Jim Rosenberg | jerotus.

Offline responsibilities will take me away from online musings for the next few days. Meanwhile, enjoy some of the best sites for political coverage:

Good luck to all of us.

–Jim

It’s a nail-biting time to be in the news business (hasn’t it always been that way?). A Poynter analyst notes that recently released circulation numbers for US papers are actually worse than they appear.

Now Wired reports on Gannett’s imminent new strategy to “crowdsource” the news gathering and analysis functions of flagship title USA Today and 90 other papers nationally. Company leaders swear it’s not about cutting costs – they say it’s about leveraging the resources of their readers, and creating a community of information:

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”

The early-adopter half of my brain is excited by this – it seems like a smart way to acknowledge how media and technology has really leveled the playing field for access to information as well as the ability to find a platform to communicate.

And yet, the old-school journalism side of my brain thinks this is really silly – it will be a cost-cutting move eventually…and it negates the need to have well-funded investigative journalism keeping watch over our policymakers.

It is too early to say if this is a good thing or not. This much is clear – newspapers need to keep changing if they are to remain relevant to their audiences.

It’s not often (if ever, actually) that I would just glom something onto this site after reading a blog post elsewhere, but this just seems like a no-brainer (and I love the look of the flags). Amit Agarwal says:

Since more than 65% of web users speak a language other than English, it is essential that you provide language translation features in your blog so that you don’t miss the non-English speaking traffic.

So when an Arabic visitor passes your English blog, he or she can just click the Arab flag to translate the website into his native language - That way you don’t loose a visitor plus he could even subscribe if the content is good even if written in another language.

More about language issues and the web, courtesy of the United Nations.

Language Translation Flags via Digital Inspiration

Poynter’s picked up on a presentation done by Yahoo! News product manager Jeordan Legon for a group of journalism students in Chile. Yahoo! News gets an astounding 36 million unique vistors each month. Salient points:

Advertising is being segmented by audience – search is proving to be most effective.

Innovate without fear of failure.

On the other side of the fence, Yahoo! has launched a search marketing blog for publishers. One to watch, I imagine.

[A view of the future for news - El Mercurio via Poynter]

The New York Times reports on a concerted effort by liberal bloggers to move negative stories about Republicans into higher spots on results pages in Google. This practice is negatively called “Google Bombing” – it is an extreme example of what’s known as search engine optimization (SEO) – which is a way of cross-linking and setting up content so that a search engine sees the content and ranks it more highly in a search result.

It will be harder to manipulate results for searches of the name of a candidate who has already been widely covered in the news and widely discussed in the blogosphere, because so many links and so many pages already refer to that particular name. Search results on lesser-known candidates, with a smaller body of references and links, may be easier to change.

“We don’t condone the practice of Google bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results,” said Ricardo Reyes, a Google spokesman. “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.”

If you’re wondering why I put a picture of Cleopatra Jones on this entry, well…it’s because that photo came up during a Google Image search on “Jon Kyl,” a senator from my home state of Arizona who is one of the targets of this Google Bomb campaign. It’s a better visual than a guy in a suit, no?

This is a big deal, as Reuters reports:

Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses.

“What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay,” she said. “This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod.”

At the moment, Apple aims to keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically do not work on iPods.

[Apple's DRM is hacked via Reuters]

A Compete study out this month shows that people who use social networking sites tend to have a bit more discretionary income and spend less time watching television than folks who don’t use such sites.  The study also finds that traditional online advertising is not terribly effective in reaching those people:

Online marketers that are integrating customer forums, peer reviews and branded micro-sites are having the best results in bringing in users than those relying on the more traditional online advertising like banner ads, search result ads and pay-per-click advertisements.

I’d like to see some numbers breaking down exactly how many people online are considered social networkers vs. other.

Today’s Hindustan Times has a story assessing the state of blogs written by Indians – or that are about India. “Can India ever achieve superpower status in the blogosphere?” asks the HT.

My own view is yes – absolutely. Though based on this story, it appears that India’s blogging community has not yet reached critical mass. The HT quotes blogger Amit Agarawal: “There are various factors that currently prevent India from being a blogging superpower. We do not have enough people blogging and more importantly, there aren’t enough people reading blogs. To add to this, the majority of Indian blogs are personal diaries that would only be interesting to the family and friends of the blog’s author.”

That’s an apt description of blogging in the United States about four years ago (and look at how things are now). And yet, Indian blogs have made international headlines at least twice this year. Last July, in the hours after the Mumbai train attacks, blogs brought people together and filled a critical information gap. The same month there was the strange and still not fully explained shut down of certain web sites – ostensibly to avoid offending certain religious groups.

Will India’s blogging community continue to grow and become more relevant? You can bet on it.

U2′s website announced today that fans can go on a global web treasure hunt to locate snippets of lyrics from past songs. These clues – embedded in web sites – will add up to a series of letters that can be used to answer a question. The winner gets to fly to Hawaii to see U2 in concert.

All of this is clearly designed to create maximum online buzz – and I’m guessing it will drive traffic to some of U2′s favorite causes, as well. It’s brilliant, if not slightly confusing. More details to come at U2.com.