pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/paper-tank.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="460" height="345" style="display:block;float:none;" /Being the blind bat that I am, I first got excited when I saw this M1 Abrams tank made out of paper because I thought those were comic-book pages. Is that Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos? Maybe colored Milton Canniff's Steve Canyons? Doug Murray's 'Nam? Then I zoomed in and I realized what it was./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/tankwithpaper.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="460" height="345" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pCatalogs schmatalogs and newspapers ads. A good metaphor of the brutality and power of marketing. Maybe the killing nature of consumers markets getting into recession. Or the need for war economy these days. Whatever it is, it looks pretty. [a href="http://thecontaminated.com/paper-tank/"The Contaminated/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:b447aa76b153ecf24cd0a0ee49e41bd3:LamXUSS4DeuPw5rh4cjQdnZZJak0GtF4xQzJ444j5VSoOL50yE%2BDUMo%2Fv2itY1FixcRrnUrZl5%2BnfQ%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Poll' alt='Poll' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/poll_securityslow.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=3f46fa2f59e567939f161c5f7c96bc06" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=3f46fa2f59e567939f161c5f7c96bc06" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/gizmodo/full?a=DVPphu"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/gizmodo/full?i=DVPphu" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=zgykM"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=zgykM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=4XGAM"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=4XGAM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=mviom"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=mviom" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=IqKQm"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=IqKQm" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/417047805" height="1" width="1"/

These are dark days for newspaper companies in the U.S. There are layoffs in print newsrooms, classified ad revenues are dwindling, and readership is shrinking. To combat these trends, Gannett introduced a bold initiative in 2006 to remake its 85 daily newspaper newsrooms into "Information Centers," making the web the primary platform for 24-hour news, with more video, databases, maps and community interaction.

In the two years since the initiative was launched, Gannett has provided staffers with training in video production and database development, and has altered the news production workflow to ensure staff is on hand to update websites around the clock. The company also runs a centralized Digital Production Center Network to provide web production support for its smaller outlets, in places like Appleton, Wisconsin, and Great Falls, Montana.

Gannett vice president for digital content Jennifer Carroll told Wired magazine last year that many newsroom journalists were hostile or baffled by the new plans, but they went along with the changes, knowing that their jobs were at stake. Now, Carroll points to success stories like the Parkersburg tornado coverage by the Des Moines Register to illustrate the wisdom of Gannett's digital approach..

"We trained their whole staff [at the Register] on how to shoot and edit video, so now they have a talented video culture that didn't exist two years ago," Carroll told me in a recent interview. "They put it all together -- all the things they've experimented with -- and did a stellar job. There was a small town of Parkersburg that was ripped apart by tornados...Through incredible work by the graphic artists, they went and took pictures of the damaged homes there, before and after, and used that to build a story to show a community that is coming back."

The interactive map of Parkersburg allows you to view various parts of town that were damaged by the tornado. There are photos of the devastation, along with video stories of survivors and cell phone video of the tornado, along with text stories of what happened in various locations. The site received an honorable mention in the recent round of Knight-Batten Innovation Awards.

Of course, there have been skeptics of Gannett's initiative. One former USA Today reporter, Jim Hopkins, described the move as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" on his blog. Plus, the digital push hasn't turned around the media company's fortunes. Gannett's credit rating was recently put on "credit watch" by Standard & Poor's with negative implications -- meaning, it could be downgraded.

Carroll has been traveling the country, visiting (and revisiting) Gannett Information Centers to see how being a digital operation is affecting the culture, mindset and morale. She told me that Gannett Digital -- the company's overarching digital division -- will eventually include more than 100 technology and IT staffers, more than doubling the number before this initiative. She talked to me about hiring trends, and gave me a progress report on the Information Center push at Gannett. The following is an edited transcript of our phone and email conversations.

Give me an overview on how the Information Center strategy has worked out so far.

