“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. The company says the app has been downloaded eight million times, the BBC reports, 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.

When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.

The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline.

Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The newsonomics of 99-cent media”), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each.

Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless.

When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot.

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples.

The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust.

We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:

• 33-45 percent of consumers who pay for digital subscriptions click to buy before they ever run into a paywall. That’s right — a third to a half of buyers just need to be told they will have to pay for continuing access, and they’re sold. As economists note that price is a signal of value, consumers understand the linkage. Assign what seems to be a fair price, and some readers pay up, especially if they are exposed to a “warning” screen, letting them know they’ve used up of critical number of “free” views. Maybe they want to avoid the bumping inconvenience — or maybe they just acknowledge the jig’s up.
• If print readers are charged something extra for digital access, then non-print subscribers are more likely to buy a digital-only sub. Why pay for digital access is the other guys (the print subscribers) are getting it thrown in for “free”? Typically, Press+ sees a 20-percent-plus increase in signups on sites that charge print subscribers something extra. That extra may be just a third or so of the price digital-only subscribers pay (say, $2.95 instead of $6.95), but it makes a difference. Consequently, Press+ says 80-90 percent of its sites charge print subscribers for digital access. The company now powers 323 sites and thus has more access to collective data than any other news-selling source.
• You can reverse the river, or at least channel it. The New York Times took a year, but figured it out righter than anyone expected. It bundled its Sunday print paper (still an ad behemoth) with digital, making that package $60 or so a year cheaper than digital alone. The result, of course, is that Sunday Times home delivery is up for first time since 2006. It’s not just NYT or the L.A. Times which have embraced Sunday/digital combos. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune began a similar push in November. Now, of its 18,000 digital-only subscribers, 28 percent have agreed to an add on the Sunday paper, for just 30 cents a week, says CEO Mike Klingensmith (“A Twin Cities turnaround?”). So we see that consumers may well be more agnostic about platform than we thought. Given them an easy one-click way of buying even musty old print, and they will. Irony: If you hadn’t charged them for digital access, you probably wouldn’t have sold them on print.
• New products create new markets. 70 percent of The Economist‘s digital subscribers are not former print subscribers, says Paul Rossi, managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. That’s surprising in one sense, but not in another. Newspaper company digital VPs will tell you that they’re surprised to see how little overlap there is between their print audience customer bases and their digital ones. The downside here: Many print customers seem not to value digital access that much. The Star Tribune is finding a low take rate of 3 percent of its Sunday-only print subscribers willing to take its digital-access upsell. One lesson: The building of a new digital-mainly audience won’t be easy and will require new product thinking; it’s not that easy just to port over established customers.
• The all-access bundle must contain multiple consumer hooks. Sure, readers like to get mobile access as well as desktop and print, and maybe some video. Yet some may especially prize the special events or membership perks they are offered, as the L.A. Times is banking on (and start-ups Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Global Post have applied outside the paywall model). Some will like the extras, like The Boston Globe telling its new 18,000 digital subscribers, as well as its print ones, that they now get “free” Sunday Supper ebooks (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”). Sports fanatics or business data lovers will find other niches to value — and ones that make the whole bundle worthwhile. Archives — and the research riches they offer — will prove irresistible to some. In 2012, a bundle may offer a half dozen reasons to buy, casting a wide net, with the hope that at least one shiny lure will reel in the customers. By 2013, expect “dynamic, customized offers,” targeting would-be buyers by their specific interests to be more widely in use.
• While pageviews may drop 10-15 percent with a paywall, unique visitors remain fairly constant. We see the phenomenon of those who do hit a paywall one month coming back in subsequent months, rather than fleeing forever. “It may be the second, third, or fourth month before someone says, ‘I guess I am a frequent visitor here, and I’ll play,’” says Press+’s Gordon Crovitz.
• Archives find new life. Archives have lived in a corner of news and magazine websites for a long time. They’ve been used, but not highly used or highly monetized. Now, courtesy of the tablet, and a new way to charge, The Economist is finding that 20 percent of its single copy sales are of past issues. Readers will pay for the old in new wrappers, whether back e-issues, or niched ebooks. The all-access offer can be much wider than cross-platform, or multi-device. It can extend across time, from a century of yesterdays to alerts for tomorrow.
• News media is probably underpriced. Take the high-end Economist. CEO Andrew Rashbass — speaking to MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2012, in a recommended video — said that a survey of its subscribers showed that a majority didn’t know how much they were paying for the Economist. When pressed to guess, most over-estimated the price. At the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, an early paywall leader in the middle of America, a recent price increase to $8.99 from $7.99 has so far resulted in no material loss of subscribers. At Europe’s Piano Media, early experience in Slovakia and Slovenia is that price isn’t a big factor, says Piano’s David Brauchli. “Payment for news on the web is really more a philosophical mindset rather than economic. People who are opposed to paying will always opposed to paying and those who see the value of paying don’t mind paying no matter what the price is.” That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial.
• Bundle or unbundle — what’s the right way? Mainly, we don’t know yet, and the answer may be different for differing audience segments. The Economist started with print being a higher price than a separate digital sub. Then it raised the digital price to match that of print — to assert digital value. It now offers all-access: one price gets you both. Next up: You can buy either print or digital for the same price, but if you want both, you’ll pay more. It’s an evolution of testing, and so far, it’s been an upward one.

Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it: “The newsonomics of the FT as an internet retailer”) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:

I think overall publishers have to start thinking more like e-commerce companies. More like Amazon. You can’t just throw up a wall or an app and expect it to just sell itself. We’re still building that muscle here at the Globe, and some of our colleagues in the industry are even farther along. We have extensive real-time and daily analytics and are employing multivariate testing to try offers and designs to refine the experience that works best for each type of user.

Photo by Jessica Wilson used under a Creative Commons license.

The developers behind Angry Birds said last August that players were averaging about 200 million minutes per day with the game. If that stat has held steady (and at the time Rovio said it was “growing exponentially”), it means that the world has played more than 300,000 years of Angry Birds.

In other words, stretched out linearly, our collective time spent flinging digital birds at pigs would predate the existence of modern humans. If you work in a newsroom, the thought of this level of audience engagement probably makes you swoon.

