data, and aggregation.

On business model, most MOOC courses are free to students at this point, a wonderful price point that brings in lots of customers, er, students.

On data, Coursera’s goal is to “analyze student data to obtain a better understanding of online pedagogy and student learning…and understand human learning at a scale and depth that has been never been possible before.” Think of the power of that data.

On aggregation, look at edX’s statement about the project, “The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.” Become the go-to source, globally, nationally or locally for something people value, and the digital world rewards you.

One other way we can look at building value and revenue here. Let’s take the prism of manufacturing. Publishers manufacture content (and ads), use it for a single purpose — the paper, the site — and then discard it. News is a raw resource, whose value is poorly amplified; better for publishers to move up the food chain and find higher-end uses for it in the creation of learning and knowledge.

Establishing new relationships and deepening old ones should create a future pipeline for products and services still to be born.

Forget Udacity — let’s think audacity. The audacity to think, in spite of news organizations’ shrinkage, they can make a larger, not smaller, contribution to their readers and communities.

Many non-profits, like NPR, like to tell the public that they are “mission-driven organizations,” words, I assume, that are meant to separate them from profit-seeking media. With news media profitability now only achieved by keeping the scalpel handy and well-oiled, the profit line works less as a defining difference. More important may be that, in comparison, much legacy news media seems mission-free. It still exists, but in economic decline harbors increasing doubt about its own purpose. With self-doubt and its apparent clout receding, it has grown less clear about its role in democracy, rather than more clear.

Maybe a mission-based exhortation to adapt the technologies of the day to further community education, engagement and civic problem-solving is a tonic for the deepening media malaise.

Let’s let The Guardian’s C.P. Scott bring us full circle, reconnecting journalism and education.

Scott’s clear-eyed, pre-cable, pre-web view of what journalists — and educators — do rings even more important today: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred. ‘Propaganda’, so called, by this means is hateful.” In fact, one of the greatest shared values of the news and education industries is that both are fact-based enterprises, operating against longer odds as misinformation and disinformation can be funded on a different massive scale.

In 1921, he wrote:

A newspaper has two sides to it…It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.

“Want to keep mobile users engaged longer?” I wrote a year ago. “Just add audio.”

Flipboard, the popular “social magazine” for the iPad and iPhone, already enjoys high user engagement. As of January the app has been downloaded eight million times, the company says, and users spend an average of 90 minutes per month with it. (It’s no Globo, but that’s a solid number.)

Now Flipboard’s smorgasbord of lean-back content gets a big addition: audio. This week’s update brings in content from NPR, PRI, and a host of independent podcast producers by way of the social audio platform SoundCloud. And if past data is any indication, audio could keep users “flipping” a lot longer.

Most users of NPR’s mobile apps never listen to audio, but those who do consume twice as much content as people only reading text. In other words, users who play an audio story are likely to read more articles. On average, according to data from January–mid-April 2011, audio streamers racked up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd. Same ratio for iPad users: Listeners viewed 8.1 pages per visit, while readers view 3.9 pages. (I have asked NPR for updated numbers; watch this space.)

It makes sense: Audio is the perfect multitasking medium. In the updated Flipboard app, I can hit play on the latest episode of The Dinner Party and continue flipping through articles. Why wouldn’t I want an aural accompaniment?

The partnership fits with NPR CEO Gary Knell’s vision of “radio everywhere,” as public radio braces for a future beyond the terrestrial broadcast. (See also: Infinite Player, the connected car.)

And because Flipboard promotes discovery of new content, with channels that can be customized to users’ tastes, lesser-known productions may get more attention. When I select the “Audio” tab on Flipboard, I see Roman Mars’ independent program 99% Invisible next to public-radio powerhouse Fresh Air. I also see Snoop Dogg, one of SoundCloud’s featured users.

SoundCloud has spent the past year investing in partnerships with public radio and other providers of non-music content. The company wants to be for audio what YouTube is for video: part hard drive in the sky, part community, the place everyone goes to upload sound when they need to embed or share it.

In a statement, Flipboard founder Mike McCue said the addition of SoundCloud is an example of “how Flipboard makes social content a more discoverable and more immersive experience.”

It’s also an example of Flipboard’s more-is-more approach to serving users, who have come to expect an overabundance of choice.

Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his 8 questions that will define the future of journalism.

On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues. Below you’ll find the full video of his talk.

“I do feel these are extraordinary times. I do feel that we in a sense are at the beginnings of a renaissance with regards to journalism,” he said. “I know that’s hard for many people to hear given the pain of the disruption to the traditional sources.”

Nearly 17 million Americans have reached voting age in the four years since the last presidential election cycle. This year’s pool of youth voters includes 46 million people in the United States, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. But the youth vote is notoriously elusive.

Even in 2008, when young people turned out in huge numbers and the under-30 vote tipped the scales for Barack Obama in some key swing states, youth turnout still clocked in below the record-high of 55.4 percent in 1972. In the 2010 midterms, turnout among young voters dipped slightly below where it was in 2006. There’s also a significant education gap — 26 percentage points in 2008 — that shows college students vote in much higher numbers than young people not enrolled in college.

Surveyed about why they opt out of voting, eligible youth consistently say that they aren’t interested in politics. Other common explanations for staying away from the ballot box: Being too busy, turned off by political vitriol, or just forgetful.

Taking cues from fantasy football, MTV is partnering with a group of news organizations on a game they hope will engage youth with elective politics. The network has long experimented with ways to engage young voters, but this year it’s trading citizen journalism — in 2008, MTV picked one correspondent in each state and D.C. to cover the presidential race — for a gamification approach to elections coverage.

“Millennials are increasingly viewing life through a game lens, even just [using] #winning or #fail,” Jason Rzepka, MTV’s vice president of public affairs, told me. “Game vernacular has become a part of youth vernacular. By putting that competitive layer on top of it — a lot of people are inherently competitive, so if the path to winning is being informed, there could be a really great civic benefit.”

MTV is using a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant to launch a beta version of Fantasy Election ’12 this summer, with a formal public launch on Sept. 1. Here’s how the game works: Players and their friends sign up to compete against one another in a league. Each player drafts a 12-person team made up of Congressional and presidential candidates. When the candidates on your virtual team do well in real life, you get points. If the candidates on your team are faltering, you have the opportunity to trade them. The game emphasizes mobile — players using smartphones can check stats from their phones, receive push notifications about candidate performance, and check into various campaign-related events from anywhere.

In fantasy sports, performance is based on real-life statistics — touchdowns, RBIs, goals scored — whereas measuring political gains is rarely as straightforward. In an attempt to quantify political performance in as objective a way possible, game developers opted to focus on data. Here are some of the measures that MTV will track:

— A candidate’s willingness to take Project Vote Smart’s Political Courage Test, which gets them on-record about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion

— Aggregated polling data from Real Clear Politics

— Fact checks from PolitiFact

— Frequency of Twitter and Facebook activity as a way to gauge engagement with potential constituents

— Civility as tracked by the Wesleyan Media Project, which analyzes all broadcast ads aired by or on behalf of candidates in every media market

— Funding disclosure as monitored by the Center for Responsive Politics

Fantasy Election ’12 players rack up points if a candidate on his or her roster says something rated “true” by PolitiFact, fills out the Political Courage Test, runs positive campaign ads, etc.

“When the candidates do good, you do good,” Rzepka says. “And when you get a push notification that says [Republican Sen. Chuck] Grassley just told a baldfaced lie, and got a ‘pants on fire’ [rating] from PolitiFact, you’re going to say, ‘Oh man, I’ve got to drop this guy.’” (For the record, Grassley’s never been so rated.)

There are plenty of ways to pick apart MTV’s measures as imperfect. Some candidates are fact-checked more than others. Fact checkers, like refs, don’t always make the right call. Relying on polling data arguably discourages critical thinking by voters — and so on. But the structure of the game is built around using data as much as possible as a way to minimize subjectivity.

“We pay a lot of attention to data, and we think the rise of data is really important especially as we’ve lost population in newsrooms,” said Michael Maness, the Knight Foundation’s vice president of journalism and media innovation. “Anything that involves money is quantifiable as a data set and is less subjective.” (Full disclosure: This site is also a Knight grantee.)

There are other ways that Fantasy Election ’12 players can rack up points — like by registering to vote, and by using social geography apps to “check in” to watching debates, for example. The goal is to engage players with the election process in real time, and to draw in those who have been put off by elective politics as “too densely packed with jargon” or otherwise “impenetrable,” Rzepka says.

The decision to go with gamification over citizen journalism is a reflection of how the news industry has evolved since 2008. In the same way that a youth-only town hall meeting was a landmark move by MTV in 1992 but breaks no new ground today, MTV’s citizen journalism experiment made sense four years ago more than it would now.

“When that was conceived and announced, the idea of citizen journalism was still relatively novel,” Rzepka said. “I think we learned a lot about the potential and the pitfalls for that kind of approach…We did see a lot of great content developed by those young contributors, but I think we also realized with this cycle that more isn’t necessarily better.”

Instead, MTV hopes it can help demystify the election for as many people as possible. Rzepka says the network wants to help young voters break down the key issues and come to conclusions themselves — the goal isn’t to tell people how to vote, but to help them figure out how to decide for themselves. (And while the game is targeted for teens and twentysomethings, grownups can play, too. We asked.)

If all goes as planned, the result of the game will be a real-life election that features higher participation from youth and encourages real-life candidates to be civil, transparent and honest. That’s what makes the name Fantasy Election a double entendre — the “fantasy” refers to the nature of the game, but also the real-world outcome that game developers are hoping to see.

“It’s pretty pie-in-the-sky,” Rzepka says. “It’s a moon shot.”

Scott Kidder, director of editorial operations at Gawker Media, tweeted his indignation this morning when he found himself forced to share an Adweek article via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ if he wanted to read beyond the opening few paragraphs. (The rest of the story was blocked by grey boxes, as you see above.)

