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Great story in next month's Vanity Fair about the New York Times bureau in Iraq, the only U.S paper that hasn't cut back it's in-country coverage. The New York Times’s Lonely War.

Roy Greenslade points us to a new newspaper being published in London, on a very tiny basis: The Manual is an actual hand drawn, hand lettered newspaper, 150 copies distributed to commuters at London stations this morning. How it was published... Fascinating.

Since we moved to far western North Carolina, where we can get the daily paper from Asheville delivered by mail only, we began buying the Sunday Chattanooga Times Free Press (even though we have to drive 5 miles to get it). I fell in love with this paper immediately. Founded by Adolph Ochs and carrying national and international stories from the NY Times, McClatchy and more, it gives me more news than some other papers I've read regularly. The local coverage is good and the features and sports often interesting. When the war started it was one of the first small city papers to send an embedded correspondent who came up with great stories. For in-depth coverage of big stories like Chattanooga's successful bid to get a VW plant, it's incomparable. I like the Web site, too: even though I can't get the daily paper without driving at least 15 miles, I can catch up on the news during the week online. So I'm thrilled to see Mindy McAdams' review of the paper, on her T...

On the journalism front, there's a little flurry of discussion over how news organizations need to rebuild themselves, leading to this memo from Tampa Tribune editor Janet Coats on the plans for an 'interactive newsroom' joining the newspaper, online and television news processes. Last week, lots of bloggers and commenters reacted to a posting by Tampa intern Jessica DaSilva, "It's worth fighting for" , quoting Coats' talk with newsroom staffers. Lots of the comments here were negative (sample:) Wow, you really are young and naive, aren’t you? Someone sent me the link to your blog, and I almost had to laugh, it was so ridiculous. I’m truly amazed that in one of your other posts, you can tell reporters to stop whining and do something about their situation. What, praytell, young lady, would you like them to do? This lead to Ryan Sholin's posting, Declare your independence from the curmudgeon tribe . Hmm. It's hard all around, and on some of these ...

Joel Achenbach is watching the blogs who claim to get the news the 'mainstream media' don't: News we remembered to report . And, in a later posting, down near the bottom of this roundup , Joel links to a Blogoland comment on blogger Glenn Reynolds' brag about 'better than mainstream media' reporting on Iraq, which links to: A New York Times story expanded upon by a blog A straight ABC News report (twice) A straight Reuters story A straight Knight-Ridder story The New Republic’s Iraq’d blog A link to USAid’s website A link to Iraq the Model commenting on some local newspaper accounts an L.A. Times story examined by a blog a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story examined by a blog A straight AP report a New Zealand newspaper story examined by a blog A link to a round-up of Iraq blogs A link to the WMD- Intelligence Commission report A link to some sort of ID bracelet/donation site A link on “ways to support the troops” A link to an Iraq toy drive Blogoland's comm...

This memo has been forwarded, I suppose, to lots of people, but luckily, one of them was Bob Norman, who posted it on his Daily Pulp blog: the list of 42 newsroom staffers who are leaving the Miami Herald, with commentary on several of the long-timers from Manny Garcia. Included, three of the few remaining library staff. Not needed, now that archiving's being offshored to India..... So sad. (Oh, and speaking of the Pulp and layoffs, it is just stunning to read the comments on the post about layoffs at the Palm Beach Post from last week. Apparently it was linked on Drudge, and neanderthals from around the country decided to use the post as a vehicle to proclaim their hatred of 'liberal, left-wing, commie socialist' journalists. How depressing.)

From Howard Owens: Spare me the fancy redesigns and give me some text to read . Among the gems: Spare me the big graphics and four-column photos and color splashes. Stop trying to turn your print front page into a web page. ...If they want timeliness, they’ll go online. ...News isn’t about a demographic (as in, “How do we target women, age 24 to 35, with one child and two cats?”) ...The print product should provide context and a moment’s respite. The online product should say, “this is what is happening now.” ...Try digging into your archives and looking at your newspaper from 1971. Make your 2008 paper look like that. You know, this sounds nearly right to me. I want the background and the ads (and comics, and recipes) from the paper that I get delivered by mail late in the day, and don't expect it to give me breaking news. But I also don't want briefs about national/international stories I already know about. I need the local news, the analysis, the interesting stories about p...

The question of journalists and blogging has been debated for years, and I've linked to lots and lots of stuff on the topic. There's so much now that I don't usually link to it, but once in awhile I notice something that stands out. Today, it's a posting by Roy Greenslade, Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution . He raises some interesting ideas: I have tended to predict that future news organisations will consist of a small hub of "professional journalists" at the centre with bloggers (aka amateur journalists/citizen journalists) on the periphery. In other words, us pros will still run the show. I'm altogether less certain about that model now. First, I wonder whether us pros are as valuable as we think. Second, and more fundamentally, I wonder whether a "news organisation" is as perfect a model as we might think. On a related note, I noticed another journalist/blogger spat going on in Asheville NC, where a local blogge...

Gene Weingarten writes that the recent Washington Post buyouts haven't affected his written product, at all: Yanks Thump Sox . (Thanks to Doug Fisher .) Note the version with errors noted finds more than I would ever have caught in a hurry.....

Some more interesting thoughts on news research and other topics... In the Wall Street Journal by Jason Fry, The Case of the Missing White Pages (link fixed). It explores the question of whether there is a directory of cell phone numbers (a question that comes up on NewsLib about once a year). A few years back there was news one was coming, but according to this story, Intelius gave up on it. Cell phone users don't want strangers getting their numbers, end of story. But it raises some interesting thoughts: That will arouse uneasy feelings that technology has once again done away with something we assumed was eternal...Those of us who remember looking ourselves up in the white pages and thinking that now we belong to a place may lament -- not for the first time -- that our real-world communities are becoming more fragmented as people spend time in online communities of their own choosing instead. (Via Resourceshelf.) Mentioned in Derek Willis' report on some sessions he attende...