“The game industry is a $60 billion industry,” the Knight Foundation’s Jessica Goldfin told me. “When you talk about meeting people where they are, well, they’re playing games. Eleven million people play World of Warcraft…So how do you then take these mechanics, these games where people are, and build in some sort of higher social purpose or embed them within a social system?”

I recently caught up with Goldfin and the foundation’s Beverly Blake about a Knight-funded social-impact game called Macon Money, which was aimed at strengthening community ties and bolstering economic revitalization in Macon, Ga. This wasn’t a newsy experiment per se, but its focus on how to engage communities — and exploring new ways to connect them with one another — is in many ways applicable to newsrooms still finding their footing in an ever-changing digital media world.

“The goal was to create the environment where people who otherwise would not have had an opportunity to meet one another, to meet and get to know one another,” Blake told me. “The second goal was to use currency [invented for the game] to suport local businesses.”

So Knight — full disclosure: this site is, like many in journalism, also a Knight Foundation grantee — enlisted the game-design team at Area/Code, which has since become Zynga New York. In all, Knight granted about $700,000 for research and implementation. The result was a community-wide game called Macon Money designed to encourage divergent groups to come together, collaborate, and earn money that they would then spend at local businesses.

Here’s how it worked: Players who signed up would receive half of a Macon Money bond. It was up to them to find the person in their community who received the other half. Then, the newly formed pair could redeem their bond for Macon Money currency, which some local businesses agreed to accept. (A similar experiment — only without the gaming aspect — with local currency played out in Western Massachusetts about five years ago.)

Macon bucks have an undeniably local aesthetic, with former resident Otis Redding’s image gracing the bills. The exchange rate is $1 USD to $1 Macon, and a total of $65,000 Macon Money bonds were issued in $10 – $100 increments. It was free to play, which Goldfin says made some participants dubious at first.

“We started out slow,” she said. “This was a brand new concept for all of us. There was a lot of apprehension about it and people thought, ‘Free money? I can spend it at these businesses? What’s the catch?’”

Over time, though, and with the help of word-of-mouth, traditional media coverage, informational videos, and boots-on-the-ground explanations from the team behind the game, people got “very excited, very involved, very committed to the game.” How the game spread reinforces the importance of multi-platform and multi-channel distribution when it comes to engaging an audience.

While gamification has creeped into the news world in fun and meaningful ways, the lessons for journalists from Macon Money have less to do with how newsrooms can use games in storytelling, and more to do with what games tell us about how people connect with one another and share information.

With its Games for Change initiative, Knight has spent plenty of time and money exploring and attempting to spur innovation in gaming that extends far beyond entertainment for its own sake. Here’s how the Knight Foundation explained how Macon Money fits into this mission earlier this week in a post-mortem about the experiment:

Unlike past foundation support for digital games, these took place in real-time with real people in the real world and they supported ongoing efforts to tackle local issues. There is already an existing body of research about how digital games have the potential to improve learning and influence behavior. But less attention has been paid to the effects of real-world games — i.e., games that are played out in the physical world. Knight wanted to explore which aspects of real-world games were most effective in addressing community issues.

Some of their findings: 78 percent of those who played Macon Money were under 40 years old; 70 percent were women; African Americans were underrepresented among players; most were employed full-time and earned more than $60,000 per year. Relatively few strong ties were formed, but about 15 percent of matched players became Facebook friends.

Blake says the overall results were “very encouraging,” because there was some evidence that the game forged and strengthened community ties: “When people get to know one another, even if it’s just a weak tie, that bodes well. Seventy percent of the people who responded on that note said that they would recognize the person [who had the other half of their bond] and say hello.”

The results were also positive with regard to economic development. About 46 percent of players said Macon Money took them to a local business that was new to them, and 92 percent reported having returned to that business after the game.

So what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to audience engagement and community building in social-impact gaming? And how might these lessons be applied in newsrooms that want to launch games, or apps, or just generally rethink social engagement?

Goldfin offers what may be both the most obvious and most important point: “It was fun. Games are supposed to be fun. Often times, people are like, ‘We’re going to make a game about the First Amendment!’ or ‘We’re going to make a game about economic revitalization!’ Often the people who do that aren’t game designers.”

That brings us to some of the critical aspects from a development standpoint, like honoring the “value of design” by having the right people work on the right aspects of the project — then recalibrating as needed. For example, Macon Money needed seasoned game designers to build the infrastructure, but it also needed people who knew the Macon community first hand.

“You have to constantly balance, and manage, and negotiate the expertise of all of these elements,” Goldfin said. “Otherwise you won’t have success.”

The team also embraced an open source mentality, including sharing a blueprint for other communities interested in developing something simliar.

The project from the start required rethinking how to define the people that Macon Money aimed to reach, a task that is easily transferrable to “newsrooms that want to engage their constituents,” Goldfin said. When you start reconceptualizing how communities can be grouped, you can innovate cost-effective ways to reach them — whether it’s through games, content sections, events, tweet-ups, or some other channel.

“We usually define audiences or communities by very traditional demographics, but that no longer needs to be the limitation,” she said. “You can define communities through interest, rather than age. It’s the bigger picture. One size doesn’t fit all.”

In an announcement on BostonGlobe.com’s Insiders blog, Charles Mansbach, the Globe’s Page 1 editor, says the paper is doing away with the convention of using those terms in stories. Instead they’ll start using the day on the week. So instead of seeing a Thursday story noting the Red Sox start a series with the Orioles “tomorrow,” it’ll say the series starts “Friday.” This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is a break — and an official one — with decades of practice at many newspapers.

The reason? Times (pun intended) have changed. Mansbach explains:

The reason for the change is that articles are no longer written only for the newspaper. Breaking news is posted immediately on the Globe’s websites; stories are then fleshed out, posted again, then put into the process for the next day’s paper and the next day’s web entries. With all that traffic, a reliance on “yesterday, “today,” and “tomorrow” is an invitation for error.

The Globe’s decision is part of an ongoing discussion inside and outside newsrooms about how to adjust phrasing in news to meet the needs of an evolved news cycle. Like the Globe, a number of papers have changed house style to only use the days of the week, while others use different terminology online and in print.