Carroll: We were especially interested in compiling deep, local information with visual tools, mapping and original documents and the idea of crowdsourcing and putting a premium on community involvement and interaction in all we do. And at the same time moving to a 24/7 continuous news update mindset. In the beginning we were testing assumptions about the breaking news business and what that means, and we realized that we had fallen out of that. We were doing breaking news but we weren't doing the right kind of breaking news on our websites. We had to change the positions and the times that reporters were coming in so that we had an immediacy to everything that we were doing.

At the same time we were going back to continuous news updates, we wanted to push the edge in doing public service journalism. One of the things we've learned over the past couple years is that truly changing the jobs and what people do in them really changes the culture. We've been doing more experimenting to take advantage of what we see as a laboratory with very innovative people who want to try to change and have a passion for what they do and for journalism.

That's been extremely rewarding, because it's not just our younger staff that has innovated but our 30-year veterans in the business who might be still photographers who are really amazing videographers and are really enjoying the storytelling aspect of what they do through video. People are combining skills in every corner of the news operation.

As I've gone back to visit those operations, they are continuing to innovate and excel in the areas that they were stars in the first place. As an example, the Des Moines Register...hired data experts and visual programmers who understand the utility of the data and how people come in and use the mapping. In other words, 'Can I just go in and type in my neighbor's address to see what they paid for property taxes vs. mine?' How do we make that easy and understandable and put the consumer at the heart of that?

Out of the seven key areas in your blueprint for the initiative -- public service, data, community conversation, local, custom content, multimedia and digital -- did you decide which ones were more important than others? How much did you leave that up to the papers to decide?

Carroll: What we outlined was the key areas that every newsroom must [implement], and if not, then we could continue doing training so even the smaller operations would have some resources and knowledge of how to do it right. At our larger papers, we asked them to do all seven areas, but we gave them a blueprint and it was up to them to decide how to do that in their communities.

It was first and foremost public service that expands print to digital to mobile and whatever form that people, including younger audiences, would want to access that. The Des Moines example is a good one for quality public service, showing how tornados and flooding affects the community and what's at stake, and what needs to happen to ensure that it won't happen again. So it's public service, leading to databases, which have continued to grow in terms of importance and potential. We talk about community conversation as being paramount to everything we do, and welcoming the wisdom of the communities, and introducing blogging and social media tools so communities of interest can find each other in new ways.

In Ft. Myers, Florida, they have done a great job reaching out to diverse organizations including philanthropic organizations who can have a bigger voice by having a persona page on the newspaper website. In Rochester [N.Y.], they were looking at reaching people who may not have used the website in the past, so they went to a young professionals organization and showed them all the new tools, and worked with them to build a website within the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle site. Now they have a robust site that they can do themselves, and can post what happens in their meetings and their photos -- so we can customize in a way we wouldn't have been able to do before.

As for local, we have many medium-sized market newspapers and even in our larger papers, like in Cincinnati, we have more than 200 hyper-local niche geo-targeted sites. With the right kind of tagging, we can populate those sites with all sorts of content from the newspapers and we've developed all kinds of community publishing tools so people can submit their stories, photos and videos. We call this pro-am, a combination of professional contributions and some from the community.

If there were three or four sites worth looking at, one is in Cincinnati. Their Cincy Navigator is a very interesting mapping/database tool, where you can see anything from crime that happened yesterday to businesses that opened around the block. It's very utility-driven. In their community sites, you can see the "Get Published" tools, and they have words like "share" and not "be a community journalist" because people are very intimidated by that. And we have the reporters serving as ambassadors who hand out cards and let the community know that we value their input as well.

Our newsrooms have adopted the mantra of write for online, update for print. Everything is thought of for immediacy and getting it out the door.

Has that been a challenge for the smaller papers?

