A quick roundup

Been a busy week and so haven't posted. But some things I've come across that are worth considering:

Nicole at A Capital Idea points to a great way to spend 15 minutes. Take the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's headline challenge -- write three heds in that time. Warning, those stories are funky and those counts aren't easy. (Read the column by reader's reperesentative Kate Parry first -- an ode to copy editors.)

Read Jay Rosen's take on the New York Times-About.com deal. Unlike a lot of the ink spilled (or rather, gushed) over the deal, Rosen takes the path not well-trod and gets to an important "little detail" for news organizations: too many have their systems set up so there is no permanance, no long tail, no roots sunk into the Web. We're running into this ourselves at the school, as we have switched over to World Now for our Web publishing (hey, it was donated!). We used to be able to pull up "pages" for contests -- now we can't.

Look at Scott Libin's Poyner column on the new book "Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell. One of Gladwell's main points is that, in decision-making, more information isn't always better.

Forbes is out with its own ideas on the woes of the news business. A lot of stuff about how will "serious news" outlets survive. (And see the review by John McIntyre, AME at the Baltimore Sun and American Copy Editors Society president, of Philip Meyer's The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.)

Note the citizens journalism efforts of the New West Network. The founder is Jonathan Weber, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, which went crash with the dot-coms.

And read (via Media Info Center) how the Edinburg (Texas) Daily Review has decided to trim back from daily publication. "Primarily, a lot of the news we have in our paper right now is state and national news, which people are getting on television or national papers," said Pearl Austin Mathis, publisher and editor. "I don't think that's the reason they are taking the paper. They want our paper for Edinburg news. That's what we are going to give them. We figure we can fill two papers a week with Edinburg news." Right on, Pearl. (And as a side benefit, she gets to work days more.)

Finally, click on over to the J-School Year project. Read two thought-provoking posts by a couple of my former students. The first, from Tamika Cody about her job search, should anger everyone who cares about this business and about nurturing talent. The second, from David Hardee, is a pretty -- as they say in diplomatic circles -- frank look at the real world from a new journalist's eyes.