There is one exception to the new rule: print headlines. “Today” remains the basic unit of news urgency, especially online. “Today” is the equivalent of “now,” as in “you should be reading this because it’s happening within the context of your day.” Mansbach said the we should expect to still see things like “Crucial vote on debt limit today.” As he puts it: “We suspect that “Crucial vote on debt limit Wednesday” would not rivet anyone’s attention.”

[Editor's note: This story originally included this line: "Yesterday and tomorrow are almost meaningless in an era when someone could discover an article through search or social two weeks or eight months after its first published." While that's true, as Noam Cohen points out in the comments, we shouldn't have said it was the reason for the Globe's change. As the Mansbach quote above states, the key issue is that stories are often published on the web and in print on different days — not that an online story can have a theoretically infinite lifespan. Sorry.]

In 2009, the Star Tribune found itself on a dubious list: The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. That was the year Minnesota’s largest daily entered into bankruptcy after rounds of cost-cutting couldn’t help the company ease its debt load. It wasn’t particularly unusual to see a newspaper company enter into Chapter 11 in those dark days. But as someone who grew up reading the Star Tribune — I still have the front page from when the Twins won the World Series in ’87 — the thought of my home paper going under was frightening.

The Star Tribune today, four years later, seems to have lifted itself off the endangered list — although, to extend the species metaphor, it still has work to do before its survival becomes a matter of Least Concern. It’s out of bankruptcy; its debt has been reduced from around $500 million to $100 million. And, maybe most importantly, it’s growing its readership in print and through digital and keeping an eye towards growing consumer revenue.

Publisher Michael Klingensmith tells me the paper’s first-quarter revenue was up over the same period last year — a claim not many papers its size have been able to make since the mid-2000s. According to freshly released Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers, Sunday circulation is up about 4 percent in the most recent reporting period, while daily is up around 1 percent. They also saw a jump in single copy sales for Sunday in the second half of 2011, up to 120,000 from 115,000. Since launching digital subscriptions in fall 2011, the Star Tribune now has 18,000 digital subscribers. (The Star Tribune has a meter model that allows 20 free stories a month.) Overall subscription revenue is up 7.5 percent in the first half of this year from a year ago, Klingensmith said.

On the advertising side, Klingensmith would not provide specific data, but he said declines in ad revenue are shrinking: “Total advertising revenue declines have shrunk to the low single digit range in this year, to the order of magnitude that can be offset by increases in consumer revenue.” On top of all that, for two years in a row, the company has been able to cut employees a check as part of the paper’s profit-sharing agreement.

That’s a good story, but there’s a difference between turning the ship around and charting a new course. Klingensmith, a Minnesota native himself, wants to push the paper into new territory by meeting people where they are (or where they read) and by co-mingling the value of print and digital products.

“We’re trying to transform the nature of the subscriber relationship,” he said. “You no longer subscribe to the paper or an app. You subscribe to the Star Tribune brand.”

Bundling and the case for protecting print

The Star Tribune, like so many papers with digital subscriptions, wants to protect its print base from eroding. Seven-day print subscribers get digital access included in their subscription, as do readers who get the paper more than more than 2 days. But Sunday-only? You pay an incremental 99 cents a week to get digital access. So instead of the Frank Rich Discount of The New York Times — using digital subscriptions to push Sunday print — the Star Tribune wants to push readers to pick up more than just the Sunday paper.

“We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through out system”

In other words, the Star Tribune wants you all-in, across platforms. While some media outlets are content to offer a menu of apps at various price points (the sports app, the entertainment app, the politics app), Klingensmith said he thinks that approach has a limited ceiling for revenue. Rather than break up your audience and allow them to have dissociated relationships with your company, create a product that appeals to various parts of your audience while giving them a door to the rest of your work.

“Pieces that appeal to segments, like entertainment apps or high school sports, if you put enough in a package I think you can charge more for the entire package,” he said. “My back of the envelope math says, so far, that’s the way to go.”

One complicating factor in their digital growth has been the hand-off between Apple’s App Store and the Star Tribune’s own subscriber system. The Star Tribune is not a part of Apple’s Newsstand, so in order for readers to connect their app access to their account they have to work through the Star Tribune’s own authentication system. “It’s not about the 30 percent we’d have to pay Apple. That would be fine,” he said. “We went to a lot of pain and effort to build a system that is customer-centric.”

Though Newsstand can provide visibility and discoverability, that’s not as critical for a local paper like the Star Tribune. Klingensmith said their audience is the within the boundaries of the state of Minnesota and anyone who grew up there, and that audience already knows about the Star Tribune. The more important issue is creating a deeper connection with readers — and, not incidentally, holding onto the valuable data each reader brings with it. “We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through our system and have those people in our database,” he said.

Changing the Sunday paper

Before he came to the Star Tribune, Klingensmith was at Time Inc. for over 30 years, working at places like Time, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly (which he co-founded). So the narrative goes that Klingensmith, with his years in the magazine business, saw the appeal of reader research — surveys and focus groups — and applied it to the daily newspaper. It’s not like audience research was foreign to newspapers — but considering how tight budgets have become at most papers, they haven’t been top priority either. Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes said it had been at least four years since the paper undertook any significant research, so it was time for some fresh insights from readers. Barnes said they tested readers on everything from the design of the paper to its digital offerings. That work helped influence the redesign of StarTribune.com and changes to the print product, Barnes said.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing”

It also directed changes to the Sunday paper. If there’s a conventional wisdom in newspapers about Sundays, it goes like this: Sundays are for the takeout pieces, the long features, the narratives, and other elements that don’t fit in the shrunken daily news hole. But that wasn’t what Star Tribune readers had in mind for their paper: “We heard over and over, ‘Features are nice, but we want the hard news,’” Barnes said.

More specifically, readers wanted hard news and investigations on A1, along with a mix of national and international reporting. It wasn’t that readers didn’t enjoy features; rather, their Sunday news diet gave them time to ingest more serious news along with features, and they prefer the news at the top of the meal. Klingensmith said readers believe the front page is the chief indicator of a story’s importance and set a high bar for what is placed there. They adjusted the Sunday edition and now have more news up front, which Klingensmith thinks is one of the reasons single-copy sales increased.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing,” he said. “It’s important for us to understand where people want to get what sort of news.”

What comes next?