Carroll: We have 40 smaller newspapers that are part of our Digital Production Center Network, which means we handle their production for them so they can operate 24/7 websites and can turn around the content. Our test site for moving to a continous news operation was in Wilmington, Del. When we launched and they restructured their operation to do that, in the first month they had an increase of 2 million page views. So we realized that a news site needs to be a news site and be constantly updated.

We had to adjust some staffing and got really good at rapid fire updates. It's a news wire or AP model, and we had to realize that a fender bender is just as important as a five-car crash. The larger papers have the production staff to do their own websites and the smaller papers do not. They are still in charge of doing their content, but we just do the production for them.

Do the smaller ones really have a 24-hour news operation?

Carroll: I would say it would be more thinly staffed between midnight and 6 a.m. on the smaller sites. But we do have some of our larger papers, like in Honolulu, they have hired someone who is there around the clock and is equipped to run out and do breaking news stories, do video and all those things. I was just in Westchester, and I am so high on them because they were testing community conversation, which can mean so many things. What they've become very good at is video. Their mantra is that everything needs to be produced in four or five different mediums. So a lot of their reporters have iMacs with cameras, and they can do live blogs which become podcasts, video that feeds into it, and the main narrative.

The education reporter, for instance, told me if news breaks she can update her blog from her desk, and it's interesting to see that they are not limited by the delivery mechanism or the container. It's just different content for different audiences depending on their preferences. If you prefer print, then we want to have the very best analysis and reporting and prose possible. If you prefer instant smaller bites on the website, we have that as well. If you have your own research, then we can provide it with our databases. Or if you prefer audio podcasts, we have that as well. We have to continue to think of how we can grow and each medium has its own crediblity.

In audio and video, what kinds of content have worked with each medium?

Carroll: I think the Parkersburg example is one where the video just tells the story. The video [entices] you to read more and get more background. It shows how video can effectively enhance your work. At the same time, it doesn't have to be highly produced; it can be quick-hit, it can be short, it can be used to enhance your podcast. There's so many different ways to approach things and experiment with.

Another area for experimentation for us is when we run major reports on Sundays, we publish the database earlier in the week. Here's one example: The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle did a story on police overtime, and they published the database on a Thursday night before the Sunday print publish date, and immediately saw hundreds of people going to the database and checking out police overtime. Because there was high interest online, they knew there would be high interest when the newspaper report came out, and they had the highest single copy sales of the year that Sunday.

What we're seeing is that if we use the mediums in the right way, if we use the website for data, which is the way people use websites -- click, quick-hit, search, move on -- and back that up with the way that people use print -- sit back, analyze, synthesize -- we can be much more effective. So we're constantly thinking of ways to use all those tools to build on each other.

How have the hiring patterns changed? I know you're hiring a lot of people in digital, but there have also been company-wide layoffs. How do you see that working in the big picture? Do you see more tech people and programmers coming in? How do you see the jobs changing from place to place?

Carroll: You're right that we have stepped up our hiring of people who have knowledge of databases over the past two years, whether that's web design or video editing skills, but we've also focused on training our existing staff as well. It's been really rewarding, and it's incredible when you ask people what skills they'd like to learn, when they are using their cell phone or going online, you find a lot of people with their own blogs or you find a lot of people who enjoy doing their own video. When you invite them to do that professionally, it opens new doors.

Unfortunately all this was launched against the backdrop of a declining industry and shaky economic times and it was never meant to be an answer. It was meant to be a way to innovate and grow and try to transform at the same time that economic realities were forcing budget cuts. The first year we launched the Information Center was 2006, which was the same year Knight-Ridder was falling apart, which validates that we need to be as committed as ever to making it work.

At Gannett Digital, we are hiring, and it's not just areas like content, which is my chief area, but also in business, analysts, and people who are experts at metrics and understanding where people are going online, and making sure we have done rigorous usability testing. And we're also expanding IT, which I think the entire industry has underfunded, so we're putting a lot more horsepower into having experts on IT and technology.

