[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]
Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was [...]

[Not too long ago, it was clear who was a producer of news — and who were the sources who fed them. Not so in a world where the production of media has been democratized, and the rules that governed that production are up in the air. In this essay, journalist Glenda Cooper examines several [...]

As he absorbs more responsibility for the digital operations of The New York Times, executive editor Bill Keller is trying something that anthropologists would call participant observation: For three weeks, he’s been limiting his exposure to the print edition and consuming the Times in its various digital forms, “trying to better understand the joys and [...]

Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, was in China last week for a government-sponsored media summit, where he compared digital content to NCAA basketball and explained the AP’s plans to build revenue online. But Curley was far more revealing when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the [...]

Nothing brings home the clash of cultures between “new” and “old” media like the debates over social-media policies at mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Earlier this year, the Times was in the spotlight for its attempt to develop a policy on Twitter in the wake of some indiscreet twittering [...]

Yesterday we revealed plans by The Associated Press to hold back some content from member websites. (Great discussion going on there, by the way.) The primary motivation of that initiative is search: AP material that resides on hundreds of disparate sites at the same time will hardly rate in Google compared to a single page [...]

Nothing spreads faster than a good link. We’ve posted more than 80 links related to new media on our Twitter feed this week, and here’s a roundup of the most popular, interesting, and/or important ones:
— Technorati released a list of websites to which blogs most frequently link, and it’s dominated by traditional news media. The [...]

Today marks the launch of a big new project from our friends a couple blocks away at the Berkman Center. It’s called Media Cloud, and its aim is to allow researchers and individuals to use data to observe how stories unfold, both in the mainstream media and in the blogs.
Media Cloud is a massive data [...]

— Seth Godin says now’s a great time to start a newspaper. (Or, more accurately, an email news…something.) “It will cost you nothing. It will become your gift to the community. And it will be a long lasting asset that belongs to you, not to the competition.” And he’s right — so long as your [...]

— Martin Langeveld makes his predictions for 2009 in the news biz. I’d agree with most, although (a) I think there will be at least one other newspaper company bankruptcy, (b) I think Q3/Q4 revenue numbers will be down from 2008, not flat, (c) circ will be down, not stable, (d) newspaper stocks won’t beat [...]

— The Wall Street Journal is talking out loud about poaching the markets of the major metros, Gawker says. Would that mean regional variations of the WSJ that are have just enough local content to turn two-paper subscribers into one-paper subscribers? I have a hard time seeing average newspaper readers converting in large numbers to [...]

— Matt Thompson argues coverage of the 2008 campaign was the best in history. The key takeaway, though:
I’m a politics junkie who’s willing to devote untold hours to the task of tailoring my coverage to suit my information needs. For someone like me, the diversity and breadth of information on the Web is perfect. But [...]

That web of circles and lines is BBC blogger Steve Bowbrick’s conception of what’s standing in the way of a more “open” BBC. There’s a discussion going on in the comments of Steve’s post, but a better one on the image’s Flickr page. Any of these recognizable from a news organization dear to your heart?

Noticed in the comments on this post about the BBC’s (very tentative) open-source initiative: Auntie Beeb is actually releasing its album reviews via a Creative Commons license. In other words, they’re willingly giving other web sites (or publications) the right to reprint their reviews, free of charge.
The BBC had years ago announced its intentions to [...]