Klingensmith is quick to not take too much credit for the Star Tribune’s turnaround. He came to the paper after it came out of bankruptcy in 2010. While Klingensmith didn’t set the table, he shaped what happened next. (He was named Editor & Publisher’s 2011 Publisher of the Year.) The outlook for the paper is much improved from a few years ago, but both Kilingensmith and Barnes say they have plenty of work to do.

One area of focus is their iPad app, which they say has underperformed since its release last year. Putting aside the issue of authenticating subscriptions, the content on the app itself could be more dynamic and take better advantage of the tablet’s features, Barnes said. They plan — no surprise — to do research on it. “I think there is an appetite for work we are doing on the iPad — I don’t think we’ve nailed the right approach to it yet,” she said.

Klingensmith had his sights set on evening out the revenue picture, bringing the advertising revenue and consumer product revenues into closer balance. That would mean an increase from the consumer side of things, which Klingensmith estimates sits around 43 percent at the moment. He said it wouldn’t be out of the question to raise the price of the paper again. He doesn’t expect they would reduce the number of free stories in their meter, as the Times has, but he won’t rule it out either. “Generally speaking, over time, the print product in particular will have to carry a higher price. For the continuance of the enterprise, consumers are going to have to carry the cost,” he said.

Fortunately, Klingensmith has some perspective. Yes, the Star Tribune is caught up the same uncertainty that all newspapers around the country are facing. But Klingensmith’s happy for the ability to focus. Instead of a stable of magazines, he’s just got one title. Instead of multiple audiences, he’s just got one state-sized market. “We just have one little newspaper to run here, and that simplifies things,” he said.

Image of the Star Tribune building from Matt Green and Star Tribune newspaper box from smcgee used under a Creative Commons license.

Though it might only come in 140-character bursts, everyone’s a publisher on Twitter. But how many of those publishers are journalists, or acting like journalists — and how does that affect what kind of information ends up getting passed around?

A study in the works at Indiana University aims to examine the extent to which Twitter users behave like journalists, even if they aren’t journalists in the traditional professional sense. Specifically, researchers Hans Ibold and Emily Metzgar are looking at “politically-oriented” Twitter users, and how they wield information.

“The writing is on the wall that people are turning to social media often, over and above traditional legacy news media,” Ibold told me. “It’s become a go-to source. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to ask: What kinds of journalistic storytelling are some of the more popular tweeters employing? The implication is that Twitter is becoming a news source — but what kind of a news source?”

By the nature of the platform, Twitter users perform functions that were once often limited to professional journalists — they publicly share ideas and information, engage with political issues, and otherwise connect and empower citizens. On the most basic level, this highlights Twitter as a disruptive force in the changing media ecosystem. Even as a relatively small percentage of online adults use Twitter (about 13 percent, according to Pew), people are able to act journalistically without relying on traditional channels to do so.

Metzgar and Ibold opted to find groups of politically oriented Twitter users the same way many people search the site: by using hashtags. With data from the university’s Twitter-analyzing Truthy project, they compared tweets using the conservative #tcot hashtag with those using the liberal #p2. A couple of examples:

ICYMI: Retweet if you are voting against Barack Obama and his horrible policies in November! #LNYHBT #tcot #Resist44

— Laura (@GOPrincess) April 25, 2012

“Bin Laden is Dead, General Motors is Alive, and the GOP is on Life-Support” Make it happen in November. #p2 #Obama2012

— mm62 (@markm1962) April 26, 2012

Now, Metzgar and Ibold are still in the process of evaluating tweets — 250 so far, but ultimately 2,500 — for journalistic behaviors. For example, do these Twitter users verify the information they’re sharing? Do they simply assert information? Do they affirm preconceived notions? Or do they demonstrate some other special-interest approach?

Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach and Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel developed this evaluation framework — verification, assertion, affirmation, and special-interest —  in their book Blur. (For the purposes of their study, Metzgar and Ibold added a “none of the above” category.)

Researchers are also evaluating tweets for political rhetoric using three categories: attack, acclaim, and rebuttal. Their early findings have yielded some interesting results. Metzgar and Ibold find the most prevalent journalistic mode among their politically-oriented sample is assertion, which Kovach and Rosenstiel characterize as placing the “highest value on immediacy and volume and in so doing tends to become a passive conduit of information.” (Sound familiar, web users?)

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass media potential.”

We’ve repeatedly seen the ease with which misinformation can spread on Twitter. (See also: Joe Paterno, Fidel Castro, and Nikki Haley.) Of tweets that demonstrated journalism behaviors, researchers found affirmation was also more likely than verification. Looking through the filter of political rhetoric, Twitter users were most likely to attack than rebut or acclaim.

Their preliminary findings also offer some hints as to distinction between partisan groups’ Twitter behaviors. For example, left-leaning Twitter users in their sample group were more likely than their right-wing counterparts to “retweet without any context,” Metzgar said. But overall, she and Ibold found “little difference” between how the two groups use Twitter. Regardless of political orientation, tweets were likely to be “scandal-oriented with emotional charge.” (Again, sound familiar, web users?)

What may be more telling is how both of these highly engaged Twitter groups — in addition to an “overall disregard for verification” — ignored traditional media, and one another. In instances when Twitter users did attempt to provide verification, it often came in the form of a link to an outside source. But rarely was that source a traditional journalistic outlet.

“Based on the small sample examined here, these politically focused conversations are happening without explicit reference to more traditional media outlets,” Metzgar and Ibold wrote in a working draft of the study.

And yet they found that the “echo chamber effect,” even as it excludes traditional media, still follows a familiar dynamic. Whether it’s in the newspaper, on cable TV, or on Twitter, people seek information that reinforces preconceived notions. Here’s how they put it in a draft:

People associate with those with whom they have something in common. Politics is a contentious topic — even among friends, partisanship is a fact of political life in the United States. People who are engaged civically in real life are more likely to be engaged online, too. Although early praise for the Internet suggested access to technology would end inequalities in society, the reality has been that new technologies simply reinforce already existing structures and the political Twittersphere is one place we expect to see the same dynamics repeated.

These findings are beginning to form a “view from 30,000 feet,” Metzgar says, but there are plans to dig much deeper. She wants to be able to analyze tweets right down to policy-based levels. Ibold wants to develop a framework for analyzing how people tweet about emotion, and what effect that has on the way people share.