There's never been any shortage of ideas, but [it's been a shortage of] access to programmers and developers and IT people to make them happen. We've short-changed ourselves so that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth.

Many newspapers complain that it's expensive to get good programmers or that it's difficult to recruit them because they'd prefer tech companies or startups. Has it been difficult to hire them at Gannett?

Carroll: We're right in the middle of a major hiring period at Gannett Digital for exactly those kinds of people and we've been very impressed by the response. Some are coming from startups, some are coming from existing online companies, others are those that we've gone out and recruited in the past couple years. We have been a lot more proactive about being in places we weren't before, like tech conferences and R&D sessions. We've tried to learn and grow so we can stay ahead instead of running to stay in place like everyone else.

We've done a lot of hiring over the past three months in all these areas: product development, audience, technology and operations. At the same time, the economic realities that are affecting all sorts of pockets across the United States, including in real estate, have forced newspapers to make reductions so we are putting a premium on innovation and growth to support some of the work that our local newspapers are doing. We are taking on the R&D role that they don't have the staff to do.

What about the ways that ad sales are changing, and how can local papers better collaborate on making sales online?

Carroll: I think there has been an ongoing need for innovation in digital ad sales front as there has been on the journalism front. From what I've learned and read, it's very difficult for print reps to also sell online and mobile. Instead of offering these as add-ons -- which was done a lot in the early days -- we have to say, 'wait a second, these are premium ad positions and they have to be sold that way, the way that people are using rich media.' So we need to be more strategic about that.

When we have passionate sites like [the local sites for moms], and we're about to launch a national MomsLikeMe.com site, which ramps up the aggregated reach of all our moms sites -- we have more than 60, with more than 1 million daily unique visitors and 12 million to 14 million page views. We have very rich local engagement on our mom sites. We have always been able to sell that locally and in new ways -- to children's hospitals and to birthday party catering and home cleaning services and that sort of thing, because we know we have a targeted audience, especially of younger mothers who come to our site.

We're rapidly launching in Gannett markets and have launched in 17 non-Gannett markets -- and will have 80 local sites by the end of the week. Each site has a local manager who is instrumental in local community connections and engaging area moms. We are coordinating marketing and sales from here. Content -- most of which is fueled by conversations between local moms -- is all done locally. We also have a lot of interested national advertisers who [want to reach] younger mothers in a medium that they enjoy, which is driven by conversation and connection.

