[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]
A meter for the Times’ blogs: Plenty of stuff happened at the intersection of journalism and new media this week, and for whatever reason, a lot of it had something to do [...]

Posts like yesterday’s by my Nieman Lab colleague Jonathan Stray make my academic heart flutter. Stray’s analysis looked at coverage of the latest Google-China developments and found that only 11 percent of the 100-plus news sources did “original reporting” on the issue.
It should join the growing list of reports — from the six year [...]

[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]
Building news apps for the iPad: The buzz from the tech crowd about Apple’s iPad has died down, but the iPad is beginning to get more interesting for the journalism world. That’s [...]

So, if you are a news publisher, new or old, how do you engage this new world? I’ve checked around and there are precious few metrics to yet point to; it’s all so new. Consider, though, that “social media optimization,” a term that has buzzed quietly about Silicon Valley for a couple of years, will soon get real, becoming as much a fixture of our digital strategy as search engine optimization has become.

Within that social media optimization, we’ll see focused attempts to understand the value of social links, and, of course, the nuances among social links.

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, [...]

With the journalism and technology landscape changing literally by the hour, I often feel that one thing missing from conversations about “the future of news” is the long view. Steve Yelvington was implicitly making this point about history when he recently wrote that
…newspapers have a track record of empirical learnings that perhaps ought to be [...]

A quick addendum to Zach’s post on The New York Times Magazine’s great Katrina story. While some will argue that one epic story isn’t the best journalistic use of $400,000 (or whatever the final bill is), I think the folks at ProPublica and the Times are right to point out how expensive quality investigative reporting [...]

I’d never heard this term until Dave Hendricks, who blogs at Attentionization, used it when he wrote about my post regarding what newspapers could learn from the decline in the ice harvesting business. (Read more about how he explains artisanal news in the comments on that post.)
I like the term. So I started to think [...]

Jimmy Fallon’s new Conan-O’Brien-replacing late-night show debuts tonight. Will it be any good? Probably not, at least at first. (Conan wasn’t much good when he started, either.)
But this article by Nicholas Carlson gives me some hope that Fallon’s show is ready to innovate in the right directions. And it also provides a few lessons that [...]

The settlement in the GateHouse/NYT Co. case has been posted, and this is one of those moments when it’s clear I am not a lawyer. We’re trying to get clarity from people smarter than us, and we’re discussing it over on Twitter. But here’s a preliminary reading of the settlement language:
GateHouse will implement one or [...]

— CBS is planning to relaunch its TV.com as a “better Hulu” — meaning it’ll have Hulu’s streaming video and a community around it, discussing the shows. A reminder that good content is great, but people talking about your good content is better.
— William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week, uses the language of “curation” — [...]

In the web version of his most recent column, The New York Times’ Frank Rich squeezed 32 links among his 1,560 words. The mere presence of links might not seem so notable — except that only one of the Times’ 10 other op-ed columnists had included even a single link in his or her most [...]

— 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 [...]