Via Mindy McAdams' Teaching Online Journalism site, a link to a report by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0: What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web . Karp just wanted to get some news about a bad storm that had knocked out power to his office in Northern Virginia, and could find nothing on it on the Washington Post's website, where he went first. Not that there wasn't news out there, and Karp explains step-by-step what he did to find it. No wonder Google is more popular than online newspapers. Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist had a similar experience . It turns out, of course, that Washington Post online readers have an alternative way to get to local weather news, but it's not obvious to someone just clicking on the main page.

It's becoming a given that if someone writes a news story that contains an error, bloggers will draw attention to it. Here's one in the New York Times that has Tennessee a'twitter: 36 Hours in Knoxville in the Sunday Travel section. It starts out: KNOXVILLE is often called “the couch” by the people who live there. Problem is, no one in Knoxville ever heard that before. And the Tennessee bloggers are letting the Times know. The story is all over the 'net since Nashville's Knoxville's Instapundit, probably the most read blog, posted it. (Thanks for the reader comment. Brain fade.) Lots of links on Michael Silence's blog at the Knoxville News, including a letter Silence sent to the Times' Public Editor . Lots on Jack Lail's blog too. The story was number one on the Times list of most-blogged stories. Now I've added another.

Via Mark Schaver , a link to a posting at GraphicDesignr that lists the number of Twitter tweets coming from newspapers around the country. Among them, news, sports, even a Miami Herald Twitter on Cuba . A lot more than I would have guessed. Guess there is something to this Twitter thing after all. Of course, when I tried to get the Asheville Citizen-Times Twitter feed, I got the 'Too many Tweets' announcement.......

Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm, in his new blog The Grimm Truth , makes a statement about journalism and blogging that strikes true to me, Blogging, Circa 1968 : Writing for a small town newspaper, knocking out one little story after another, every day, writing about everything that moved, I was utterly intertwined in the life of the community. And the community wasn't shy about telling me I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I was blogging. I just didn't know it yet. This one will be on my daily visit list.

One of the things I miss most about reading newspapers online is getting to see all the pictures, in a size where you can make out detail. Many papers' online photos leave much to be desired, in size and number. So I'm thrilled to see this new feature from the Boston Globe, The Big Picture , a daily blog where the best news photos of the day are posted in large format. If one photo isn't enough, there are often links to more on the topic, such as these amazing pictures from the aftermath of the Chinese quake. I like this a lot.

In the upcoming issue of New York Review of Books: The Library in the New Age , by Robert Darnton. This discussion of how information is disseminated spends a bit of time on news, blogs, and other new media. Good stuff: ...stories about blogging point to the same conclusion: blogs create news, and news can take the form of a textual reality that trumps the reality under our noses. Today many reporters spend more time tracking blogs than they do checking out traditional sources such as the spokespersons of public authorities. News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we? I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened. ...having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surpr...

Wow, I didn't even know this was going on. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says the New York Times Embraces Link Journalism and cites an example of a blog entry at The Lede that's full of links to other papers. Is this true of Times stories and other blogs? I usually don't click on Times links because they usually go to Times stories by category. As in this story , about the new Firefox Web browser. The link to Microsoft goes to Times stories on Microsoft , et cetera. A good sign, especially if it's not just happening at The Lede.....from Karp: ...the Times has clearly gotten over the red herring fear of “sending people away.” The Lede has helped readers make sense of what they read elsewhere, helping to make the Lede more essential than those other source.

Over the last few years, several newspapers have made the expensive investment of scanning their microfilm to make stories available online that are older than their text archives, started in the early 1980s or later. ProQuest has done several newspapers, as well as Olive , Heritage , and Cold North Wind. Some are available online, by subscription, or through the newspaper's Web site, downloaded for a small fee; some public libraries offer access to ProQuest papers, too. The New York Times is one of those papers, and you can search and download individual stories from their older archives in PDF ProQuest format. But now the Times has launched Times Machine , where you can actually browse scans of an entire newspaper. If you're a home delivery subscriber you can use the full service, covering years from 1851-1922. A few papers are available for non-subscribers, covering major events and '100 years ago today'. (Note the page also suggests checking if your local library ...

So how did Ernest Hemingway develop that unique writing style? A lot of it came from his newspaper writing experience, at the Kansas City Star. The Star has put a stylesheet from around 1915 online, and they say Hemingway later remarked to a reporter that the admonitions in this style sheet were 'the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing'. Wonderful stuff. Much outdated, but could be adapted to current style thought: Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be postitive, not negative. ...Never use old slang. Such words as stunt, cut out, got his goat, come across, sit up and take notice, put one over, have no place after their use becomes common. Slang to be enjoyable must be fresh. ...Say luncheon, not lunch. There's a surprising amount of information on reporting drug use: The Star does not use 'dope' or 'dope fiend'. Use habit forming drugs or narcotics or addicts. It's too bad the PDF of this old docume...

Derek Willis looked at the South Florida coverage of the Miami Dolphins draft, and discovered databases on the Sun Sentinel's and Palm Beach Post's websites (and the S-S's sister paper, the Orlando Sentinel). None at the Miami Herald. So, being a data junky, Derek made his own: Miami Dolphins Draft Database . What a wonderful exercise to show how easy it can be. Why isn't every newspaper doing things like this? (Because most papers don't have anyone on staff that knows databases like Derek.) It took Derek a little over an hour and a half to do this. Took me about 2 seconds to find a list of all Dolphins draft picks from Wisconsin .