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass-media potential,” Metzgar said. “We think there are discussions happening out in the wide open that previously weren’t happening in the wide open, and people who are interested in those discussions can — if they choose to — track those discussions, see where things are headed and even sense tone, sentiment and emotion to get a feel for where the really engaged, activated public stands.”

Image derived from illustration by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

Shared bylines are common enough. But what about a story with the names of 15 reporters and more than a dozen news organizations attached to it?

Last month, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, and nonprofit news organization The Hechinger Report jointly produced a lengthy story that had a single byline — Alyson Klein’s — but listed 14 other reporters from 12 additional news organizations as contributors. Check it out:

This article was produced by Education Week, The Hechinger Report, and the Education Writers Association. Additional reporting was contributed by Liz Bowie and Erica Green of the Baltimore Sun, Sarah Karp of Catalyst Chicago, Antoinette Konz of The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Jennifer Brown of The Denver Post, Lori Higgins of the Detroit Free Press, Nancy Mitchell of Education News Colorado, Rachel Cromidas and Philissa Cramer of GothamSchools, Scott Elliott of The Indianapolis Star, Paul Takahashi of the Las Vegas Sun, Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, Jennifer Jordan of The Providence Journal, and Brian Rosenthal of The Seattle Times.

This is the second such collaboration between Ed Week, EWA, and Hechinger. Education is a beat that’s national — with federal policies and research — but intensely local, with thousands of school boards making decisions at a community level. So the idea is to have local and national reporters join forces to cover a major education story that’s playing out in different areas of the country, and at various levels of government. Ed Week produced an overview story with a national angle, then local partners — who helped feed state-based information for that national story — could reprint all or part of it in their regional publications. In this case, the assignment was to track the local use of $3 billion in federal School Improvement Grant stimulus money.

While Ed Week handled much of the writing and editing, EWA executive director Caroline Hendrie says it made sense for her organization to serve as the link to reporters participating from newsrooms around the country. “We work with reporters and editors across the country — these are our members and they’re already actively engaged with us,” Hendrie told me.

Davin McHenry, web producer and news editor at The Hechinger Report, says he handled project logistics like enforcing deadlines and “making sure the project was on track, getting information out to everyone.”

It may be true, as Hendrie told me, that we as journalists are “better together.” But it’s also true that a project of this scope presents a host of challenges. Here are some of the things Hendrie, McHenry, and Ed Week assistant managing editor Mark Bomster say they learned along the way, and the advice they’d give others who are considering a similar undertaking.

Find likeminded partners

McHenry: Our main thrust up to this point has been collaborating with newspapers, and providing them with content. We’re kind of that midpoint between the Education Writers Association and Ed Week…At the same time, we know how to provide high-level news content that’s accepted by the largest and most stringent news orgazantions.

Hendrie: It was very much a three-way collaboration from the beginning, with the idea that we would work to define clear roles for each of the organizations. That meshed well with our different but somewhat complimentary audiences and activities.

This kind of collaboration won’t work for every story

Bomster: You have to be sure you actually have the will and resources to follow through with it. Then you have to find a subject that will really resonate, and still hold up given such a long reporting and planning cycle…It has to be something that’s sort of a perennial topic, but also at the same time newsworthy, and something that hasn’t been plumbed as deeply as you might think.

Establish clearly defined roles, and cede control

Hendrie: It makes total sense for us to take the lead on the recruitment…Our community is comprised both of the national reporters and editors and local. We have news outlets of every stripe in all media — not just print, not just online, not just radio, not just TV, but all of those things. To the extent that we can pool our resources, we’ll all produce better information for the public.

Bomster: It’s kind of unusual because those of us who are news editors and reporters tend to be such control freaks. We had to cede a certain amount of that control. The way that it really turned out, we each decided we were going to play our positions.

Think big, but start small

McHenry: The first time around, we went out and recruited as many papers as we could in one big fell swoop…We asked them to dedicate a reporter for a week, maybe two weeks, to investigate the topic. I think at our high-water mark, I want to say we had 50 news outlets that had initially signed on. But what we ran into was, a lot of these places, they had eyes bigger than their stomachs and very quickly that number started dwindling. [The fix this time around, McHenry said, was to allow time-strapped news organizations to help with certain stages of the project, without feeling bad about not being able to commit from start to finish.]

Know your limitations

Hendrie: Always be aware of just how overtaxed journalists are today in the modern newsroom. One lesson that we’re learning is always to simplify, and find more streamlined ways to communicate. People are so pressed for time and pulled in so many directions…Put extra time into thinking how you’re messaging.

Realize the potential reward

Bomster: This model puts a big premium on collaborative work. We all maximize our resources, and there’s a lot of leverage you can get out of that with just a couple of organizations who are in tune about coverage philosophy and expertise.

Hendrie: So much of education policy and practice happens at the state and the local level, but there’s huge commonalities and, more and more, the national and federal impact is increasing. So it’s very important that education journalists compare notes, learn from each other, help one another know what’s going on in other communities because there is so much — the overall context varies, certainly, but there are threads running through that are the same everywhere.

Photo by Twix used under a Creative Commons license.

The last time NPR launched a show was five years ago. It was the Bryant Park Project, a morning newsmagazine aimed at younger listeners. The network developed the show in secret and beefed up its New York bureau with reporters, producers, and editors. The budget for its first year was more than $2 million.

BPP was cancelled after 10 months, having reached just 13 markets. The underdeveloped show could never compete with Morning Edition, whose national listenership is topped only by Rush Limbaugh. A few months later, NPR cancelled two more news programs, Day to Day and News and Notes, blaming a disastrous budget gap.

Now NPR is taking another stab at creating new programming, but the approach looks quite different. Its newest show, TED Radio Hour (hosted by Alison Stewart, formerly BPP’s co-host), debuts today in at least seven markets. Ask Me Another, a prerecorded live game show for puzzle types, begins airing next weekend in at least six markets, including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. And John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet of Wonders, which I guess is a variety show for hipsters, debuts Memorial Day weekend.

What’s different this time? The network seems to be taking a page from agile software development, the philosophy that products should be released early and iterated often. The shows are live (cheap) and/or adaptations of existing shows (easy), all produced in six- or 10- or 13-episode pilot runs instead of as permanent offerings. Listeners and local program directors are invited to help shape the sound of the programs, making it something of a public beta.

