The disruption in media and real-time politics at paidContent 2012
As part of paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York, I'll be talking with venture capitalist Fred Wilson about the future of media and with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about real-time politics.
Twitter and Reddit as crowdsourced fact-checking engines
New research about how news is verified through Twitter and a crowdsourced debunking of some fake Wikipedia entries reinforce the point that social networks and online communities can be powerful tools for the real-time verification of events, something that used to take place behind closed doors.
Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo
In an interview about the future of the media industry, Google's head of news products Richard Gingras said that newspapers are like old-fashioned internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo, and that unless they can adapt to the web instead of fighting it they are doomed.
My personal take: 3 reasons I don’t like newspaper paywalls
The news that Canada's largest newspaper is launching a paywall brings back memories of an earlier paywall attempt, and how that led one GigaOM writer to the discovery of blogging -- and three reasons why paywalls are not the solution to the newspaper industry's problems.
Facebook admits that it doesn’t know how mobile works
Instead of focusing on Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie, investors and analysts should pay more attention to what it flagged in its latest securities filing: that its mobile business is underperforming on the ad-revenue front, and it doesn't really know whether it can fix it.
Twitter: We’re still the free-speech wing of the free-speech party
Attempts by various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world to track dissidents through social networks has put pressure on companies like Twitter to comply with these court orders -- but Twitter seems determined to uphold its users rights whenever possible. 
Twitter, World War II and the death of official secrets
The government's attempt to keep the president's trip to Afghanistan a secret was foiled by Twitter -- in the same week that the Associated Press apologized to the reporter it fired 67 years ago for breaking the embargo on the end of World War II.
Prismatic wants to be the newspaper for a digital age
Surrounded by an overwhelming amount of digital content, many people are looking for something that can fill the role of a digital newspaper -- filtering and highlighting interesting content. Among the many startups trying to solve this problem is a San Francisco outfit called Prismatic.
It doesn’t matter what e-books cost to make
Book publishers are trying hard to argue that e-books cost almost as much to produce as printed ones, and therefore prices for e-books should be higher -- but the bottom line is that consumers don't care what a publisher's costs are, nor should they.
Hey Google — your G+ desperation is showing
Google is doing everything it can to integrate the Google+ social network into all of its properties, so that it can become a "social layer" across the entire company. But that same behavior is irritating users like actor -- and prominent Google+ user -- Wil Wheaton.
Twitter’s big problem: It still needs better filters
The changes Twitter just announced it is making to its "Discover" tab are designed to make recommended links and topics more personalized, and therefore more accurate -- which is a good thing, because that is the single biggest business challenge the company faces right now.
How and why you should do data journalism
Some of the media industry's leading "data journalists" have published a crowdsourced handbook for the practice of data-oriented journalism, including examples of some of the best projects, tips on how to hire hacker-journalists -- and an argument for why data journalism could help save the media.
