[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

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

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

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

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It sometimes feels like all the good topics are taken online — it’s uncommon to find a promising but untrampled niche for a new website. The folks behind The Awl hope they’ve found one in a new site up in beta today called Splitsider. (It’s password-protected for now; it’ll be public next week.) It’ll cover the comedy industry for a ready audience of comedy nerds/lovers, and it’s the first evidence of the Awl expansion plans we wrote about in June.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Earlier today, Google and The Associated Press announced that they’ve struck a new licensing deal that will allow Google to continue posting content from the news cooperative. The contract is an extension of an agreement that goes back to 2006 — the one that permits Google to host AP content on Google properties (Google News, most prominently). And, depending on whose statement you read, the agreement will both “create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities” and allow the companies to “work together in a number of new areas, such as ways to improve discovery and distribution of news.”

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

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Until recently, Tumblr was a fairly isolated phenomenon: a platform that (to overgeneralize only slightly) helped a slew of web-savvy young city-dwellers to stay connected with more characters than Twitter but less commitment than blogs. Now, though, the service — which passed its billion-post mark last Monday — is in the air in a more diffuse way, via the tons-of-Tumblrs popping up under the banners of national news outlets. There’s Newsweek’s praiseworthy specimen — the most buzzed-about of the bunch — but there’s also The New Yorker’s, The Economist’s, The American Prospect’s, Life magazine’s, the Huffington Post’s, the Paris Review’s, Utne Reader’s, ProPublica’s, and, a bit farther afield, Public Radio International’s, ABC News Radio’s…and on and on.

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

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The reaction to our new free iPhone app has been tremendously positive — if you’ve got an iPhone and haven’t downloaded it yet, I suggest you hop to. On my post announcing the app, there were a few comments I wanted to respond to. First, this one from Robin Sloan, who wants a little background on how the digital sausage got made:

I’d love to read a little mini “developer diary” about the behind-the-scenes process here — tools/frameworks you used, surprises along the way, etc. Bet it would be useful to a lot of folks working on iPhone apps at news organizations, too!

So, for those interested, here’s my tale of how the Lab iPhone app came into being — a tale I hope lots more news organizations can tell. Because if I can do it for a total cost of $624, there’s no reason more newspapers shouldn’t be on the platform.

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