“We’ve had successful shows that have been around for decades, and the newest ones that are reaching big audiences — even those are a decade old.”

Ask Me Another, for example, is perfectly designed for social media (which, remember, barely existed when Bryant Park Project began). Because it’s a live show, every member of the audience is a potential Twitter or Facebook connection.

Word of the show spread on social media — which is how I found out about it — so NPR PR has a head start. The network says 4,000 people have already attended the live shows, pre-launch. The shows are being fed to member stations free of charge.

“Historically, the way that NPR and others in public radio have produced big programming is we come up with an idea we think is really good, we hire a staff, we keep all this very cloak-and-dagger secret, and then we try to make a big launch with it, and we end up with 30 stations and then over time more stations add to it,” Eric Nuzum, NPR’s newly promoted vice president of programming, told me.

“Using that process, it takes years to determine if something is going to be a hit or not. And that involves millions and millions of dollars.”

In other words, failure is a much bigger fail. If Ask Me Another doesn’t take off, hey, it was still a relatively cheap experiment. Nuzum says the weak economy is driving the new strategy. (NPR would not tell me how much money is budgeted for the programs, but it’s safe to say none of them costs $2 million.)

Two years ago, NPR conducted an “audience opportunity study” that found listeners wanted more shows that sound like them. A lighter approach, more humor. Shows like Ask Me Another could be the hook that casual listeners need to discover other radio programming, Nuzum said. Some of the most successful public radio shows, after all, are weekend shows — This American Life, Car Talk, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

“It’s much easier to describe this when I’m in person with someone, so I apologize if some of this seems vague, because I actually draw when I’m talking about this,” Nuzum said.

Don’t worry, Eric Nuzum, we got this. Here is an interpretation of what his drawing might look like, by Lisa Tobin:

“Imagine there’s a circle, and the circle’s really dark, and that circle is our current audience. And it’s dark because there are so many people — there’s like a gravitational force — that are all kind of brought together. Then imagine a much larger ring around that circle, and that’s our potential audience. What we’re trying to do is bring that audience towards that center, trying to bring them more towards our programming.

“What we did before was we were just creating shows that occupied space in that larger circle without really paying attention to how well it connected to the inner circle. These shows are much more an attempt to have something that connects both to the larger circle and the inner circle as well.”

Nuzum said he is emulating HBO’s iterative approach to programming. He’s not the first to make the comparison. Cambridge-based PRX has experimented with new programming and distribution for five years, including with Marc Maron’s podcast WTF and The Moth Radio Hour. Jake Shapiro, the executive director of PRX, has long proposed a “public radio pilot season.”

“We’ve had successful shows that have been around for decades, and the newest ones that are reaching big audiences — even those are a decade old,” he told me. “We had a really good experiment with something similar, which was Public Radio Talent Quest, but that was more focused on hosts and new voices.”

Glynn Washington, one of the two Talent Quest winners, would go on to host NPR’s Snap Judgment. But the five dozen other people seen as serious competitors were largely forgotten. Shapiro says there’s a big ecosystem of podcasters and aspiring podcasters who would jump at the chance to be a part of public radio.

“It revealed that there’s a way to take some of what is the chaotic but very effective commercial television season dance and translate it into public radio terms, where essentially we collaborate with stations to introduce new show concepts, on air and online, in a very visible, very vocal way,” he said.

Nuzum said the nimble approach to programming is more or less the new normal at NPR. “Whether [these shows] have a future or not, I’m really proud of what we’ve come up with,” he said. “The bigger experiment is the process…This wouldn’t have been possible a couple of years ago.”

Photo of an old radio by santibon used under a Creative Commons license.

Ricochet will be available on a handful of sites within the Times Company’s stable of properties including NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, and About.com. The first advertiser to use the program is SAP, and you can get a sense of what Ricochet does here (compare it with the same page without the customized link). Pricing for the product will depend on the duration of a campaign and will be sold through the sales staffs at the respective NYT Co. brands.

But beyond an interesting advertising idea, Ricochet is being run out of an interesting new structural idea at NYT HQ. It’s part of a newly formed unit called R&D Ventures, a spin-off from the Times Company’s R&D Lab, a unit we’ve written a lot about. Michael Zimbalist, vice president of research and development operations for the Times Co., told me the new group is a more commercially minded extension of the R&D Lab that focuses on “how to scale and monetize, instead of what does a new user experience look like, or how does content evolve into new spaces.” In other words, the R&D Lab thinks of something new; R&D Ventures works to turn it into a product.

It’s a small group — a handful of people, Zimbalist says — with experience in product development, sales, business development, and other areas. While Ricochet’s been in development since last year, the Ventures group was formed more recently. Zimbalist told me the R&D Lab and R&D Ventures would work almost like a relay team: If an idea from the lab seems like it could find a broader audience (and make money), the baton will be handed off to Team Ventures to bring it to market. “When we contemplate the future of media and marketing, we actually build examples of what we’re thinking about,” Zimbalist said. But the R&D Lab’s work still focuses a bit more on the theoretical — thinking about ideas that might be two years out, not that might be shipped as a new service or feature within months.

That’s basically the story of how Ricochet, and R&D Ventures came to life. Ricochet is rooted in Project Cascade, a time-based visualization of how Times stories move across Twitter. Cascade shows how a story rises and falls, the people who drive pick-up of certain links, the time it takes for a story to come down to earth, all plotted across a graph that makes the social media universe look a bit like an actual universe.

By studying the life of Times stories they discovered something interesting: Companies and consumer brands were tweeting a lot of their work. That’s how they identified the opportunity to transform Cascade into a marketing tool. As part of running Ricochet, companies also get access to a version of Cascade for their own analytics so they can assess their campaigns. With many companies producing content directly for consumers, outlets like the Times can help by providing relevant, authoritative content that doesn’t feel overtly marketing-y, ZImbalist said. “Brands are becoming publishers and developing their own content strategies,” he said.

The story of Ricochet should sound somewhat familiar. Around two years ago, the Times was developing a prototype for social news reader that it eventually moved over to Betaworks. Working in conjunction with ex-Times staff, Betaworks later launched News.me. Zimbalist said they learned from that experience that there are costs and benefits to developing in-house versus outside the company that depend on what’s being built. While ZImbalist wouldn’t discuss any future projects coming out of the R&D Ventures pipeline, he said it’s important that they’re ready to iterate new products when the time comes.

