Mediagazer: Why Twitter's army of ‘Mechanical Turks’ will not conquer breaking news (Cory Bergman/Inside)

6:55 AM ET, January 10, 2013

Top News:

Ken Layne / The Awl:

SF Weekly, Seattle Weekly Latest Victims Of Alt-Weekly Newspaper Industry — Staffers and free-lancers at two West Coast alt-weeklies are nervously awaiting whatever unpleasant news comes with the sale of those papers to local conglomerates. Like all of the once-mighty urban weekly papers …

Discussion: The Snitch, NetNewsCheck Latest, LA Observed, AAN and Eater National

Jim Romenesko:
Village Voice Media sells SF Weekly and Seattle Weekly to Black Press properties

Discussion: SF Appeal, The Daily Weekly, Slog and The Huffington Post

China Real Time Report:

Face-Off in a Beijing Newsroom: An Insider's Account … Fallout from a high-profile conflict over censorship between Chinese propaganda officials and journalists at Southern Weekly, one of China's most daring newspapers, has spread to sister newspaper Beijing News, which lost a dramatic stand-off …

New York Times:
Censored Newspaper Returns to Publication Amid Struggles

Discussion: Guardian

Janet Stilson / Adweek:

Why do community news sites, once hailed as the future of journalism, so often flop? — Spelunking equipment, climbing gear and snowshoes are Steve Sutorius' life. That's clear watching him as he peddles outdoor-sports merchandise in his shop, Wildernest, on this 10-mile-long jewel in Puget Sound just off the coast from Seattle.

Cory Bergman / Inside:

Why Twitter's army of ‘Mechanical Turks’ will not conquer breaking news — Twitter revealed this week that it uses Mechanical Turk — a croudsourced pool of people — as an innovative way to help identify and classify search queries as soon as they're trending.

Discussion: GigaOM, Softpedia News, VentureBeat and Marketing Pilgrim

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Business Insider Traffic Revealed — A couple of years ago, I revealed a lot of internal information about Business Insider—the sort of information that most companies paranoically guard for a litany of stated reasons. — I said that, if nothing horrible happened, I might one day do the same thing again.

Discussion: PandoDaily

Charlie Warzel / Adweek: The Biggest New Media Trend Is Analytics Transparency

Craig Silverman / Poynter:

Google's Gingras: Journalists need to focus on invention, not transformation — Richard Gingras says that at this moment in journalism, “transformation” is a four letter word. — Gingras, the head of news and social products for Google, spoke to a group of journalism professors …

Jason Boog / GalleyCat:

Publishing Projects Raised $15 Million on Kickstarter Last Year — Publishing projects raised $15,311,251 on Kickstarter last year, but only 30 percent of attempted projects succeeded. There were 5,634 publishing projects launched, but only 1,666 of those projects actually got funded.

Discussion: bookforum.com, FishbowlNY, Softpedia News and AppNewser

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke / The New York Observer:

Wired EIC Scott Dadich Names New Editorial Team — Wired's new EIC Scott Dadich is settling into the magazine's San Francisco office, where he moved over the holidays, and his new role on the masthead. And as part of the transition, he has named a new editorial team.

Mathew Ingram / paidContent:

NYT public editor: Sometimes transparency triumphs over objectivity — Is the status of objectivity as a sacrosanct principle of the journalism industry beginning to weaken? There have been some encouraging signs lately, not the least of which are some recent blog posts …

Discussion: Boing Boing and The Public Editor's Journal

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

Online radio will start serving ads based on your web browsing — Picture yourself sitting in Cleveland and using the internet to explore places to visit in France. Later, you pull up online radio service Pandora on your web browser to listen to Motown songs and what do you hear?

Discussion: AdExchanger

Paul Sawers / The Next Web:

The Atlantic Wire taps Sencha to launch a new HTML5 iPad Web app fit for the digital era — American magazine The Atlantic has been providing literary and cultural commentary for more than 150 years, but its traditional roots haven't hindered it from evolving into a publication fit for the digital age.

Discussion: Audience Development

David Lieberman / Deadline.com:

Lionsgate Lends A Hand To Samsung's 3D TV Technology: CES — Consumers aren't going to buy many 3D TV sets unless they have more content to watch on them. The independent studio said at the International CES confab in Las Vegas today that it will help the cause by using Samsung's image processing technology …

Discussion: The Wrap

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

At Huffington Post, everything old is new again: All reporters get blogs — Once upon a time, The Huffington Post was a left-wing, Drudge-like aggregator with a stable of celebrity columns that eventually metastasized into a sort-of group-blog empire for unpaid “experts” and “citizen journalists.”

Guardian:

Bradley Manning trial delayed until June after sentence reduction granted — Judge reschedules former US soldier's trial to give more time for review of classified information related to WikiLeaks case — A military judge has pushed back the trial of Bradley Manning …

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Glenn Greenwald / Guardian:
Even a military judge recognizes what many progressives denied: Bradley Manning was mistreated

Discussion: @freedomofpress, New York Times and The Huffington Post

Ben Kersey / The Verge:

JSTOR begins offering free yet limited access to its online academic library — Online digital library JSTOR will begin offering free access to its catalogue of journals, papers, and books. The Register & Read program will now allow individuals to register for the service …

Hamish McKenzie / PandoDaily:

How does BuzzFeed intend to crack a $1B valuation? By embracing journalism's past — It was just over a year ago that BuzzFeed hired editor-in-chief Ben Smith away from Politico to help build the cat-happy publication into a major media company. In the intervening months …