Mediagazer: Dark shadows — In Washington, murder turns out to be color-coded (Clay Shirky/Columbia Journalism Review)

8:50 PM ET, March 3, 2013

Top News:

This Story Stinks — IN the beginning, the technology gods created the Internet and saw that it was good. Here, at last, was a public sphere with unlimited potential for reasoned debate and the thoughtful exchange of ideas, an enlightening conversational bridge across the many geographic …

Discussion: @jondenunzio, @bill_gross, Gawker and @jeffjarvis

Patrick B. Pexton / Washington Post:

Signing off as Post ombudsman — My two-year term as The Post's independent ombudsman has run out. It has been both a privilege to serve Post readers as a pipeline to the staff and an honor to work in a newsroom of such distinguished journalists. I hope I succeeded even a little in explaining …

Discussion: @jbrodkin

Greg Gilman / The Wrap: Washington Post Eliminates Ombudsman Position

Katharine Weymouth / Washington Post:
A reader representative for The Post

Discussion: Washingtonian, Mediactive, NPR Ombudsman, Washington Post, Politico, JIMROMENESKO.COM and Tampabay.com

Yochai Benkler / New Republic:

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case — After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country.

Discussion: paidContent, @antderosa, Guardian, Gawker and The Dish

Scott Shane / New York Times:
Manning to Face More Serious Charges in Leak

Discussion: The Verge

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The newsonomics of selling Main Street — Main Street is finally going digital. With the digitization of smaller business, newspaper companies believe they've found that elusive third leg of a business model — a model that could keep them standing, maybe even taller, into the second half of this decade.

Discussion: Street Fight

Andrés Cala / Christian Science Monitor:

Spain's economic crisis has an unexpected victim: journalism — The Spanish media has been ravaged by the country's recession, and not just economically. The crisis has also sparked serious challenges to its credibility. — MADRID — In Spain's transformational economic crisis, no industry has escaped unscathed.

Marco Arment / Marco.org:

“Did we just rip off Marco Arment and The Magazine?” — That's actually the title of the latest newsletter from TypeEngine, a startup promising a platform to easily make Newsstand magazines a lot like mine. — I don't really know what to think about things like this.

Discussion: @glennf

Clay Shirky / Columbia Journalism Review:

Dark shadows — In Washington, murder turns out to be color-coded — It's been a big year for Homicide Watch. Last summer's Kickstarter campaign succeeded admirably, raising $47,450. The website went from an almost-fatal hiatus to hiring its first staff members, who could continue …

Felix Salmon:

Content economics, part 2: payments — Apologies for the delay between part 1 and this: I wanted to wait until Amanda Palmer's TED talk appeared online, because it's an important part of the other big aspect of content economics. Part 1 was about the ability of publishers to sell readers to advertisers …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, @mathewi and Fortune

Barbara Demick / Los Angeles Times:

Live China TV coverage of executions raises outcry — Chinese state TV broadcasts live images of four condemned killers shortly before they are executed. Human rights lawyers and others express outrage at the unprecedented coverage. — Naw Kham, a drug gang leader from Myanmar …

Discussion: The Verge, Mediaite and Gawker

Joe Pompeo / New Republic:

The National: Abu Dhai's brief experiment in press freedom — In 2008, when a new government-owned newspaper debuted in the Persian Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi, it was greeted as the latest sign of the formerly sleepy oil town's cosmopolitan ambitions. The island city of around 900,000 …

Discussion: @sultanalqassemi, @tnr, @jessradio and @emile_hokayem

Erik Wemple:

Ann Romney blames campaign and media for the same thing — Here's a sound bite that's sure to get all kinds of rotation over several news cycles this week. “I'm happy to blame the media.” That's what Ann Romney said to Chris Wallace in a much-anticipated Fox News interview.

Discussion: Fox News Insider, The Huffington Post, Mediaite and Politico

John Wihbey / Nieman Journalism Lab:

What's New in Digital Scholarship: Why can Facebook posts be super-memorable, and did tweets direct bombs in Libya? — Editor's note: There's a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers?

Discussion: Journalist's Resource