A brand guru. That’s what they called Baba Shetty when he was hired away from advertising agency Hill Holliday by The Daily Beast to be the new CEO of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Less than a month later, the company announced that Newsweek was putting an end to its print edition and going all-digital….

Reuters, as a wire service, has the concept of a minute-by-minute stream of news deep in its DNA. So it’s natural that its digital presence would echo that — a flowing river of information, where moving from story to story feels unencumbered. Yesterday Reuters unveiled a preview site for the future look and design of…

Digg publishes the results of a user survey and finds that email remains a more popular link-sharing tool than Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or carrier pigeon. (Those Google+ numbers are surprisingly high, though.) Interestingly, the survey data also supports buzz that Pocket has taken a clear lead over Instapaper and Readability in the read-later space. (This…

Stemming the misinformation epidemic: As The New York Times’ Brian Stelter pointed out, the media — both old and new — played as large a role in the manhunt that followed last week’s Boston Marathon bombing as it has in any major news story in recent history. There are a myriad of angles to this story, but…

Social media skepticism about breaking news: As has become the norm following large-scale tragedies, the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed two and injured more than a hundred sparked a lively discussion about social media, journalism, and the value of simply getting information right during crisis situations. The attacks spurred some remarkable journalism —…

Big talk from the TV suits: The TV startup Aereo drew some significant threats from the industry’s giants this week. The major broadcasters have a lawsuit pending against Aereo, which charges subscribers to watch over-the-air TV online by giving them remote access to their own tiny antennas. Unlike cable companies, Aereo doesn’t pay broadcasters retransmission…

TAIPEI — I recently had the pleasure of teaching a two-day data journalism workshop at the Commonwealth Magazine Group in Taiwan’s capital city. The signature moment came when I showed these journalists the L.A. Times crime map, and explained that it updated automatically from government data feeds. There were gasps from my audience. “Why does…

Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, has launched a news startup called Worldcrunch. For the past three years, he’s been describing and commenting on the process here at Nieman Lab. Read his past installments here. Three years ago, when I was taking my first baby steps from reporter to…

The Brown Institute for Media Innovation just began accepting applications from students or alumni of Columbia and Stanford for its second round of Magic Grants. Helen Gurley Brown made headlines last year when she donated $30 million jointly to Columbia and Stanford to found the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a bicoastal effort toward helping…

New York Times senior software architect Jacob Harris has a thing for robots and wordplay. You may recall he’s the guy behind @nytimes_ebooks, the Times answer to the elusive and inscrutable Twitter bot @Horse_ebooks. So it’s only natural that Harris has now created an algorithm that extrudes haiku out of the text of Times stories….

Big paywall announcements in U.K.: As seems to happen pretty much every week now, a few more big paywall dominoes fell this week — two of the U.K.’s biggest papers, The Sun and The Telegraph, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle here in the States. The Telegraph’s pay plan is a metered model, which has…

Cicadas are harmless, albeit somewhat disgusting. Every 17 years, Brood II cicadas come out of the ground in swarms from as far south as Virginia to as far north as Connecticut. They don’t do much beyond make a lot of noise. Typically, they appear when the temperature eight inches below the surface hits 64 degrees….

Mourning the loss of Google Reader: Google announced that it would be pulling the plug this July on Google Reader, the dominant RSS reader on the web. There are plenty of alternatives, of course, several of whom (like Digg, Feedly, Zite and Flipboard) began actively courting Google Reader users within hours of Google’s announcement. Google Reader…

Editor’s note: You may remember Jake Levine from our Q&A with him in October or his contribution to our predictions-for-2013 package. He used to run News.me; now he runs Digg. Jake wrote this piece about how business-side types are drawn to the idea of “learning to code” and how their approach may not be doing…

If you ever wanted an “Ask This Old House”-style guide set in the universe of newsroom developers and designers, today you’re in luck: OpenNews Learning is a new kind of online education project that looks at the nuts and bolts of interactive projects through the eyes of the people who built them. It’s the newest…