He posted a screen shot of the offending prompt and the Tumblr community had its say: “god, this reeks of desperation,” opined jenawithonen. “if you can’t get people to read your articles, write better articles.” The outrage! Combined with the recent blowback against frictionless sharing and Facebook social readers — which put a somewhat similar must-share wall between the reader and the content — it seemed like a new way that media companies were trying to forcibly convert their audiences into promotional devices.

Actually, it was probably an error.

Adweek employs Google’s Consumer Surveys program (an experiment we first reported on last November), a sort of paywall substitute. Adweek embeds Google’s mini surveys in articles; Google pays Adweek for each completed survey. Adweek opts to provide survey alternatives, such as sharing the article on social media. (Max irony: You can see the “survey wall” in action by reading Adweek’s own article about it.)

In this case, the survey question didn’t fire — leaving only the alternative, sharing the article. (We looked at several dozen Adweek articles and couldn’t replicate the must-share interface. Each time, sharing was one option for access, along with a survey.)

A Google spokesperson provided this statement:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

So Kidder’s negative experience seems to have been the result of a bug, not a feature, with Adweek playing the role of unwitting host. (I reached out to Adweek for comment but haven’t heard back yet.)

Even if it turned out to be an error, the reaction from readers is instructive (see the responses on Kidder’s Tumblr post). There are creative ways to monetize online content, but tipping the scales into user-hostile territory risks a damaging backlash.

Update: Google now says it has pushed code to fix the problem.

Three years later, PubliCola is gone. Last week, Feit announced that the site was going out of business because ad revenue “has been limited and inconsistent.” PubliCola had an audience, though — about 400,000 monthly pageviews during political season. So what went wrong?

Feit said the main problems came on the business side and could be grouped under a single heading: a lack of scale and infrastructure to execute commercial ideas and to follow up on promising projects. Let’s go through some examples:

Advertising execution: PubliCola’s plan to bring in advertisers in never took off because, Feit thinks, the effort was erratic. Because of their small scale, advertising sometimes had a full-time dedicated staffer, sometimes only a part-timer, and sometimes no one at all.

“Our intent was to go after the lobbying firms that were promoting issues in the state capitol…the people who wanted to be seen by politicians and leaders,” he said. PubliCola was read in the “cubicles of power”: aides and staff at the capitol, city hall, and even U.S. Senate offices. “That was something we were doing editorially that was attractive to advertisers, but we didn’t execute very well on the advertising side,” Feit said.

Execution on events: Civic debates were one thing PubliCola was really interested in covering and in promoting. The site organized three debates (one of them about a controversial tunnel) which were “incredibly successful”, according to Feit. Unfortunately, PubliCola was unable to keep up with the business opportunities that type of events offered: “There were moments when we were picking up steam and I don’t think we were able to follow through.”

Lack of planning: Being a two-person operation played against the site’s sustainability as a business. Feit and Barnett wore many hats and ultimately were caught up in the day-to-day mayhem. “We didn’t have a long-term editorial and business calendar, which is pretty basic,” he said.

Experimenting: The site flirted with the idea of charging for some content, like a paid newsletter with more in-depth features, or giving access to detailed data from polls published by the site: “The problem with that was, again, there were only two of us doing the reporting, so I don’t know if we could’ve delivered.” What about a paywall? “The New York Times route,” as Feit calls it, was never an option because he felt it would go against the site’s mission: news for the public.

One thing that PubliCola did experiment with was widening its focus, covering more beats than just local politics. The move was intended to lure advertisers related to other topics like music, books, culture, and crime. “We tried the general-interest approach and quickly backed away from it,” Feit said. “It was a mistake.”

Instead, Feit and Erica Barnett, PubliCola’s other reporter, will be joining a general-interest site rather than expanding into one. They will continue writing PubliCola’s two most successful columns, Morning Fizz and Afternoon Jolt, for fellow Seattle site Crosscut.com. The reporters will be on contract while their new bosses explore if they can get funding to make the positions permanent.

Crosscut describes itself as “a general-interest news site, with coverage ranging over politics, business, arts and lifestyle, and the world of ideas.” It once, like PubliCola, operated as a for-profit company, but it became a nonprofit in 2009 as a way to keep the site up and running.

“We did think about it [switching PubliCola to a nonprofit model],” Feit told me, “but we ultimately ruled it out because our sense was, right or wrong, that it somehow might make the product less lively and exciting.” He acknowledged that the model allows more revenue stream through memberships, grants and social advertising, but said he believed it could also “de-energizes” the reporting. (Does that mean that their journalism will be less “energetic,” now that it will run on the nonprofit Crosscut? No, Feit rushed to clarify. “They [Crosscut.com] want to add our voice and they want to preserve it. I’m excited to be in that mix,” he adds.)

“Where’s Gasper? We might need him.”

There’s an empty chair where Christopher Gasper should be. It’s at a news desk set against a green screen in the studio where Boston Sports Live will go on the air at noon in about 15 minutes. This studio is inside The Boston Globe — just off the newsroom, to be exact, and Gasper, a sportswriter, is probably somewhere between his other desk and this one. It’s a Monday, the second week the Globe has been producing the live online sports show, which aims to capitalize on the city’s deep and intense relationship with sports.

Which means there’s no shortage of material the three days a week the show airs on Boston.com. Today feels like a particularly robust day in Boston sports: a big win from the Celtics in the NBA Playoffs, yet another meltdown from the suddenly hapless Red Sox (in 17 innings, no less), and the retirement of a member of several Patriots Super Bowl teams.

In the last two hours, Alan Miller and his small team have been prepping for noon. While the needs of the moment are slotting the B-roll footage and fixing the sound levels, the team is still learning the ropes when it comes to producing something TV-like. It helps that Miller, the Globe’s director of video initiatives, comes with almost 20 years of TV expertise producing shows for local broadcasters.

This, though, aims to be a little different: The Globe wants the gloss and precision of TV, but the interactivity and reach of the web. So not only does this team have to work on smoothing out the transitions between show blocks and massaging graphics, they’re also trying to make sure their live chats are surfacing enough questions and that the livestream works on various devices.

Of course, right now, they’d just like it if the host was at his desk.

“He’s here — he’s in the building,” Miller says. He’s jokey and loose with just a hint of urgency. “Everyone’s in the building and we’re ready to play internet TV.”

Since their earliest moves onto the web, newspapers have been trying to figure out video — to figure out how best to take advantage of the higher engagement (and higher ad rates) that video promises. The Globe is no different, producing video packages to accompany stories, movie reviews, gadget reviews, and interviews with politicians and athletes. They’ve been nominated, and won, regional Emmy awards for their online video.

What’s been more elusive is live video. Caleb Solomon, the Globe’s managing editor, told me live video was the logical next step, something that could be used on scene (for breaking news, press conferences, and so on) or as appointment viewing. In the last year, they started to get more ambitious with their live video, having journalists report from the New Hampshire Republican primary and Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis. One of their biggest moments was the retirement of Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek in March, which gave the site its largest viewer numbers for a live video ever (though they wouldn’t share specifics). For a live online show, there may be no better time than noon, which is when traffic on Boston.com peaks, Solomon said.

Sports and video seemed like a no-brainer, particularly because the Globe, like many newspapers around the country, has invested in prepping their journalists for TV. It’s not difficult to find Globe reporters, particularly sports reporters, on ESPN or regional cable channels like NESN and NECN. A live, online sports show would capture that in-house talent for the Globe instead of a partner and help drive audiences to Boston.com, a site that lost some of its newspaper-derived content in last fall’s launch of sister site BostonGlobe.com.

After months of talking it over, the JetBlue sponsorship meant the show was accelerating fast — like trying-to-outrun-an-avalanche fast.

But video is not cheap, especially if you want to make it look good. “We’ve been looking at live video for a long time now and, like so much of what goes on with video technology, the price came down to the point where we could do it in good way,” Solomon said.

A breakthrough came in the form of JetBlue looking for more advertising opportunities with the Globe. With sponsorship money in the bank, Boston Sports Live quickly started taking shape. A set, in the studio off the photography department, was constructed. They also purchased a NewTek TriCaster — essentially a TV control room in a box, that allows for multiple camera angles, customizable graphics, video compositing, and HD streaming. For the Globe, one of the TriCaster’s advantages is its ability to build virtual sets. Once those green drapes are down, the host and the guest could be anywhere, the moon, the White House, a zoo. They went with something more modest, a studio overlooking Fenway. After months of talking it over, the JetBlue sponsorship meant the show was accelerating fast — like trying-to-outrun-an-avalanche fast. “It’s amazing. It shows the quality of people in this building, being able to put together a studio and TV show in 6 days,” Miller said.

TV stations have satellite trucks. These guys are relying on wifi and a Dropbox account.

It’s 11 a.m. and Patriots offensive tackle Matt Light is officially retiring after 11 seasons and five Super Bowls. He’s also running 30 minutes behind when he was supposed to start. This has Miller and Ed Medina, the Globe’s director of multimedia, slightly worried. Light’s retirement is scheduled in the rundown of today’s show, which starts in about an hour. Meanwhile, down in Foxborough, Globe videographer Scott LaPierre is filming the press conference. Had things gone according to the original plan, LaPierre would shoot the event, send a short clip to the newsroom and the footage would make the noon show. That process is routine for TV stations. Of course, TV stations have satellite trucks. These guys are relying on wifi and a Dropbox account. Considering all they need is a 20-30 second clip, the window of opportunity might still be open. LaPierre just has to get a 3-5 minute clip into Dropbox, which would then have to be downloaded and edited. Best case scenario: The clip gets deposited 30-45 minutes before the show. Anything less wouldn’t make it and they’d go without. Miller’s optimistic, Medina’s skeptical. “If it doesn’t finish uploading till 11:45, that’s too late,” Medina says.