*****

What do you think about Gannett's Information Center push? Do you think they are making the right moves, and that it will help the company survive in the long run? What else could they be doing to help deal with the digital shift? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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centerimg id="image1464" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/1959/_MG_9094websmall.jpg" alt="_MG_9094websmall.jpg" //centerbr / piThis week I spoke with Aaron Levy, Executive Director and a Senior Curator of the Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary non-profit art space a href="http://slought.org/"Slought Foundation/a, about his participation in the U.S. Pavilion at a href="http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/"La Biennale di Venezia, 11th International Architecture Exhibition/a. Working in a team with William Menking and Andrew Strum, the exhibition, titled "a href="http://positioningpractice.us/"Into the Open: Positioning Practice/a," investigates contemporary socially-engaged architectural practice in the United States. Sixteen practitioners were selected for the exhibition, including The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Design Corps, Detroit Collaborative Design Center, Gans Studio, The Heidelberg Project, International Center for Urban Ecology, Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates,Project Row Houses, Rebar, Rural Studio, Spatial Information Design Lab/Laura Kurgan, Studio 804, Smith and Others, The Edible Schoolyard/Yale Sustainable Food Project, and Estudio Teddy Cruz. Levy, along with William Menking and Andrew Strum, a href="http://www.arch.columbia.edu/index.php?pageData=1/12/5/"will discuss the exhibition at Columbia University on October 13th/a and downtown at a href="http://www.arch.columbia.edu/studiox/calendar.html"Studio-X on October 14th/a. - Ceci Moss/i/p bpCeci Moss: The title for the U.S. Pavilion is "Into the Open: Positioning Practice." Considering the wide range of approaches represented in this exhibition, I'm wondering if you can discuss why you selected this title, and how it speaks to the premise of community involvement through architectural practice./p/b pAaron Levy: What should our place be in this world, and how should architects help shape our sense of place? These are two of the questions that our exhibition gestures towards, through a new American taxonomy of conflict and urgency that takes visitors through some of the richest and the poorest neighborhoods of North America. The sixteen practices we have selected embody an expanded definition of architectural responsibility, whereby architects and designers become activists, developers, facilitators of a more inclusive urban policy, and producers of unique urban research. The exhibition explores not just what these architects and activists have built, but how they have built. In this sense, it is very much in keeping with the contemporary focus on process./p pI recently read Karsten Harries' iThe Ethical Function of Architecture/i, which follows Sigfried Giedion in arguing that the main task for architecture today is the interpretation of a way of life valid for our time. Harries argues that architecture is more than just an aesthetic approach, and that for some time now, architecture has been profoundly uncertain of its way. Can the problem of where architecture is going ever be thought separately from the larger problem of community and public forms of solidarity? Why must the ethical and the aesthetic always be in opposition? These questions are not just for philosophers; these are some of the questions that the field of architecture needs to consider today./p centerimg id="image1467" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/1959/Exhibit-Edible1small.jpg" alt="Exhibit-Edible1small.jpg" //centerbr / centeriImage: The Edible Schoolyard/Yale Sustainable Food Project, Model Schoolyard Garden (Installation Photograph) (Photo credit: Ryan Reitbauer/Duggal Visual Solutions)/i/centerbr / pbHow did you become involved with this exhibition? /b/p pIt's a really great question--although it doesn't have all that interesting an answer...There were a fair share of procedural and logistical headaches that are incredibly mundane though perhaps interesting to curators! /p pOur team (William Menking of iThe Architect's Newspaper/i, Andrew Sturm from PARC Foundation, and myself, in dialogue with architects Teddy Cruz and Deborah Gans) submitted a preliminary conceptualization to the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), responding to a public call for proposals. Once our proposal was accepted, we only had about 90 days to actualize what was a fairly rough schematic and fundraise. The lack of easily available documentation for many of the community-oriented practices in our exhibition called into question a typical curatorial approach privileging the display of cultural artifact and encouraged us to highlight architectural process instead. We viewed limitations such as these productively, allowing them to organically determine our approach./p !