“I think we learned from [News.me] that in order to bring a new product to market, it needed a focused team of entrepreneurially inclined people who were both technically inclined and business inclined,” Zimbalist said.

Fresh accusations and denials for News Corp.: After several months of investigation, News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, testified this week before the British government’s Leveson inquiry into their company’s phone hacking and bribery scandal. Rupert made headlines by apologizing for his lack of action to stop the scandal and by admitting there was a cover-up — though he said he was the victim of his underlings’ cover-up, not a perpetrator himself (a charge one of those underlings strenuously objected to).

Murdoch also said he “panicked” by closing his News of the World newspaper last year, but said he should have done so years earlier. He spent the first day of his testimony defending himself against charges of lobbying public officials for favors, saying former Prime Minister Gordon Brown “declared war” on News Corp., which Brown denied. James Murdoch also testified to a lack of knowledge of the scandal and cozy relationships with officials.

Attention in that area quickly shifted this week to British Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, with emails released to show that he worked to help News Corp. pick up support last year for its bid to takeover the broadcaster BSkyB — the same bid he was charged with overseeing. Hunt called the accusation “laughable” and refused calls to resign, though one of his aides did resign, saying his contact with News Corp. “went too far.”

The commentary on Murdoch’s appearance was, perhaps surprisingly, mixed. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple mocked the fine line Murdoch apparently walked in his currying favor from public officials, and the Guardian’s Nick Davies said Murdoch looks vulnerable: “The man who has made millions out of paying people to ask difficult questions, finally faced questioners he could not cope with.” He antagonized quite a few powerful people in his testimony, Davies said, and the Leveson inquiry ultimately holds the cards here.

But Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff said Rupert doesn’t use his newspapers to gain officials’ favor in the way he’s accused of doing, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer argued that there’s nothing really wrong with lobbying regulators to approve your proposals anyway. “Don’t damn Murdoch for learning the rules of the regulatory game and then playing them as aggressively as he can,” he wrote.

Plagiarism and aggregation at the Post: A Washington Post blogger named Elizabeth Flock resigned last week after being caught plagiarizing, but the story went under the radar until the Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, wrote a column charging the Post with failing to properly guide its youngest journalists. Pexton said he talked with other young Post aggregators who “felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing.”

Poynter’s Craig Silverman wrote a strong follow-up to the column, talking to several people from the Post and emphasizing the gravity of Flock’s transgression, but also throwing cold water on the “journalism’s standards are gone, thanks to aggregation” narrative. Reuters’ Jack Shafer thought Pexton went too easy on Flock’s plagiarism, but others thought it was the Post he wasn’t hard enough on. The Awl’s Trevor Butterworth said Flock’s mistake within the Post’s aggregation empire shed light on the “inherent cheapness of the product and the ethical dubiety of the entire process. You see, the Post—or any legacy news organization turned aggregator—wants to have its cake and other people’s cake too, and to do so without damaging its brand as a purveyor of original cake.”

BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza made the same point, criticizing the Post for trying to dress up its aggregation as original reporting. The Raw Story’s Megan Carpentier used the example as a warning that even the most haphazard, thoughtless aggregated pieces have a certain online permanence under our bylines.

Technology, connection, and loneliness: A week after an Atlantic cover story asked whether Facebook was making us lonely (its answer: yes), MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle echoed the same point last weekend in a New York Times opinion piece. Through social and mobile media, Turkle argued, we’re trading conversation for mere connection, sacrificing self-reflection and the true experience of relating with others in the process.

Numerous people disputed her points, on a variety of different fronts. Cyborgology’s David Banks charged Turkle with “digital dualism,” asserting that “There is no ‘second self’ on my Facebook profile — it’s the same one that is embodied in flesh and blood.” At The Atlantic, Alexandra Samuel said Turkle is guilty of a different kind of dualism — an us/them dichotomy between (generally younger) social media users and the rest of us. Turkle, she wrote, “assumes conversations are only meaningful when they look like the conversations we grew up having.”

Like Banks, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pointed out the close connection between online and offline relationships, and sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci argued at The Atlantic that if we are indeed seeing a loss in substantive interpersonal connection, it has more to do with our flight to the suburbs than social media. Claude Fischer of Boston Review disputed the idea that loneliness is on the rise in the first place, and in a series of thoughtful tweets, Wired’s Tim Carmody said the road to real relationship is in our own work, not in our embrace or denial of technologies.

New media lessons from academics and news orgs: The University of Texas hosted its annual International Symposium on Online Journalism last weekend, one of the few of the scores of journalism conferences that brings together both working journalists and academics. As usual, University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida live-blogged the heck out of the conference, and you can see his summaries of each of his 14 posts here.

Several people distilled the conference’s many presentations into a few themes: The Lab’s staff identified a few, including the need to balance beauty and usefulness in data journalism and the increasing centrality of mobile in news orgs’ strategies. At the Nonprofit Journalism Hub, conference organizer Amy Schmitz Weiss organized the themes into takeaways for news orgs, and Wisconsin j-prof Sue Robinson published some useful notes, organized by subject area.

A couple of specific items from the conference: The Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance wrote on a University of Texas study that found that the people most likely to pay for news are young men who are highly interested in news, though it also found that our stated desires in news consumption don’t necessarily match up with our actual habits. And Dan Gillmor touted the news-sharing potential of one of the conference’s presenters, LinkedIn, saying it’s the first site to connect news sharing with our professional contacts, rather than our personal ones.

[Editor's note: Mark's too modest to mention the paper he coauthored and presented at ISOJ.]

Reading roundup: Several interesting debates lurked just a bit under the radar this week. Here’s a quick lay of the land:

— Reuters’ Felix Salmon wondered why the New York Times doesn’t sell early access to its big business scoops to hedge funds looking for a market advantage, as Reuters and Bloomberg do. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram argued that the public value of those is too great to do that, and Salmon responded to his and others’ objections. The conversation also included a lively Twitter exchange, which Ingram and the Lab’s Joshua Benton Storified.

