HONG KONG — A few weeks ago, Jonathan Stray looked at how news is reported and repeated in the new news ecosystem by tracking a single international story — the revelation that last year’s hacking of Google and other companies had been traced to two schools in China. His finding: 121 distinct versions of the [...]

Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. (The study is entitled “How will journalism survive the internet age?” Round 1 was held in December; transcripts and other material are linked here — scroll down. Not to be outdone, [...]

day.

For Google, its profit has allowed it to lay the groundwork for that growth. Its financial performance is hugely impressive today, but almost all of its revenue has been based on desktop/laptop paid search. As many have said, it’s a one-trick pony, but with the best trick found in the 21st century digital business. It knows that business is maturing, so we can see the theme in its a company-a-month buying spree: mobile, social, video. That combo, what I call the new trifecta for this digital decade, anticipates where digital use — and ad spending — is going. Google is not only providing us pictures of our topography through StreetView, it is laying new roads for its own highly profitable future.

We often talk about the new news ecosystem — the network of traditional outlets, new startups, nonprofits, and individuals who are creating and filtering the news. But how is the work of reporting divvied up among the members of that ecosystem?
To try to build a datapoint on that question, I chose a single big story [...]

[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 [...]

Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.”

Within that simple word change,we see a world shifting, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

[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 gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few [...]

CNET and Gizmodo have been sharing content for the last couple months. I confirmed that a partnership exists, but requests for additional information from either party were not fruitful.
Frankly, the most intriguing aspect of this partnership is already in plain view: The sites are posting the same articles. Take a look at this Gizmodo story [...]

Web marketer says Facebook is hitting “tech lock in,” better known as “worldwide domination” http://j.mp/cbgsMM »
Google exec says NYT paywall won’t make money: “It’s too easy to bypass” http://j.mp/aJVB55 »
Bloomberg may launch a $100 million site on the intersection of biz and politics, employing 40-50 http://j.mp/cPVVZS »
Bono’s private equity firm will invest up to $100 [...]

[Our friend Mark Coddington has spent the past several months writing weekly summaries of what's happened in the the changing world of journalism — both the important stories and the debates that came up around them online. I've liked them so much that I've asked him to join us here at the Lab. So every [...]

[Yesterday, we showed how our Martin Langeveld's predictions for 2009 turned out. A few hits, a few misses, but lots of thoughts provoked. Here's his list of what we can expect in 2010. —Josh]
Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.2 percent in Q3 of 2009 and [...]

[A little over one year ago, our friend Martin Langeveld made a series of predictions about what 2009 would bring for the news business — in particular the newspaper business. I even wrote about them at the time and offered up a few counter-predictions. Here's Martin's rundown of how he fared. Up next, we'll post [...]

Google News launched a Spotlight section back in September to highlight “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” Initial response was positive, but with a few months under its belt I checked in to see if the feature is living up to that first flush of excitement.
The verdict?
It all depends on how you define “in-depth” and “lasting [...]

[In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued its report on how our media need to evolve to serve the public interest in the digital age. The effort included some big names: Google's Marissa Mayer, former solicitor general Ted Olson, ex-L.A. Times editor John Carroll, former FCC chairman [...]

I’ve helped organize a lot of future of journalism conferences this year, and have done some research for a few policy-oriented “future of journalism” white papers. And let’s face it: as Alan Mutter told On the Media this weekend, we’re edging close to the point of extreme rehash.
This isn’t to say there won’t be more [...]