In the still evolving world of the show, Miller is the producer/director, Medina is technical director, and Steve Silva, a sports producer for Boston.com, is graphics editor. This morning, Silva’s been busy hunting down and piecing together shots of Doc Rivers, Paul Pierce, Matt Light, Bill Belichick, and Clay Buchholz. Medina been spending his time trying to finesse the virtual set and reduce some of the fuzziness you see when people are placed against the green screen. Medina is embracing incremental improvements. “You missed the baby being born,” he told me. “Now we’re at the nursing stage.”

If there is a trick to making Boston Sports Live work, it’s going to be nurturing a new habit from the audience, namely getting them to watch a 15-20 minute show online. Capturing the mid-day, sitting-at-your-desk-with-a-sandwich audience is a step in that direction. They also want a level of engagement through live chats and viewer questions, pulled off email, Twitter, and Facebook. These things will take time — again, incrementalism. Medina said they need to merge the excitement of live, breaking stories with a sense of reliability to form a habit in viewers. “You can’t deny breaking news video or the effect a big event has on your traffic,” he said. “This is different. This is more like appointment-based TV viewing.” Even though the show is online-native, they also want some of the look and feel of TV. It conveys a sense of professionalism, but also familiarity for viewers. “The better we get at this, the harder it will be to tell the difference” between TV and online video, Medina said.

Around 11:20, Miller’s phone rings. “Hey Scott, how’s it going,” he says, walking out of the studio. A few minutes later, he’s back with news from Foxborough. “We’re not gonna get Scott’s stuff. It’s gonna take too long to download,” he says. “We gave it a shot.”

Gasper made it with 12 minutes to spare, followed shortly after by Chad Finn, another Globe writer guesting today to talk Sox, Celtics, and Pats. Miller goes over the rundown and script with them, pointing out potential pitfalls, some of which they’ll hit over the next 20 minutes. When Gasper can’t pull up audience questions on his iPad, Miller feeds them to him through an earpiece. Also, at one point the top of Finn’s head goes missing. Medina has to fix the unfortunate crop by adjusting the camera live.

What may matter more at this point is getting the production routine right. After all, the material will more or less take care of itself. This is Boston: Sports draw heat no matter what takes place on the field. In order for the show to work, to grow an audience and to attract sponsors, they’ll need consistency. These are the things that carry over from TV, the unavoidable similarities that will factor into the Globe’s success or favor.

Of course it’s not exactly TV either, something they’ll all be reminded of daily. Just after the clock hits noon, the studio is dark and quiet as Miller gets off the phone: “We’re up on the home page. Everyone standby.”

Last November I wrote about Dan Schultz and his Truth Goggles, a piece of software he’s developing in partnership with PolitiFact that highlights suspicious claims in news articles. It’s as simple as spellcheck.

Now, as Schultz finalizes his graduate thesis at the MIT Media Lab, he’s conducting a user study to understand how people (anonymously) respond to a prototype of the tool. It’s our first look at the software in action, and he wants you to give it a try.

Here’s how it works. First you’re asked to evaluate the veracity of several statements. “Over 40 percent of children born in America are born out of wedlock.” “Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent.” No Googling; you have 20 seconds for each claim.

Next you’re asked to read actual news articles that contain claims in PolitiFact’s database. In “highlight mode,” the claim in question is unobtrusively highlighted; click the text for PolitiFact’s evaluation. In “goggles mode,” all of the text that follows the first highlighted claim is blurred out, making it impossible to read on without engaging the claim first. In “safe mode,” all highlighted phrases are blocked out, forcing the user to reveal each one by one.

Finally, you’re shown many of the same claims again — this time without the goggles — and asked to rate their trueness. Schultz wants to see whether his software influences the way people process information and make conclusions.

“All of the current interface prototypes are walking different lines between theoretical effectiveness and convenience. I’m just as curious as you to see if the interfaces end up creating different degrees of impact in the study environment,” Schultz told me in an email.

I found that the latter two settings, goggles mode and safe mode, focused my attention on phrases I might otherwise have brushed past. Sure, my internal skepticism detector usually starts beeping whenever I see quotation marks, but this exercise also forced me to consider claims in a reporter’s copy — e.g., “About 2.5 million young adults from age 19 to 25 attained health coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act…” — the kind of information I’m more likely to assume is true.

After using the goggles for awhile, it was impossible to read articles without a skepticism bordering on incredulity.

If you don’t want to wade through the study, there’s also a static demo page available. Schultz said the study and the demo are both “canned,” in that he preselected articles he knew to contain claims checked by PolitiFact. “Other than that, it’s using a live working version of Truth Goggles,” he said.

Schultz doesn’t want to talk much yet about the study design, lest he taint the data. “I’ll just say that the results so far appear incredibly interesting,” he said. His thesis, and a working version of the software, should be finished by as early as next week.

Slideshows, Facebook apps, and annoyed readers: After a few weeks revolving around News Corp., the media-watching world seemed to fixate on The Washington Post this week, focusing specifically on two developments: First, Adweek’s Lucia Moses reported that several top Post editors and reporters met with the newspaper’s president, Steve Hills, and that among other things, he urged them to produce more pageview-grabbing slideshows.

The Atlantic Wire’s Alexander Abad-Santos called it “one of the more disturbing things you’ll hear from someone in charge of one America’s best papers,” and his colleague, Alexis Madrigal, further explained the futility of slideshows. Those slideshows, he argued, may be producing more pageviews, but they’re not actually drawing more people. And the people that do read them come away with the feeling that the site doesn’t value them. “People know when your product is cheap; there is no ‘trick’ of the web,” he wrote.

The second development came when Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici reported that the number of users of its Facebook Social Reader had dropped precipitously over the past month or so. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman noticed that a lot of other Facebook social apps have experienced a similar drop, including The Guardian’s, and proposed that the decline might be because the apps just enable too much sharing, even for Facebook: “they felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information.” SF Weekly’s Dan Mitchell agreed, calling the apps “spam, basically.”

But there seemed to be something amiss with such a simple explanation. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter noticed that there was a huge change in most apps’ statistics around April 10, and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine hypothesized that the drop was a result of Facebook’s transition to “Trending Articles,” which made social reader articles much less prominent in users’ news feeds. That theory was confirmed by editors at the Post and the Guardian, as the Lab’s Justin Ellis found.

From this explanation came a different lesson for news orgs — as GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram argued, with a social reader, “Facebook owns you, in the sense that it controls access to your content. It controls who sees it and when, and it controls how it is displayed — or even whether it is displayed.” Sonderman made a similar point and also touched on the user annoyance issue.

Facebook, for its part, countered that engagement on many of its social apps is up, and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon pointed out that even though there was a valid logistical explanation for the user decline, many observers still insisted on sticking to user annoyance as the root cause.

This week, on ‘as AOL turns’: AOL’s been providing us with a steady supply of drama over the past couple of years, and this week came the latest bits of maneuvering: A month after she was reported to have gained more power in an executive reshuffling, Arianna Huffington acknowledged at a conference that her role at AOL has been shrunk back to just The Huffington Post, as The Wall Street Journal reported. (When AOL bought HuffPo, she had been put in charge of all of the site’s editorial content, though some of its brands have since been folded into HuffPo.)

As Huffington told it, she asked for the role reduction as an attempt to focus more specifically on HuffPo and gain more independence for her site. She also said she’d been approached by private-equity firms trying to buy HuffPo from AOL, though she said nothing had come of it. Huffington insisted her relationship with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was fine, but others were skeptical. New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli said it’s tough not to see this as “a crack in the facade of a relationship many believed to be doomed from the start.”

GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram was similarly dubious, and he also explored some possibilities for a HuffPo sale, concluding that Huffington will either take her site private again or end up taking over the whole operation at AOL. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici wondered why AOL doesn’t just sell HuffPo anyway, but reasoned, as Ingram did, that AOL has invested all of its content resources into HuffPo, leaving the company with very little in the way of media if it were to sell. AOL, he argued, overpaid for HuffPo on the premise that it could replicate the site’s model across its other properties, which hasn’t panned out.

AOL also announced its most recent quarterly earnings, which were higher than expected, though one of its key ad metrics was down, and, as All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported, its traffic continues to slide. Meanwhile, PandoDaily (made up largely of ex-TechCrunchers) reported that AOL is shopping TechCrunch and Engadget for $70 million to $100 million. Armstrong denied that, and TechCrunch said the rumors of a sale actually originated from AOL’s aborted plans to spin the two blogs into their own company.

A deepening scandal and rising profits for News Corp.: It was a quieter week for News Corp. after the whirlwind of the last few weeks, but there were a few smaller developments. The company’s British newspaper division missed another deadline for its latest government accounting report, and its second-biggest investor, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, voiced his frustration with the phone hacking scandal’s influence on the company. Here in the States, 70,000 people have signed a petition to ask Congress to investigate the scandal for potential breaches of U.S. law.

Amid all this, News Corp.’s profits keep growing. Its net income grew 47 percent, and its profits, announced this week, beat analysts’ estimates. The company’s costs from the scandal keep soaring, too, hitting $167 million since last summer. The New York Times’ David Carr said News Corp.’s continued profits and its board’s ongoing support of Rupert Murdoch might make him still seem invincible, but he’s still on an irreversible fall. He pinned much of blame for News Corp.’s tone-deafness on the board, saying that “the primary reason Mr. Murdoch has not been held to account is that the board of News Corporation has no independence, little influence and no stomach for confronting its chairman.” Former Times editor Bill Keller, meanwhile, said Murdoch’s greater shame will be Fox News’ pretensions at honest journalism.

Reading roundup: A few smaller stories running a little bit more under the radar this week:

— Jason Pontin of Technology Review wrote a piece on how publishers have grown disillusioned with apps after expecting them to do so much to restore their old business models, concluding regarding his own publication’s app experience: “I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram echoed Pontin’s discontent with apps, and Dave Winer and Doc Searls touted the superiority of rivers of news over apps.