--more-- pI can't even begin to describe how difficult it was to stage this exhibition in Venice! The biennale opens just days after Ferragosto, an Italian holiday which effectively shuts down Venice for the month of August. Additionally, everything in the exhibition -- from our shipping crates filled with cultural artifacts to the vegetables we planted in the courtyard of the pavilion for Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard -- arrived to the pavilion by barge (a rather curious process which you can view online on our blog). In hindsight, perhaps what was most difficult about curating the U.S. Pavilion was not the pressure to deliver, but rather the lack of time for extended deliberation -- an aspect that I think of as quite central to any curatorial process. The exhibition was ultimately installed on-site in less than two weeks, with the finishing touches made as the press conference began./p pIt is quite interesting that the different perspectives, tensions, and sensibilities that each member of our team brought to the table are still evident in the exhibition. What role should artifacts play? How should process be communicated without too heavily relying on text? What position should text and video occupy in the exhibition? In the end, we decided that visitors to the U.S. Pavilion should be able to interact and engage with the featured practices in a variety of ways, rather than through just one interface. There are models to interact with, video panoramas and slideshows to watch, but also books to read, blogs to contribute to, and even installations to walk through. The exhibition is less a site of formal instruction than one of participation and social critique. In this sense, the pavilion is decidedly unmonumental this year, intimate even, resisting spectacularity. /p pbHow did your work with Slought Foundation contribute to your position on the team? /b/p pAt Slought Foundation, we encourage sociability and activism through public programs that are purposely critical and provocative; we invite audiences to consider culture and critical exchange as a source of dynamism and enjoyment. As a young organization, we stand for a quintessentially American do-it-yourself culture that is intellectually entrepreneurial and newly resurgent. Our projects take place in Philadelphia against a backdrop of inequality, urban blight, and socioeconomic disparity, which is very much in keeping with the practices and sites of conflict represented in the U.S. Pavilion./p pIn Venice, we were specifically interested in exploring how architecture can go beyond building (director Aaron Betsky's overall theme for this year's biennale), but also how architecture can go beyond the biennale itself. We wanted to invite viewers to think of architecture not just as a physical infrastructure but also as a social practice. Is an exhibition more than the display of models or cultural artifact? What is possible, and what is placed at risk, when architects become developers, work as artists, curators, or even community activists, acting not just intellectually but also entrepreneurially? We hope that the exhibition catalyzes contemporary practice by prompting questions such as these. /p pMany of the artists, architects and theorists we work with in Philadelphia and in Venice consider research as a fundamental component of their work; they challenge us to reconsider the politics of exhibition display and prevailing curatorial approaches by evading clear distinctions between artist, architect, critic, and curator. In Venice we also departed from past convention by omitting celebrity practices from consideration, instead highlighting projects with a grassroots, community sensibility. These practices work primarily with communities through complex choreographies of collaboration that balance on the edge of the professional. The sixteen practices offer sixteen different models of community engagement--a diversity of approaches in place of one. /p bpWould you argue Slought's own place vis-a-vis the culture and community in Philadelphia provided you with a unique vantage point in which to think about civic engagement?/p/b pThe selection of Slought Foundation (in partnership with PARC Foundation) to represent the United States is an enormous honor for our small West Philadelphia non-profit, but also recognizes a new spirit of community activism and inclusiveness across the country. Our selection highlights how the local site and emergent practices are newly empowered today, despite the absence of major public and private support for grass-roots social and cultural organizations that challenge conventional wisdom. In preparing for Venice, we thought a great deal about how to scale intimacy and informality to the international level of a biennale. European audiences seem to have noticed and appreciated these gestures of curatorial humility in representing the United States./p bpThe curatorial statement describes how local initiatives, such as Project Row Houses and the Heidelberg Project, arose out of the lack of large-scale public infrastructure projects in the United States. While these organizations successfully and creatively navigated private, public, and non-profit sectors in order to support and stage their projects, their existence also speaks to the abandonment, in part, of the communities they serve by larger government. Given the potential overreaching effects of the economic downturn of the past few weeks, do you see local initiatives such as these becoming more central to the health and well being of our cities? Could you argue that this direction is potentially problematic?