The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced a $1.99-a-year iPhone app. The choice was interesting both because it offered time-limited access to content and because of the low price point — at a time when other newspaper execs are apparently debating prices more than 100 times greater. As our friend [...]

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.

Fifteen years ago few would have looked at the mass of pulp and ink that constituted a Sunday newspaper and thought, “Now there’s a thing of beauty.” But that’s how McSweeney’s is positioning the upcoming “San Francisco Panorama” edition of its literary magazine.
Panorama is a newspaper monster. It’s an old-school, bullet-stopping, 15″ x 22″ broadsheet. [...]

With no live programming in the morning, MLB Network had to scramble to assemble its crew after the bombshell broke Feb. 7: Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts and David Epstein were reporting that Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids in 2003 as a member of the Texas Rangers. But within a few hours, MLB Network [...]