— The New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum documented the frenetic daily routine of Business Insider blogger Joe Weisenthal, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon responded that Weisenthal’s style isn’t something indicative of bloggers in general, but unique to his distinctive personality.

— Finally, Belgian developer Stijn Debrouwere wrote a fantastic post on the astounding number of ways that journalism is being chipped away at by services and sites that aren’t journalistic themselves, but that are being consumed by people instead of news. Give it a read — it’s probably the best piece about the state of journalism yet this year.

Howard Rheingold isn’t too concerned about whether Google is making us stupid or if Facebook is making us lonely. Those kind of criticisms, Rheingold says, miscalculate the ability humans have to change their behavior, particularly when it comes to how we use social media and the Internet more broadly.

“If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool,” Rheingold said Thursday.

Rheingold was visiting the MIT Media Lab to talk about his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which examines how people can use the Internet not just to better themselves, but also society as a whole. Rheingold has a longer online history than most, going back to The WELL, one of the first online forums back in the 1980s. Ever since writing about that experience, Rheingold has developed a habit for dropping the kind of book that not just probes what it means to be online, but charts what that means for all of us.

Net Smart is a book for an era where we’ve moved past just creating online identities and communities, but still have to educate ourselves on how to operate in day-to-day life. Rheingold said he believes a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies.

The fact that those companies have grown so large so quickly has led to as much speculation about their financial futures as their impact on our attention span and privacy. But Rheingold says the analysis often focuses on the potential damages of these new platforms rather than their benefits. “Knowing that something is broken, or that there are costs to it we had not thought of when we first started using it, is not enough to tell you what to do or how to fix it,” he said.

Instead, Rheingold wants to focus on how we use these tools and how users can become more mindful and literate. Net Smart offers up a set of five literacies Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts. As we’ve become more sophisticated in the ways we use the web, we need to adjust how we use it, being able to tell fact from rumor and able to call on the skills and resources of a community to help answer our questions.

What distinguishes Rheingold’s work here is the attention to, well, attention. He’s talking about metacognition, or making ourselves more aware of what we’re doing online. We often divide our attention online, but at any given moment make “micro decisions” about what we’re going to do — write emails for work, watch a YouTube video, get lost in Twitter. Rheingold says we have to connect our attention to our intention and be more aware of how what we’re actively doing relates (or often doesn’t) to what we need. That helps when you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation, but also when you want to find accurate information about a court verdict.

“Finding the best stuff and sharing what we found is one way of improving ourselves, but also improving the commons,” he said.

In that way, attention connects with participation and collaboration. The act of sharing not only builds intelligence but shows good faith in a community. It also has a reinforcing quality; once you go from being a passive part of a community to liking, retweeting, and curating, you increase your activity as well as your value. The act of transforming information into knowledge and making it usable to people will always have value, no matter what platforms exist, Rheingold said.

“The proliferation of media has not stopped — if anything it has gone into hyperdrive,” he said. “If you want to keep up with anything, it’s not about keeping up with technologies, it’s about keeping up with literacies.”

Photo of Rheingold by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license.

“We were amazed,” Pedro Doria, digital platforms editor, told me when we spoke after his presentation at this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism. “We weren’t expecting that much. We didn’t think it would be such a success, but I think that in the end it simply makes sense.”

The numbers, surprising as they were, added up to Doria because they were the result of a deliberate effort to draw tablet users into O Globo content in new and interactive ways.

“The tablet is in that period of time where if we were talking about the web, the background would be gray and links would be either blue or purple.”

“We said we have to do something, and we should do something different, and most importantly we should start editing for the tablet,” Doria said. “Not for the web, not for the newspaper — for the tablet. We should start thinking about this gadget as a thing in itself. A new and different way of doing journalism.”

First, Doria’s eight-person team had to look at the unique ways in which people use tablets. He found people use desktop and laptop computers the most from about 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., while usage shifts toward tablets after work.

“For the tablet, there’s this little peak in the mornings, but after six o’clock it just goes sky high,” he said. That matches other data showing tablets (and let’s be honest, we mean iPads here) have usage patterns similar to the afternoon newspapers of old. O Globo set out to deliver an iPad edition each weekday at 6 p.m., with a longer edition on Fridays.

Next came the bigger question of content. Doria likes to repeat an observation that others have made: Photos may be cheap to produce but they look expensive on an iPad. Peruse through O Globo a Mais’ photos of the day — a regular feature — and you can see what he means, from the pop of President Dilma Rousseff’s red blazer to the shine of the buttons on Prince Charles of Wales’ jacket.

The evening iPad edition also features daily news, videos, original art, and articles about everything from policy and politics to pop culture and history. Each issue ends with a photo from the newspaper’s archives.

O Globo a Mais has the designed, produced feel of a magazine iPad app rather than the templatized, spare feel of many newspaper iPad apps. Stories get a paginated text presentation similar to Esquire’s, and the story-to-story navigation recalls that of Condé Nast’s apps. (It still needs an update for the new Retina display iPad, but that model won’t launch in Brazil until Friday.) For all of the attention that iPad-native The Daily has received for its distinct made-for-the-iPad aesthetic and functionality, O Globo a Mais is stylistically right there with it.

It’s notable, too, because where many magazines have adapted well to tablet presentation, some newspapers have struggled to take full advantage of the medium. All in all, about 550 people work for O Globo’s news operation, and Doria’s team is able to tap into work produced by reporters in other areas of the newsroom for the iPad evening app.

“Because it’s a premium product, the iPad will never publish anything that has been published before,” Doria said. “But after you see it in the iPad, you probably see it in the paper, because it’s good stuff.”

While you might see the same articles in the paper, much of what’s available in the iPad app simply can’t be replicated on other platforms. Single pages are layered with multiple captions, photos and videos. Other interactive features make for an experience that wouldn’t be possible online.

“It’s totally different,” Doria said. “The content is the same, but the experience is different. One of the things we did that made me more happy was this special that we did on this 18th-century paintings and watercolors of Rio 300 years ago, [layered on top of photographs of] how it is now. The experience of the tablet is quite intimate because as you’re spreading your finger across the painting, and suddenly the picture is showing.”

There was a similar feature online in which, using a cursor, readers could slide a vertical bar side-to-side to compare the photos and watercolors.

“It was interesting but it’s simply not as intimate,” Doria said. “It’s so intimate, the relationship you have with the iPad. You start uncovering the picture and seeing, wow, that’s how the city changed in these last 300 years.”

Digital subscribers pay R$29.99 per month (about $16), which includes access to the O Globo app — that’s where you’ll find the new iPad evening edition, along with a print replica of the paper. Existing print subscribers can access the iPad evening edition each day for an additional R$10 (about $5) per month, and non-subscribers can either buy new editions for R$1.99 (about $1) apiece or wait a day until they’re available for free. Doria won’t give concrete figures, but says the number of subscriptions has been growing substantially since the launch of O Globo a Mais — which translates to O Globo Plus.

The three editors who lead the O Globo a Mais team each have decades of journalism experience apiece, a factor that has been “fundamental” to creating a quality product, he said. The most critical components of the app’s early success, Doria says, is having an “integrated newsroom” — meaning great content goes wherever it fits best, and an attitude that no single platform is more important than the other.

“The print edition is as important as the website, and it is as important as the p.m. edition,” he said. “We do journalistic products. We are about producing quality news, quality content. And we should have that same drive looking for quality in whatever product we decide to work on.”

At this point, Doria says O Globo is “only just discovering” what is can provide on the iPad. He also says he has “no doubt whatsoever” that every one of O Globo’s readers will have a tablet in the next five years.

“Right now, the tablet is in that period of time where if we were talking about the web, the background would be gray and links would be either blue or purple,” Doria said. “It’s really the beginning. It will change a lot, but to be in the beginning is to be part of this invention process.”

Photo of O Globo a Mais layout designer Télio Alvarenga courtesy Pedro Doria.

Less than a year and a half after launch, the subscription aggregation startup Ongo — a newspaper-industry effort to create a pan-media subscription system — is shutting down. It’ll close its doors by month’s end, Ongo CEO Dan Haarmann confirmed to me, leaving about 25 people out of work.

Ongo was backed by The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co., and Gannett (at a reported initial investment of $4 million each) and tried to combine the designed, multi-sourced reading experience of Flipboard or Zite with a paywall. It launched with about 20 publications; as it shuts down, it had deals with about 40 publishers and over 100 publications.

From the start, Ongo was hurt by a confusing pricing model. A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post and USA Today — but only “Top Stories” from Reuters, “Selected Content” from the Financial Times, and “Picks” from The New York Times. If you wanted to add more publications beyond the core offerings, those came at significantly varied prices — 99 cents a month for Slate, Salon, or Engadget; $3.99 for the Christian Science Monitor; $9.99 for the Chicago Tribune or The Miami Herald; either 99 cents or $14.99 a month for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, depending on how much of it you wanted; and so on.

Add to that the fact that most of Ongo’s content was available for free on the web — and the fact that many of its news orgs have chosen to focus on building their own paywalls — and Ongo was an uphill struggle from the start.

Haarmann said that Ongo learned some lessons about modern news distribution the hard way. One was the importance of access to closed platforms — including the biggest of them all, Apple’s App Store.

“You have to be on a tablet platform to have success,” he said. “That’s where people are most willing to spend money, so for a paid product, you’re going to have to focus on the mobile side. Apple’s take, from a billing perspective, made it very difficult to succeed in a paid-product space from what we think the pricing should be.”

In other words, if news services want to give users the convenience of being able to buy their product on their iPhones and iPads through iTunes, they have to be willing to give Apple a 30 percent cut. Ongo’s iPad app doesn’t offer in-app purchasing — which means it doesn’t have to pay Apple’s cut, but also that it doesn’t get access to the App Store’s ease-of-payment.

