[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 raft of ideas at SXSW: The center of the journalism-and-tech world this week has been Austin, Texas, site of the annual conference South by Southwest. The part we’re most concerned about [...]

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.

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s news about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The iPad’s big reveal: Apple unveiled its new tablet — the unfortunately named iPad — on Wednesday, a week before the Super Bowl, and the buzz was as least as big: The Internet practically broke [...]

Shortly after George W. Bush’s victory in 2004, liberal magazines The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and The Nation held a joint crisis meeting. They emerged from the Rockefellers’ old “coach barn” at Pocantico with the goal of collaborating more closely in order to master new technologies, increase the impact of independent media outlets — [...]

In a corner of the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., they’ve prototyped a living room of the future. It’s not as whizbang awesome as you might hope — a lamp glows red or green depending on how the markets are doing — but it does feel like a reasonable conception [...]

Paul Colford, the AP’s director of media relations, has asked to respond to the interview I did with The Toledo Blade’s Ron Royhab about the Ohio News Organization (OHNO), the news-sharing cooperative formed by the state’s eight biggest newspapers.
First, he says Ron’s memory is faulty: “AP CEO Tom Curley did not attend the meeting with [...]

When I was in Toledo Friday, I stopped by the first newspaper to give me a job, The Toledo Blade. You may know The Blade as a family-owned paper that has historically punched well above its weight; it was for many years the smallest American newspaper to maintain a full-time foreign bureau (first in Paris, [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times has quietly unveiled a new widescreen video player that appears to run more smoothly than its previous iteration. The most obvious change is that NYT videos can now be viewed in full screen. But there’s still no way to embed videos on web pages elsewhere, which limits the content’s potential reach.
In [...]