— The Chicago Tribune announced its decision to outsource its TribLocal network of community news sites to the Chicago company Journatic, laying off about 20 employees in the process. The Chicago Reader and Jim Romenesko gave some more information about Journatic (yes, the term “content farm” comes up, though its CEO rejected the term). Street Fight’s Tom Grubisich called it a good deal for the Tribune.

— In a feature at Wired, Steven Levy looked at automatically written stories, something The Atlantic’s Rebecca Greenfield said she didn’t find scary for journalism’s future prospects, since those stories aren’t really journalism. Nebraska j-prof Matt Waite also said journalists shouldn’t be afraid of something that frees them up to do their jobs better, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram tied together the Journatic deal and the robot journalism stories to come up with something a bit less optimistic.

— This week on the ebook front: A good primer on the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit of Apple and publishers for price-fixing, which The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz said is a completely normal and OK practice. Elsewhere, some publishers are dropping digital rights management, and a publishing exec talked to paidContent about why they broke DRM.

— Gawker revealed its new commenting system this week — the Lab’s Andrew Phelps gave the background, Gawker’s Nick Denton argued in favor of anonymity, Dave Winer wanted to see the ability for anyone to write an article on it, and GigaOM talked with Denton about the state of tech.

— Google shut down its paid-content system for publishers, One Pass, saying it’s moved on to its Consumer Surveys.

— Finally, a few long reads for the weekend: David Lowery on artist rights and the new business model for creative work, Ethan Zuckerman on the ethics of tweet bombing, danah boyd on social media and fear, and Steve Buttry and Dan Conover on restoring newsroom morale.

Rupert Murdoch artwork by Surian Soosay and texting photo by Ed Brownson used under a Creative Commons license.

The Awl sure likes to build stuff. In about three years, they’ve gone from a single “New York City-based web concern” to a family of six sites. The latest just debuted: Approve This Message, a kind of politics wire with the sensibility of The Awl mothership.

It’s an aggressively, intentionally bare bones effort. At first look, you’re confronted more by what it lacks than what it has: Each story has a photo, a tag, a headline, and a credit line to the original source. That’s it: No summaries, no commentary other than the headlines that read as, well, Awl-esque: “Will Mitt pick a mini-Mitt? I hope so, because getting to say ‘mini-Mitt’ over and over will be the only fun we have,” and “Oh no! Obama has ‘only’ raised $196 million for reelection, how sad.”

Approve This Message is a link machine with a cyborg brain that is part Awl and part Percolate, the same team that developed Felix Salmon’s Counterparties at Reuters. Percolate is like a butcher with an algorithm, serving up lean news by separating the meat from the fat around the web, whether via Twitter, RSS, or elsewhere. (Think of our own heat-seeking Twitter bot, Fuego.) Unlike Counterparties, which was based off a set of existing sources from Salmon, Approve This Message is made from a wholly new set of sources, Percolate cofounder Noah Brier told me over email. As the human element in the Percolate machine, Awl editors Alex Balk and Choire Sicha can add new sources and push stories through to Approve This Message, Brier said.

“In a way what we’re doing is compiling index cards of things people said, things that happened, political posturing, and all of that”

When I talked with Sicha, he said they wanted to create something that could capture all the interesting, “did you read this” kind of stories on politics that happen every day. Approve This Message is designed to be selective and slower, so readers can find stories pegged to the news cycle or timeless work that relates to the election. It’s by no means comprehensive — the simplicity is meant to serve up interesting stories and that’s it. It’s the opposite of what Sicha calls as the “fire hose news blast” of headlines that come from most political sites. Nothing wrong with that approach — there’s an audience for it and the election is one of the biggest stories in the US this year. Still, that torrent can be daunting to even the most interested of readers.

“If you stare into the maw of the election too long you will lose your will to live,” he said.

Sicha said they’re big fans of Counterparties, and after talking with Brier they decided to run with a similar idea, thinking of the site as a scannable record of what’s being said in and around politics. “In a way what we’re doing is compiling index cards of things people said, things that happened, political posturing, and all of that, and if that changes of weeks and months we’ll have our memory file and can make note of that,” he said. The site doesn’t have any ads currently, but there are slots currently taken up by house ads sprinkled among the stories.

Approve This Message is the second new site The Awl has launched this month with the addition of The Billfold, the site dedicated to all things money. (At six main sites, The Awl’s URL count is edging closer to the scope of Gawker Media, where both Sicha and Balk put in their time pre-Awl.) But aside from a kind of wry conversational nature, the look of Approve This Message shares little in common with The Hairpin, Splitsider, or other more blog-like members of the family. As The Awl has grown its associated parts have taken on different forms, perhaps more distinct in structure than other vertical-assemblers like Buzzfeed or Gawker Media. Over in Brian Lam’s end of the universe, The Wirecutter is essentially a list, a repository of product reviews and guidance. Awl Music, the site launched in January, is like a radio station run by Eric Spiegelman with a crew of contributing DJs.

“It’s a tool for people who want to know what the great articles on the election are without all the media noise and hype”

When I asked The Awl’s publisher John Shankman about that over email he said their strategy starts with finding good writers with vision and passion, then finding the right outlet for them. “Wirecutter is a very specific vision that Brian Lam has. Approve This Message is a tool that’s fun and useful and appropriate for who and what The Awl is and our readers are,” he said. “With that said, though, design and how to architecture our information better is something we’re considering a lot.”

Shankman said the value of curating in Approve This Message isn’t just pulling together good stories, but also in presenting them in a clean and accessible way. (As Buzzfeed’s Matt Buchanan put it on Twitter: “when did the awl get all designy? this is nice.”) Approve This Message provides a refreshingly simple experience for readers. The Awl gives its audience the choice to follow Approve This Message on the site, through Twitter or Tumblr. And on those two venues they link directly to the source of the story, not back to their site. “It’s a tool for people who want to know what the great articles on the election are without all the media noise and hype. The election through Awl-colored glasses, if you will,” Shankman said.

Sicha calls Awl Music and Approve This Message more disintermediated than other sites in their network. It’s not that they want out of the blog business, because they love that and will continue to build out new places for writers to showcase their talent. But they also want to toy around with the medium, and Approve This Message is one way of doing that, Sicha said.

“We’re not building traffic here. We’re using a great tool and letting it be free,” he said. “That’s probably the opposite of what we should be doing running a business, but that’s what it is. To do anything else would be untruthful or wrong.”