Haarmann also said one thing Ongo learned, “in order to be successful at all in this business, is that social is absolutely critical.”

But it’s important to note that Ongo drew skepticism from media watchers from the start. Its business model rested on the belief that people would value an ad-free, curated experience enough to pay for it, despite both the availability of the (mostly) free web and other free apps like Flipboard. After Ongo’s January 2011 launch, GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram characterized the approach as “another Hail Mary pass aimed at trying to rewind the clock and impose scarcity on media content, and one that will likely fail just as quickly as others have.” (You can read our roundup of early response to the service here.)

In an interview with paidContent last year, Ongo founder Alex Kazim — formerly of eBay and PayPal —  said this of the approach: “We realized that users won’t pay for content — however, they will pay for a better user experience and that’s what we’re really offering.”

So did they?

Ongo tried a number of ways to optimize pricing, including free week and free month deals — even the first year for $1. The early price tag of $6.99 a month gave way to the final offering of $1.99. Haarmann says Ongo didn’t get to that price point “fast enough” to continue running. He wouldn’t immediately disclose the number of Ongo subscribers on Tuesday, but he says there was a strong enough base of supporters to make him believe in the model even after Ongo goes away — and that’s party because he wants it to exist.

“I hate advertising in my news,” Haarmann said. “I cannot stand people trying to send me a mortgage or a credit card. I’ve got two kids, so when a Dora [the Explorer] ad pops up on an article next to interest rates, it just kills me. Not only is it a waste of space but it’s a distraction. The way that interstitials and some of the advertising is pushing through reading experiences even on paid sites, I think, is egregious.”

Understandably, though, he has his doubts. Haarmann says he’d consider working for another news startup, but he might wait “a couple of years” until the industry has figured out “what the business model really is.”

“I do believe in the [Ongo] model,” he said. “Here’s where I’m losing a little faith. I think that it’s going to take a while for the industry to shift gears into the paid world. I think that in the interim they’re going to have to figure out how to balance a product that delivers revenue to help run their business, and one that satisfies a consumer’s need.”

An organization like the Financial Times, he says, is one to watch. Its abandonment of the App Store and move to an HTML5 app has saved them from Apple’s cut and attracted more than 2 million users. In Haarmann’s mind, there isn’t one way to do it that’s better than the other — but he says publishers have to “just take a path and get committed to it.”

“Just get committed to either being in the store and figuring out a business model that allows you to continue to operate, or be out of the store, and that’s not easy to do,” he said. “Apple takes up a lot of air in the room. They have a fantastic distribution platform. But the FT is having success off iTunes, and I think other people can do it, too.”

Readers have grown weary of the invasive, annoying apps! Hurrah! Or: Social readers are not the traffic boosters publishers once thought! Panic!

Or, maybe not. TechCrunch last night wrote that the drop is more likely due to tinkering on Facebook’s part on how shared articles are displayed to friends — specifically, a shift to displaying trending articles on the site rather than a “recently read articles” module. This was backed up by a tweet from the Post’s engagement producer:

Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon – drove growth.

— Ryan Y. Kellett (@rkellett) May 7, 2012

While the Post got most of the attention for its drop in numbers, The Guardian has as least as much skin in the Facebook game. In March Facebook sent more referral traffic to the Guardian than Google — a huge shift. That month, Facebook touted The Guardian as one of the success stories from using the Open Graph, with more than 3.9 million monthly active users, “over half of which are under the age of 25.”

I checked with The Guardian to see how they interpreted the drop — specifically, I asked Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development for the Guardian, who announced the company’s success with Facebook two months ago. Cordrey said over email they expected fluctuating usage patterns from readers, but something had indeed changed recently (emphasis added):

We’re still learning a lot about our Facebook app, and as with all brand new content platforms, we always expect fluctuating degrees of usage. Since our app launched in September last year we have repeatedly seen upswings and downswings in use depending on the type of content being shared by users, and the way that this user activity has been displayed within Facebook. Major changes made in the last month or so by Facebook have indeed resulted in a fall in usage since early April. However, this is not a signal that users are “abandoning” social reader apps, rather that articles which were previously surfaced predominantly in a user’s newsfeed are now much less visible.

Cordrey seems to back up the Post’s argument. (Though at Inside Facebook they found not all publishers are seeing the same decline.) It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook wields that much power, but it does make for a good reminder of the pact media companies make when they attach themselves to any third-party platform in an effort to help reach new audiences or just increase traffic. Google isn’t the only tech giant who can, with a simple internal decision, send a site’s traffic soaring or dropping.

Memes are “the street art of the social web,” says An Xiao Mina, a designer and artist in Los Angeles. But in China, a country that represses speech and the press, the lulz can turn deadly serious.

“Memes are a way of circumventing all the controls out there on the Chinese web,” she told me this weekend. “Not only do they remix fast, they’re very obscure.”

Mina got the attention of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in 2011, when she helped create a community-powered Twitter feed that translates his tweets into English. Ai invited Mina to spend a year working with him.

On the day she arrived, Jan. 12, Chinese authorities had demolished Ai’s Shanghai studio. On April 3, Ai was arrested at the Beijing airport, detained for more than two months without charge.

“Obviously, it was a very scary time. I watched as his name was slowly being stamped out of the Internet,” Mina said, referring to the work of China’s invisible censors. “But soon after that I found myself laughing. It was a very dark humor.”

She stumbled upon “Crack Sunflower Seeds,” an animated video that depicts boys and girls trying to tell the story of a sunflower-seed seller before a black hand sweeps them away. Ai, of course, had become famous for his installation of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds in London’s Tate Modern. The video was a viral hit. You couldn’t talk about Ai Weiwei on Chinese Internet, but you could talk about the ubiquitous Chinese snack food.

“It became a meme for a while, people posting pictures,” Mina told me. Most powerful for her was stumbling upon a lone sunflower seed, spray-painted, in a Beijing alleyway. “It was just kind of there. It was a perfect example of something slipping totally under the noses of anyone who’d be walking by, except for those who were in the know,” she said.

I interviewed Mina after she spoke on a panel titled “Global Lulzes” at this weekend’s ROFLCon III, a conference here in Cambridge dedicated to memes. (Also present: Tron Guy, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, Antoine Dodson, New York Times GIF enthusiast Jenna Wortham, and many other Internet-famous.)

The panel, moderated by Ethan Zuckerman, reminded us that Western meme culture is America-focused. Try showing lolcats to people in China: “They have no idea why this is funny,” Mina told me.

Mina was joined on the panel by Bia Granja of Brazil, who founded youPix, which is apparently the world’s largest conference about memes; and Anas Qtiesh, a U.S.-based Syrian blogger who has studied the memes of Syria’s bloody uprising.

As the panel got underway, I got a breaking-news alert that China had agreed to let Chen Guangcheng, a blind dissident who managed to escape house arrest, study in the United States.

Chen, too, had attracted a cult following on the Chinese Internet. People were posting his picture to Sina Weibo and other Chinese microblogging sites, voicing their support. But that was easy for the censors to pick up.

“But then this artist, Crazy Crab, an anonymous artist, said, Hey everyone, you should send me your pictures of yourself wearing sunglasses, as a way of showing support. People would send him pictures of themselves in sunglasses or blindfolds, and this served many purposes. One was to raise awareness about Chen Guangcheng, two was to show each other that they’re all aware of this,” Mina said.

Mina likens Chinese memes to the slave songs of the American South.

Any one photo of a person in sunglasses is not suspicious, but in aggregate, it’s powerful. That meme was not unlike the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme here in America.

“It’s very unlikely that the people who organized the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme were talking to the people who organized the sunglasses meme in China, because [of] language barriers, cultural differences, the firewall,” she said. It’s almost like “there’s this universal way of meme-ifying a political or social issue.”

She said the meme gave way to flash mobs, masses of people wearing sunglasses in public. Supporters in shades stealthily stood guard outside the hospital where Chen was detained.

Mina provided other examples of issues or stories that led to memes: suffocating smog and the push for clean air; the deadly high-speed train crash of July 2011.

“The obscure humor is actually a protective layer,” Mina said. “A good friend of mine suggested it’s like the slave songs of the South, when the slaves were singing about the underground railroad. It’s hiding in plain sight.”

In a perverse way, the creativity of censorship evasion has made for a richer Chinese Internet.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that people are really into anthropomorphized cats. They’re good for a chuckle, sure, but their popularity gets at the more interesting question of why and how we share online, and what that means for the changing ways in which we engage with all kinds of information, from lolcats to hard news.

Self-described Internet culture connoisseur Ben Huh is probably best known as CEO of Cheezburger, the hub for sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL blog, and Know Your Meme. He’s also a co-founder and board member of the hyped startup Circa, which bills itself as “news, re-imagined,” but has so far kept quiet about how it’s doing the re-imagining. (The site’s expected to formally launch this summer.) For now, there’s this, from its landing page: “Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers.”

I caught up with Huh at ROFLCon, an Internet culture conference at MIT, to ask him about his observations on journalism, and where he thinks the industry is headed.

Take a look at the video game industry, and it’s hard not to think of journalism.

Both built themselves up by controlling their distribution platforms — whether that meant a game console or a newspaper’s printing press — in ways that made competition difficult, maintained pricing power, and generated lots of profits. And both are now being disrupted by “good enough” new competitors that use more open development platforms (the web, the modern app store), run on carry-everywhere mobile devices, and are much, much cheaper. What The Huffington Post is to your local daily, 99-cent Angry Birds or free-to-start Farmville is to the $59 Playstation console game.

Just as the Internet has fundamentally disrupted how we think about journalism, it has deeply rattled the video game industry. We aren’t just seeing a dramatic change to how games are played — on a platform like Facebook rather than on a single-function console like Nintendo, for example — we’re seeing a shift in who is making games in the first place. Sound familiar?

