The Tweetgeist: Normal life resumes post-iPad

Comments: Engadget shuts 'em down

The tech news site announced, "We're turning comments off for a bit" in response to what it called "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening" posts.

Competitor Nick Denton soon tweeted:

@nicknotned It is possible to maintain civilized discussion as a site grows. Why the Gizmodo comment system works: http://gizmodo.com/5462585

Meanwhile, MediaBistro collected comments on comments.

And over at Chris Clarke's "This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post", the comments offered remarkable, and hilarious, comments.

#paywall: Carr to Varian to Jarvis

Nick Carr recently used the economic theories of Berkeley economist (and Google exec) Hal Varian to support an argument on behalf of charging for news content online. But, as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, in a talk at UC Berkeley Journalism School Varian seemed to contradict Carr.

@jeffjarvis Nick Carr used GOOG's Hal Varian to argue news readers will pay: http://bit.ly/dkzh0R. Varian himself says they won't: http://bit.ly/99WH38

Here's a quote from Varian:

People are willing to pay for newspapers not because they're used to paying, according to Varian, but because "It's a much nicer experience to sit there with a newspaper and a cup of coffee and have that be your leisure time activity."

To the extent that reading an actual newspaper is an activity in itself, Varian argued, people are willing to pay for it, in a way they aren't willing to pay for a couple minutes of distraction at work. So the challenge for newspapers would be to reinvent a way to make reading news a leisure-time activity. Then -- and only then -- will readers be willing to pay for content.

Drudge amplifies Reuters' middle-class tax hike inaccuracy

The news service ran a headline about President Obama's budget plan that read, "Backdoor taxes to hit middle class." Since this wasn't true, and the White House complained, Reuters "withdrew" the story -- but not before the Drudge Report linked to it. Business Insider's The Wire reported that it took Drudge half a day to remove the incorrect headline.

Jay Rosen tweeted a link to the Memeorandum snapshot including the original Reuters headline.

George Packer's Twitter-phobia

New Yorker writer George Packer's weekend rant against Twitter occasioned a wave of critiques:

@EllnMllr RT @clairecm: one note: where did i discover george packer's NYer essay on how twitter is an information hell ....? on twitter

@jayrosen_nyu Context for George Packer's column http://jr.ly/tmdq on fear of Twitter. 2004: "I hate blogs. I'm also addicted to them." http://jr.ly/tmdh

@lavrusik @stevebuttry It's funny how the critics are always the people that have never used it. That's just poor journalism.

And over at the NY Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton took Packer to task as well, writing that "The Twitter train has left the station."

Miscellaneous thought provokers

• Ryan Sholin on "Epistemology and Sources": How media outlets got duped by Jason Calacanis's iPad hoax, how he got duped by Fake Jurgen Habermas, and "Stefan de Rothschild" couldn't fool the Wikipedians.

• What are journalism schools for? Seth Lewis at Nieman Lab weighs in:

  We’re never going to find the silver bullet, so instead let’s teach students to be flexible -- to work in unpredictable settings, to generate their own funding as needed, and otherwise learn as they go. We can do that by using a curriculum that is similarly flexible, adaptive to technological and cultural trends in society even while it retains bedrock values of truth-seeking and fairness.

  And so does Dan Gillmor, in an excerpt from his next book, Mediactive.

• How Writing For the Web is Different, and How It Isn't: Jason Fry explores what kind of long-form journalism can still work online:

  The dirty secret of long-form journalism is that most of it doesn’t work in any medium. The difference is online you can watch page views erode as the page numbers rise, while in print you probably have no idea anything’s wrong. That has less to do with the Web than it does with the ability to measure readership. Long form will always be risky. Make sure it serves the subject and you can deliver on it.

• Laura McGann at Nieman Lab profiles David Bennahum and his Center for Independent Media, an $11.5 million nonprofit startup.

• Mark Glaser captures a comment from a Google News exec:

  @mediatwit Krishna Bharat, Google News: The algorithms aren't trying to replace an editor, they're trying to assimilate the wisdom of mulitple editors.