Hand-Picked Links From All Over

Editor & Publisher Editor Mark Fitzgerald notes that with the departure of Rusty Coats from E.W. Scripps and the newspaper industry, "that's two Internet thinkers gone from the business in this young year. E&P's current Editor of the Year departed Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a digital startup in D.C."The Editor of the Year, of course, is Steve Buttry, whose wife, Mimi Johnson, perhaps, wrote the best account of his journey to the exit door.If you add just more weeks to Fritzgerald's timeline, you also get to Rusty Coats' spouse, Janet Coats, who left her job as executive editor of the Tampa Tribune in December to move to Knoxville to be with her husband. She was an innovative and forward-thinking editor who guided the newspaper through a brutal reorganization.The departures of these three and those that came before them may be a clue of the upheaval and human stress at the epicenters of change in the newspaper business, those stress points where the traditional business print model and what must be the future digital-based business model most forcibly collide.The three are part of a growing list of people I've drawn inspiration and copied "best dish" recipes from for years who have exited the newspaper business. Most have retained their love of the news business or journalism, but have moved on from "the paper." They were the pioneers pushing, pulling, cajoling their organizations and the entire industry to move into the uncharteed future. For example, Rusty Coats' colleagues in the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Media Federation voted him their "Online Innovator" in 2005.These, like those before them, began as print journalists and who became leading digital news thinkers and leaders and doers before moving on. They will be missed from an industry that badly needs them. Yes, there are young people in the newspaper industry with energy and drive and ideas and optimism for its future. There are a handful I could name in my own newsroom and several more scattered about the building, which houses both the Knoxville News Sentinel and the E.W. Scripps' newspaper division's corporate interactive group. Smart, talented, and committed people seeing a future.But there's a grim reality as well. In a recent NewsU.org seminar Mark Briggs, who himself left newspapers for a news related startup, noted "culture eats strategy for lunch" and "when you bring change back to an organization, the organization's first instinct is to crush the change."Many interesting things are happening at newspapers and they are evolving, but the incubators for the news forms of the future seem to be occurring outside the walls of traditional media companies. The really interesting things in digital news and information are happening everywhere from behemoth Google to small startups like Dave Cohn's Spot.Us or  Michael van Poppel's BNOnews. It's harder to find truly innovative efforts at traditional media companies, particularly their flagship nameplates.Among the start-ups, some of the innovation is ironically being nurtured from fortunes made in traditional media, like the Knight Foundation's initiatives. Janet Coats' new role is developing a program to fund innovative New Media journalism for the Patterson Foundation in Sarasota, Fla., which recently received a fresh $200 million in an estate settlement.It will be interesting to see where these pioneers cut new trails. Best of luck to them. All us journalists need it.

American Journalism Review

Almost every widely reported aspect of Tiger's tale rested on a wobbly foundation, unsupported by on-the-record sourcing, says Paul Farhi. Much of what was reported relied on supposition, guesswork and innuendo, often sourced back to questionable online reports.

Much has been made by mainstream media about the evils of aggregation. The ability to serve headlines to content that was produced by someone else has been held up as exhibit No. 1 for how legacy news companies are at a disadvantage when competing with pureplay (web-only) enterprises.
The fact is, aggregation existed long before the Internet. As Robert Niles accurately explains, “the newspaper industry long ago optimized the use of aggregation for its medium.”  The traditional form of aggregation in newspapers – wire services, syndicated features, letters and guest columns – doesn’t compete as well in the digital age, unfortunately.
Niles offers and analyzes several models and strategies for consideration. Which one works for you depends solely on your specific market and “where the market’s pain is: What is the community’s need?” Once you’ve identified the opportunity, “think about how you can use information that you can collect – to aggregate – to meet those needs, to alleviate that pain.”
As Niles suggests, we need to “stop demonizing aggregation.” It’s been part of the news menu – and diet – for decades. We are all publishing on a network and none of us can hope (or expect) to generate enough news and information on our own to satisfy our communities.

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It’s become well established by now that news aggregators — blogs and social news sites that link to off-site content — have enormous influence. There have been countless articles about the power of Matt Drudge and how his links and headlines drive discussion. There are sites and studies that document which domains that Matt Drudge and social news site Digg link to most often.
But what about Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit? The site receives on average over half a million page views a day and can send so called “instalaunches,” surges of traffic that result in thousands of new readers via a single link. Many other bloggers and journalists read his site and it’s not uncommon for a linked item to receive wider coverage elsewhere. Though it’s widely known that Reynolds often links to conservative sites, he’s thought of by many to be much closer to the center than most right-wing bloggers (he would probably label himself a libertarian).
I originally set out to document which website domains Reynolds links to most often over a month-long period, but quickly discovered that his website only lets you click backward about three pages before it no longer offers the “previous entries” button. Instead, I had to settle for only four days of data, but even this relatively small data set was fascinating.
Over a period of four days spanning from February 23 to Feb. 26, Reynolds published a total of 287 links to 144 separate domains. In that small space of time, there were 26 domains that he linked to three times or more.
The two domains he linked to most often — Amazon.com (22) and Pajamasmedia.com (19) — aren’t surprising; Amazon has a referral system that allows Reynold to get a cut out of every click-through sale and Pajamas Media hosts his own blog. PJTV.com — also a Pajamas Media outlet — received a high number of links as well.
Of those domains that received three or more links, many of them were right-wing, but a few weren’t, including BoingBoing (9), Autoblog (3), New Scientist (3), Popsci.com (4), Popular Mechanics (4), Slate (3), and others. As is evident from the above list, though many Instapundit links are political in nature, he also often links to non-political stories — usually tech articles.
Below is a breakdown of all the domains Reynolds linked to three times or more:
Amazon.com — 22
pajamasmedia.com — 19
boingboing.net — 9
hotair.com — 8
reason.com — 8
althouse.blogspot.com — 7
pjtv.com — 7
jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com — 5
youtube.com — 5
corner.nationalreview.com — 4
dailycaller.com — 4
futurepundit.com — 4
popsci.com — 4
popularmechanics.com — 4
thedailybeast.com — 4
thefrisky.com– 4
legalinsurrection.blogspot.com — 3
slate.com — 3
taxprof.typepad.com — 3
technologyreview.com — 3
newscientist.com — 3
powerlineblog.com — 3
autoblog.com — 3
volokh.com — 3
washingtonexaminer.com — 3
weeklystandard.com — 3
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