To start to think about the parallels, I caught up with Jesse Schell, CEO and creative director of Schell Games, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. You may also know him from his widely shared 2010 lectures about what he calls the Gamepocalypse, our increasingly gamified reality. The idea is that as games become ubiquitous, they also become more like reality — you can play with your Facebook friends rather than against a computer, or create an avatar that looks like you on the Wii, for example.

“Historically, going back thousands of years, games are a social thing you do with your friends,” Schell said. “We got into a kind of thing for a while where all of the sudden computers made it so people were playing Solitaire a lot. Now that we have networking, people’s game playing behaviors are reverting to what they’ve always been. They’d rather play with their friends.”

He sees the barriers between gaming and reality dissolving — partly because we’re inherently drawn to games, but also because he sees a growing desire for authenticity in an increasingly virtual world as the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred.

So what does any of this have to do with journalism? First, there’s the idea that a desire for authenticity is not limited to gaming. In a 2010 lecture, Schell said he sees people placing increasing value on what’s real — everywhere from reality TV to organic groceries — as the manifestation of a need for authenticity.

All this is happening as barriers between professionals and amateurs are deteriorating, which complicates the question of authenticity in a disrupted industry. Put it this way: If the news industry can’t even agree on what makes a person a journalist, what are the new ways that news consumer will decide what’s real and what’s credible?

“Now that journalism is a much more participatory medium, anybody can step up and say, ‘Here’s my opinon about this now,’” Schell said. “The question is who can we believe? Who can we trust? No one has yet come up with a system that quantifies credibility.”

That’s a dicey proposition, for some of the same reasons that ratings-based fact-checkers can stir such controversy. What would a credibility quantifier look like? Who would judge — or build the algorithm to judge — what’s credible versus what isn’t?

Schell envisions a tightly integrated news operation and social network. “I think there’s a real opportunity for any company that owns both a social network and a news system,” he said. “Whoever owns a social network has the ability to control how you present yourself. If, let’s say, Facebook owns a news system of some kind, and Facebook decided it was based on how you interacted with the news system then it was going to be able to determine, ‘yeah, you are a sports expert,’ or ‘you are an expert on Kuwait’, or ‘you are an expert on whatever.’ And then when I put a post up saying, ‘I think Kuwait is screwed,’ if I can also put up an approved badge that I’m a Kuwait expert, that means something. If The New York Times had bought Facebook, they’d be in a good place right now.”

The idea calls to mind Amazon giving reviewers a special badge for using their real names, or Twitter offering those blue check-marks to verify accounts as official. And it’s worth noting that in Schell’s example, it’s the individual — not the news brand — that’s ranked for credibility.

But none of this gets at the big, enduring business-model problem that the journalism industry faces. Just as the Internet decimated ad revenue in the traditional newsprint model, Facebook games and mobile apps blew up the video game industry’s traditional retail model. Yet the gaming industry is finding workarounds that haven’t emerged in journalism.

“We have the advantage of being able to do all of these crazy business models,” he said. “So like we’ve gotten into this whole space of free-to-play models, where they’re free but if you want to succeed at the game, you want to purchase in-game resources. It’s less obvious to me that it can translate into journalism.”

What can translate, though, is a sense that a sustainable future for the industry will require a multifaceted approach to distribution. The idea that, as Digital First Media editor-in-chief Jim Brady put it, there isn’t going to be a silver bullet — only shrapnel.

“People are trying a zillion different ways of getting people to pay for games, this whole multiplicity,” Schell said. “Many different ones are working well in different contexts. You know, we’ve got everything from 99-cent games to the free-to-play model to subscription-based games. Electronic distribution has allowed for more niche games, and the same thing is true in journalism.”

A critical step, Schell says, is turning the question of how we get people to pay into why people are willing to pay. In other words, what do you need to do — as a video-game developer, a newspaper publisher, etc. — to get someone to rationalize spending money on your product?

In a 2010 lecture, Schell said it’s first about getting someone to spend time on it. If you spend enough time doing something, you will start to believe it has value. (Why else would you be spending your time on it?) If you believe something is valuable, you’re more willing to pay for it. If you pay for something, that reinforces your belief that it’s valuable, and so on.

Schell put it this way: “Who does brainstorming for new psychological locks and keys? Not very many people do that, and that’s something worth thinking about.”

Super Mario image by BlueHouseBurning and Jesse Schell photo by Official GDC used under a Creative Commons license.

Newspapers are trying to avert economic disaster. And the steps that some are taking show signs of promise — boosts in overall circulation, jumps in digital subscribers. But my concern is that newsrooms are falsely holding on to the belief that their community members will continue to see them as their most important source of information.

This view may be leading newsrooms to false optimism. Consider what we learn from the profiles of some of these newspapers in the report.

“There are no such things as sleepy towns,” says (Grand Junction, Colo.) Daily Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton, “there are only sleepy newspapers.” Citing corruption by city officials in Bell, Calif., a town that didn’t have a newspaper, Seaton vows, “That’s never going to happen here, because we’re watching.” So Bell’s corruption was really the fault of The Los Angeles Times for not doing a better job? Where do we begin with this statement?

Or consider this statement from Andy West, managing editor of Delaware State News (circulation 18,000 weekdays): “We provide information so people can make informed decisions and space every day so people can discuss what’s on their minds.”

And this statement from the Mountain Eagle, a weekly newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky (circulation 6,000), referring to their former publishers: “Because Tom and Pat Gish spoke truth to power, their family was ostracized.”

This celebratory conviction of journalists doing God’s work to protect the community appears throughout every portrait of the 50 newspapers profiled. But there’s an underlying, unacknowledged fact: Local news, and in particular local news online, is not something people care about as much as local journalists might hope.

As my colleague Matt Hindman found using comScore data: Local news gets less than half of one percent of all pageviews in a local market. Hindman finds that local news sites attracted 8.3 to 17 pageviews per person per month. People spend about nine minutes a month with local news, he found. Many local news sites are still struggling, beset by problems — long load time, poor design, retention of top developers and multimedia producers — that make it hard to increase engagement in a fragmented news marked.

The Who Needs Newspapers report says the keys to success include community-service-driven reporters and ethically managed reporting. And in each of the 50 profiles, editors wax on about their commitment to covering the important public-service news that keep citizens coming back to the newspaper.

More bad news: This isn’t why people are reading newspapers.

Political scientists and communication scholars have long bemoaned the extent to which people don’t care about civic affairs. (Political scientist John Zaller has proposed a model of citizenship where people only pay attention to news that directly affects them — the so-called Burglar Alarm model of attentiveness.) And, as political scientist Markus Prior has demonstrated, citizens have comparatively little interest in political news and tend to pay more of their attention to entertainment news.

Or take this claim: “Hyperlocal Web sites are blossoming.” In fact, as Hindman found, the traffic of hyperlocal websites is generally so small that it is actually immeasurable by comScore (less than 1 percent of web traffic per market). So sure, these sites may be flourishing, but by what measure?

The report gives perhaps one of the most interesting depictions of how paywalls are being used at newspapers across America. This is important detail, and I encourage anyone interested in paywalls to take a look. But as the authors admit, there is no “single silver bullet” to solve the industry’s problems.

What might work for some newspapers who have developed a paywall in a small community may not work in a big-city metro newspaper — or vice versa. Some newspapers are using a paywall with free headlines and weather and a deeper site that features paid content. The risk is that when people find better ways to access the local weather, they may feel little need to check the local news site at all.

One finding in the report that occurs in many of the state newspapers portrayed is that circulation losses seem to stop — or at least halt, or maybe even receive a boost — when paywalls are erected. But these news organizations are still tapping into the people who still read newspapers; to really understand whether these circulation numbers are here to stay, they must conduct a robust demographic analysis of who, exactly, happens to be buying these new newspapers. Staunching the decline isn’t exactly a business model, either.

Finally, this upbeat report on the importance of journalism and the future of democracy is really is a portrait of 50 newspapers in 50 states. There’s little indication about how and why newspapers were chosen, and no real way to compare newspapers against each other. The background summaries of each newspaper have inconsistent profiles to help us figure out just how much attention and staff news organizations are spending on say, local government affairs versus entertainment reporting, making it difficult to get a true sense of just how committed these news organizations are to doing what they are saying they are doing (see here and here).

The report does offer a celebration of journalism’s “iron core” of reporting. What’s disappointing is that we hear little reflexive questioning of journalism itself. File this one under future-of-news reports that fail to give us a clear look into the future of news.

The New York Times and Guardian both offered good overviews of the report, with the Times focusing more on Murdoch and the Guardian on Hinton, Myler, and Crone. Both noted that the strong language about Murdoch was decided along political lines, with liberals voting to put it in and conservatives trying to keep it out. Capital’s Tom McGeveran wrote a helpful explanation of what it means for Parliament to call Murdoch “unfit” (he probably won’t get his broadcast licenses revoked anytime soon), and NPR’s David Folkenflik also had a good breakdown of the situation for American audiences. One of the committee’s members, Tom Watson, offered more of his own thoughts on the scandal, and the Times’ David Carr translated the report for those of us who don’t read Parliament-ese.

News Corp. responded by issuing a defiant public statement, which contrasted a bit with Murdoch’s more contrite internal memo. Other businesspeople and media barons came to Murdoch’s defense, and the British broadcaster BSkyB, of which News Corp. owns a share and recently tried to take over, distanced itself from News Corp. in an effort to hang onto its broadcast license.

There’s other trouble for News Corp., too: A Washington ethics group has called on the FCC to revoke News Corp.’s Fox broadcast licenses in the U.S., and in Britain, opponents of News Corp.’s BSkyB takeover bid said they had been blocked from meeting with the government department in charge of approving the deal. There is some good news for News Corp., though — the second half of the British government’s inquiry into the company may never happen.

As for the toll on News Corp., the Times has a solid big-picture view of the scandal’s impact so far, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer looked at the escape routes Murdoch could take. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said this report, and Murdoch’s testimony last week, have gone a long way in exposing News Corp.’s culture of corruption: “The glib denials that have served him so well for so many years aren’t working anymore—not with all we now know.” And the Guardian’s Henry Porter went further, writing the (probably premature) political obit for Murdoch.

Mixed signals on newspaper circulation: The Audit Bureau of Circulations issued its twice-annual report on newspaper circulation this week — here are its top 25 papers and a database of every daily newspaper in the U.S. Overall, newspapers saw a slight gain in daily circulation, including a 63 percent gain in paid digital circulation, which, as paidContent noted, includes tablet or smartphone apps, paywalled website subscriptions, and other e-editions.

The common narrative drawn from those numbers was that, as Ad Age put it, “digital paywall strategies have helped newspapers counter years of grinding declines in paid-print circulation.” Poynter’s Steve Myers looked at some of the top circulation gainers and saw that many of them had instituted digital pay plans, while very few of the losers had.

Media analyst Alan Mutter pushed back against that conclusion, noting that when you isolate print circulation, almost everyone’s numbers were down, whether they had a paywalled site or not. The circulation increase, it turns out, came from including those digital numbers (and, as Ad Age pointed, possibly counting subscribers twice), not from successfully protecting the print product.

A few newspapers that were highlighted: DCist noted that The Washington Post’s circulation drop was the largest of any of the nation’s top papers, while Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon said the decline wasn’t as bad as it appeared. J-prof Dan Kennedy looked at the numbers for the Boston papers, and the Lab’s Justin Ellis wrote about the story behind the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s increase in circulation and revenue, and its paywall.

Is tech in another bubble?: New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton became the latest to raise the specter of a bubble in the tech industry this week, reporting on the practice of startups being encouraged by their investors not to make money so as to make it easier to come up with ungrounded, outrageously high valuations. Said one Stanford professor he talked to: “This is 1999 all over again, but this time, it’s gotten worse…We’re back to companies throwing around funny money. The economic values don’t add up.”

This started another round of debate over whether we are, in fact, in the midst of another tech bubble. BetaBeat put together a helpful scorecard of who chimed in on which side, and you can read a smart, extended discussion among many of those people at Branch. Tech blogger Dave Winer said the true sign of whether we’re in a bubble is whether the startups being formed are good businesses that make sense and will grow (and answered that, yes, that means we’re in a bubble).

Investor and blogger Chris Dixon argued that the true measures of a bubble are actually quite nuanced, and we’re getting mixed signals in many of them, though he said no good investors engage in the “flipping” practices Bilton described, because it’s not a good business strategy anyway. Tech blogger MG Siegler agreed, calling stories like Bilton’s “a bunch of vague fear mongering.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it appears as though the inflated valuations are coming in at the small, early seed-money end, which presents less of a danger to the public. Entrepreneur Michael Mace made a similar point, arguing that until those inflated dollar amounts hit public stock offerings, this market won’t look much like the late ’90s bubble.

Twitter tries to further personalize your news: Twitter moved a bit deeper into personalized news this week with the revamp of its Discover feature, which will put a heavier weight in its algorithm on links shared by the people you follow to help you find links you’ll be interested in. (All Things D has a good description of the change.) The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff said the new format gives Twitter’s information some social context, which is a big part of what was missing before.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that while the update is an improvement, Twitter still needs to build better filters to personalize and make sense of its information, before others do it instead. YouTube’s Hunter Walk pointed out, though, that it’s extremely hard for a single product to guess at what you like, what your friends like, and what the world likes, especially in a linear format like Twitter’s.

Elsewhere in Twitter news, the Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance wrote about journalistic behavior by regular Twitter users, and news execs argued over whether social media is helping or hurting journalism.

Reading roundup: A few other interesting stories, and a couple of thoughtful viewpoints to direct you to this week.

— The FCC voted last Friday to require local TV stations to put their information about political advertising online, starting in the largest markets. Free Press applauded the decision as a victory for transparency, though ProPublica noted they won’t be searchable. Before the vote, Poynter’s Steve Myers pointed out how resistant TV stations have been to reporting on this issue.

— As The Next Web first reported this week, the Washington Post planned to buy the social news site Digg. That report was followed up with reports that the Post was hiring most of Digg’s staff, but not buying the site or its technology, leaving the remaining people there to scramble to figure out the site’s future.

— In an engaging book excerpt in New York magazine, Jeff Himmelman revealed that Watergate hero Bob Woodward’s longtime editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, had misgivings about some of the details about some of the sources Woodward and Carl Bernstein contacted, including Deep Throat. Woodward disputed the book’s claims, Himmelman defended them, and the Post’s Erik Wemple said he was skeptical of the reports of Bradlee’s doubts, too. Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out that this conflict is only about the All the President’s Men story, not the Post’s actual reporting.

— Two great posts of tips for journalists: Poynter’s Craig Silverman with a list of resources on how to verify information on social media, and the Guardian’s advice for journalists of the future.

— Finally, Danish scholar Rasmus Kleis Nielsen wrote an insightful piece for Reuters based on some ongoing research he’s doing on what’s hindering news startups in Europe. He calls it “irrational imitation” of the dominant online model of decades past.

Photo of Murdoch by Pierre Boulle, bubble by zzub nik, and newspaper boxed by Lulu Vision all used under a Creative Commons license.

Of particular Labby note: This is the first Nieman class to feature Nieman-Berkman Fellows, who will work jointly with us here at Nieman and with our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. We initially expected to pick one Nieman-Berkman Fellow, but we ended up going with two: Borja Echevarria of El Pais and Laura Amico of Homicide Watch. You’ll be reading more from them and about their work here in the fall.

Here’s the full listing. We’re very excited to see these terrific journalists here in Cambridge in a few months. And if you’re interested in being a part of the 76th class of Nieman Fellows (who’ll arrive in August 2013), it’s not too early to start thinking about your application, even though the first deadlines are still half a year away.

U.S. Nieman Fellows in the class of 2013 and their areas of interest:

David Abel, a staff writer at The Boston Globe, plans to study the evolution of new media, the impact of rising income inequality on the social fabric, and the science as well as the potential effects of climate change.

Laura Norton Amico, editor and founder of Homicide Watch in Washington, D.C., will study criminal justice journalism in the digital age, focusing on best practices, useful tools and new models for crime and courts reporting. She is one of two new Nieman-Berkman Fellows in Journalism Innovation.

Brett Anderson, the restaurant critic and a features writer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, will study the forces and people fueling the modern American food culture and their impact on the way Americans eat. He will also examine the role food and restaurants play in communities during crisis.

Chris Arnold, national correspondent, National Public Radio, will study the reshaping of the government’s role in housing after the collapse of the bubble and how the crash will shape the future of homeownership and the American Dream. Arnold will also examine obstacles to technological innovation in consumer product safety. He is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Business Journalism.

Alexandra Garcia, video journalist at The Washington Post, will study how news organizations can create visual experiences that engage users and will explore interactive storytelling forms.

Jeneen Interlandi, a science and health journalist based in New Jersey, will study the history of pharmaceuticals, the cultural forces that have shaped our relationship to medication and the impact that has had on our perceptions of illness and health.

Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, will study architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, seeking to re-examine and revitalize the field of architectural criticism in print and on the Web. Kamin is the 2013 Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow.

Jennifer B. McDonald, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, will study canonical works of literature and philosophy and the historical role of the critic in culture.

Betsy O’Donovan, a freelance writer and editor for The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C, and other publications, will study entrepreneurial models for community newsrooms, with a particular interest in establishing and protecting the value of original reporting. She is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism.

Mary Beth Sheridan, a news editor at The Washington Post, plans to study international politics and economics, with a focus on countries struggling to transition from authoritarian to democratic systems, particularly in Latin America.

Jane Spencer, international editor at large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will study new digital tools for narrative storytelling, with an emphasis on how emerging technologies can improve news coverage of global women’s issues.

Laura Wides-Muñoz, Hispanic affairs writer for The Associated Press, will study the nexus between immigration and economics. She will examine how the global financial crisis affects the integration of immigrants into U.S. society and explore multimedia platforms for presenting the data in new and dynamic ways. She is the Louis Stark Nieman Fellow. The fellowship honors the memory of the New York Times reporter who was a pioneer in the field of labor reporting.

International Nieman Fellows in the class of 2013 and their areas of interest:

Karim Ben Khelifa (Tunisia/Belgium), a photojournalist and founder of Emphas.is, will conduct research on journalist-audience engagement, analyze the behavioral economics linked to crowdfunding and study new business models promoting the diversification of visual storytelling. He is the 2013 Carroll Binder Nieman Fellow. The Binder Fund honors 1916 Harvard graduate Carroll Binder, who expanded the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, and his son, Carroll “Ted” Binder, a 1943 Harvard graduate.

Katrin Bennhold (Germany), a London-based reporter for the International Herald Tribune, will study the economics of gender and motherhood and explore the remaining barriers and costs of gender equality in the early 21st century. She is the William Montalbano Nieman Fellow. Montalbanowas a 1970 Nieman Fellow and a prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter who reported from 100 countries during his 38-year career.

Ludovic Blecher (France), executive director and editor-in-chief of Liberation.fr, will study the business models of online media and explore ways to monetize high-value journalism. He is the Robert Waldo Ruhl Nieman Fellow. Ruhl, a 1903 Harvard graduate, was editor and publisher of the Medford Mail-Tribune in Oregon from 1911-1967.

Lee Chong-ae (Korea), senior reporter, Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), will study journalism related to complex trauma, focusing on people who have experienced the effects of periods of colonialism, war and military-influenced dictatorial administrations followed by rapid economic growth. Her fellowship is sponsored by The Asia Foundation.

Jin Deng (China), senior editor, Southern Weekly, will study how the democratization and fragmentation of information in the social media era will affect China’s journalism, society and politics. Her fellowship is supported through Sovereign Bank and the Marco Polo Program of Banco Santander.

Borja Echevarría de la Gándara (Spain), deputy managing editor, El País, will study the structural evolution of newsrooms around the world and how disruptive innovation is altering traditional business and workflow models for news. Using data from both print and Web-based news organizations, he also will try to discern the patterns in successful newsrooms and determine if the practices of digital start-ups can be applied effectively in established newsrooms. Echevarría is one of two new Nieman-Berkman Fellows in Journalism Innovation.

Yaakov Katz (Israel/United States), military reporter, The Jerusalem Post, will study the use of censorship in the digital age to determine whether it is relevant and consistent with democratic values and if it can be applieddifferently, especially in coverage of Israel and the Middle East.

Souad Mekhennet (Germany/Morocco), a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Der Spiegel and ZDF (German TV), will study how the uprisings in Arab countries in 2011 have influenced the long-term strategies of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and how Shariah (Islamic law) deals with human rights, women and democracy. She is the 2013 Barry Bingham Jr. Nieman Fellow. Bingham, a 1956 Harvard graduate, was the editor and publisher of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.

Paula Molina (Chile), anchor and editor at Radio Cooperativa, Chile’s leading radio news station, will explore the opportunities created by the digital revolution for better development, sharing and distribution of broadcast news content.

Finbarr O’Reilly (Canada/United Kingdom), Africa-based photographer for Reuters, will study psychology to better understand how the human mind and behavior is affected by personal experience, with a focus on trauma and conflict zones. He is the 2013 Ruth Cowan Nash Nieman Fellow. Nash was best known for her work as an Associated Press war correspondent during World War II.

Beauregard Lucian Tromp (South Africa), senior field producer, e-news Africa, will study the practice of countries and global corporations purchasing large tracts of land in Africa to address future food shortages and the impact of that for trade agreements, governments and local communities concerned about possible exploitation under a “new colonialism.” His fellowship is supported by the Nieman Society of Southern Africa.

San Truong (Huy Duc) (Vietnam), a freelance journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City, will study public policy, American literature and the history of Vietnam, with a goal of sharpening his work and impact as a political analyst. He is the 2013 Atsuko Chiba Nieman Fellow. The Chiba fellowship honors the memory of Atsuko Chiba, a 1968 Nieman Fellow.

Ever wish you could reduce the fire hose to a stream? The stream to a trickle?

Every day for a month, the News.me team is asking someone smart or interesting or Internet-famous to share the Last Great Thing he or she saw, a video or an article or whatever, something truly lovable. There are no archives, no permalinks, nothing to read later — which is both maddening and sort of the point.

On Monday, Clay Shirky shared a video; I forgot to grab the link, so you can’t watch it. On Tuesday, Hilary Mason shared this video of a smoking robot at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Yesterday, Khoi Vinh shared an article about “impostor syndrome,” whereby creative types often feel like frauds waiting to be exposed. Today, a Ry Cooder performance from The Old Grey Whistle Test, from Craig Mod. (Ex-Nieman Labber Zach Seward’s up tomorrow.) The site is inspired in part by Robin Sloan’s Fish app, which urges us to love, not just like, and in part by The Listserve, a giant mailing list that accepts one submission per day.

“We criticize Twitter for not having any memories and for failing at being a place where you can find things after they’ve rushed past you,” said Jake Levine, the general manager of News.me. “If we don’t want to be that, then we might want to include an archive, but as soon as we include an archive, we make this less about everyone experiencing this in the moment.”

Last Great Thing is itself a contradiction, a comment on the ephemeral nature of social networks and a study of our info-anxiety.

Levine hacked up the site with designer Justin Van Slembrouck. (They are proud to have made it without help from a developer.) They hope to observe usage patterns that might inform changes to their products (iPad app, iPhone app, and daily newsletter). Levine and Van Slembrouck are technologists, not journalists, and the project forces them to think editorially.

There are no algorithms here. News.me proper (which we’ve covered before) uses algorithms to help surface the most interesting content in users’ social streams.

“People in the same breath will tell us there’s too much stuff and not enough stuff coming through their News.me stream,” Levine told me. “They’re kind of unsatisfied with the volume of content — but they’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s at the core of our challenge over the next six to 12 months.”

Last Great Thing, like Twitter, is ephemeral. Unlike Twitter, it’s slow. Real slow.

Tweet.

Tweet.

“We’re trying to see what’s the minimum presentation that we can do here to make something compelling. We’ve been kind of wrestling with this archive thing. We’ll see how long we can withstand the pressure,” Van Slembrouck said. (Don’t give in, I say.)

“We got an email from one of our friends saying, ‘What the hell? Where’s Clay Shirky’s video? I didn’t have a chance to watch it yesterday, and now it’s gone!’” Levine said. “We’re trying to figure out: Okay, do we solve his quote-unquote problem by adding an archive? Or do we kind of let those anxieties surface a bit more so we can understand them better?”

(By the way, you can kind of cheat by subscribing to the Last Great Thing daily email.)

It’s World Press Freedom Day, when we set aside time to think about journalists around the world who struggle under repressive conditions to report and tell the truth.

With 44 journalists killed so far this year, 2012 is on track to be the deadliest year for journalists since the International Press Institute began tracking such deaths in 1997. (The exact toll depends on how you count. Reporters Without Borders, for example, puts the count at 22. It only includes deaths that are “clearly established” to have been caused because of someone’s activities as a journalist.) Both counts increased by one overnight with the murder of Somali radio reporter Farhan James Abdulle. He’s the fifth journalist to be killed in Somalia this year, which Reporters Without Borders ranks 164th in the world in press freedom.

But while we honor those working journalists who continue to battle their governments, it’s also worth noting how technology is shifting the playing field of press freedom. The boundaries of the press are expanding — and yet working to guarantee press freedom requires the notoriously slippery undertaking of defining what it is that makes someone a journalist. NPR’s Andy Carvin, who famously tweeted (and retweeted) the Arab Spring, is a professional journalist. But what about all of the citizens on the ground — some professional journalists, many not — who helped populate his Twitter feed with information about what was going on?

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has given these kinds of questions a lot of thought over the years. In 2005, he founded Global Voices, a network of hundreds of bloggers around the world who work to redress “inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media.”

“It’s really hard to organize a campaign for every blogger who gets in trouble with the law,” Zuckerman told me this week. “In part because often you don’t get arrested for blogging, you get arrested for something else.”

Working on a global scale, and without the formal backing of a news institution, it can become very difficult to determine whether such an arrest was motivated by the person’s journalistic behavior or by some other alleged activity.

Increasingly, there are groups willing to fight for the person being silenced — regardless of whether she’s a professional journalist, and regardless of whether she’s communicating “on paper, by broadcasting, or writing in bytes,” Zuckerman said.

As the power to publish spreads, World Press Freedom Day becomes about more than just “the press” as we’ve traditionally defined it. Zuckerman suggests it’s time to update the way we characterize what we’re trying to protect. Okay, so his alternative might need a bit of marketing polish, but he’s thinking something like “World Digital Public Sphere Freedom Day” or “World Network Public Sphere Freedom Day.”

“This notion of ‘the press’ holds onto this notion that there’s this specialized professional class to inform us about things,” Zuckerman said. “That institution is expanding to the point where the press is really the network public sphere or the digital public sphere. It’s incredibly important that we talk about the ability of journalists to do their jobs safely and without government harassment…But when we think about whether a country has a free press, under my definition, it’s what are the constraints on journalists? What are the constraints on nonofficial journalists [like] bloggers and activists? What are the constraints on the tools people use to discuss the issues of the day?”

Issues of Internet freedom are often framed around information consumption — whether someone in a country can get access to a given website, say. But it’s also about freedom to publish, a capacity that technology continues to spread. “There’s an enormous amount of common ground between the Internet freedom folks and the press freedom folks — and in many cases we’re looking at the same people,” Zuckerman said.

And then there’s mobile. As phones get smarter, the line between Internet users and mobile users blurs. According to the International Telecommunications Union, there were 2 billion people using the Internet at the start of last year. At the same time, there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

“It is absolutely unbelievable how rural a village you can be in, and the only things for sale will be yams, ground nuts, and phone cards,” Zuckerman said. “This is bringing in hundreds of millions of people who were not online previously. It’s a really crazy change, and what I think all of us are sort of predicting is, in the next five years, the distinction between those numbers — are you online or are you on the phone? — it’s just going to disappear. It’s going to be an irrelevant number.”

What’s good from a connectivity standpoint is not always good from a digital freedom standpoint, and this discrepancy goes to how the very structure of the Internet differs from how mobile networks are built.

“The Internet has this incredibly radically decentralized architecture where there are points of potential control, but there are a lot more of them, and it’s often possible to evade that control,” Zuckerman said. “On the mobile phone network, that’s a very different story. They tended to be built with the ability to wiretap and eavesdrop.”

When two Western journalists were killed with rockets in Syria earlier this year, The Telegraph reported that the Syrian military had tracked them down using their cell phone signals. In countries with weak legal systems and strong governments, mobile networks very quickly become a tool for government intelligence, so being an independent reporter “becomes a very difficult thing to do,” Zuckerman said.

It’s part of why groups like Mobile Active set out to educate people about the inherent security risks that mobile networks entail. Its Safer Mobile initiative includes guides and training on text-messaging risks, apps to block wiretappers, secure chat mechanisms, information on satellite phones, tips on how to safely file stories from the field, and more. The bottom line: True anonymity on a mobile network is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

“The approach that people are taking right now is just trying to get people to understand these networks much more thoroughly: ‘Here are ways you might be safe or might be unsafe,’” Zuckerman said. “The problem is, we often end up saying, ‘You shouldn’t use that.’ But that’s crazy thing to say because for most people, that’s their main information device.”

Photo by Superstrikertwo used under a Creative Commons license.