/p/b pI completely agree. In the absence of large-scale public infrastructure projects in the United States, local initiatives are necessarily becoming newly empowered and dynamic arenas for the exploration and generation of new forms of sociability and activism. Teddy Cruz has referred to this development as the "radicalization of the local;" by this he means that the unique complexity of the local urgently demands our attention today. Project Row Houses and the Heidelberg Project are two great examples of the way in which grassroots non-governmental organizations are reclaiming the ability to shape community and the built environment on the scale of the individual neighborhood. /p pbYou collaborated with architects Teddy Cruz and Deborah Gans for this exhibit. I wanted to touch on their work, because their individual projects take on issues of migration and national boundaries. Due to a continued growth of population displacement, movement, and migration, these in-between zones have become more prevalent. Can you tell us more about their practices? Within the nation-specific format of the biennial, how were their ideas in particular framed in the exhibition? /b/p pEstudio Teddy Cruz's contribution to the U.S. Pavilion is a photographic reproduction of the border fence that spans the U.S. border with Mexico at San Diego. It is at once a form of architectural research and a political practice of intervention. This visual representation of the border, together with its photographic montage illustrating the 30 miles north and south of the fence, take visitors through a landscape of conflict that courses through the affluence north of San Diego and the homelessness and neglect in Tijuana. Visitors to the pavilion literally and metaphorically pass through perforations in this porous border to enter the exhibition in the courtyard and inner galleries. These perforations, rather than taking the form of clear interruptions or breaks along the entire facade, instead take the form of small, vertical micro-incisions, thus encouraging on the part of the visitor a landscape of swerves and detours. With this small shift in perspective, the seemingly formal relationship between San Diego and its informal counterpart Tijuana, gives way to San Diego and Tijuana being understood as part of the same, larger urban system. /p centerimg id="image1465" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/1959/Exhibit-Border2small.jpg" alt="Exhibit-Border2small.jpg" //centerbr / centeriImage: Estudio Teddy Cruz (Installation Photograph), 60 linear mile section, San Diego/Tijuana, 2008 (Photo credit: Ryan Reitbauer/Duggal Visual Solutions)/i/centerbr / pGans Studio is devoted to rethinking how architecture can participate in the emergence of social forms. It focuses on extreme situations that also foretell the general. It has designed housing and infrastructure for populations displaced by environmental and political disaster in Kosovo, New Orleans, and New York City. The current universal solution to refugee housing is a tarp that cannot withstand extreme climate conditions; it does not provide for basic domestic needs such as bathing and cooking. Refugee camps lack many forms of urban infrastructure and also deplete natural resources, wreaking ecological havoc and disempowering the refugee population in their will to become self-sufficient./p pFor the biennale, Deborah Gans designed a "Roll Out House" prototype that responds to the extremely degraded conditions on Native American reservations, where a lack of infrastructure and endemic poverty calls for an urgent and easily deployable response. A house can be rebuilt around the deployed "roll out" house. One column holds a cistern, and the other a kitchen. Three hollow columns of various materials can support a roof or even a second floor. They also make possible a domestically-scaled infrastructure of waste, water, or heat. The "roll out" houses can also be assembled in larger formations to cultivate the structure of a town. A physical and social infrastructure emerges according to new principles of "roll out" housing./p centerimg id="image1466" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/1959/GANS-1small.jpg" alt="GANS-1small.jpg" //centerbr / centeriImage: Gans Studio, House with Roll Out Core, 2008/i/centerbr / pbThe theme for this year's biennial is "Out There: Beyond Architecture"- thus salient topics such as the implementation of emerging technologies with architectural practices, green design, and the intersection between contemporary art and architecture were elaborated in the exhibits. Clearly, there's an underlying progressive ethos at work here, and I'm wondering if there will be any effort to continue these dialogues and/or projects beyond the realm of the biennial./b/p pRight now our organization is working to realize a mixed-income, mixed-use community development near Lancaster Avenue here in Philadelphia. We are undertaking this project with People's Emergency Center, a social services and community development corporation, in partnership with PARC Foundation and Estudio Teddy Cruz./p pThe exhibition in Venice is therefore a sort of testing ground, a conceptual prelude to what we hope to actualize in the coming months in Philadelphia. Although we are still in the planning stages, we envision a series of social and cultural services being joined under one roof, including digital inclusion programs, employment offices, and a dedicated space for Slought Foundation. In so doing, we hope to mitigate the paucity of social and cultural organizations in neighborhoods of need. /pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-fp/~4/417108114" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=47a93a104b543772005e7184maxX=188maxY=151" border="0" alt="murdoch.jpg" title="murdoch.jpg" width="188" height="151" /Just so you have no illusions, nobody's going to get through this unscathed. Viacom a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/viacom-lowers-earnings-outlook-amid-economic-decline"just warned/a, and now News Corp. is getting its estimates reduced. Pali's Rich Greenfield, who knows a thing or two about the company, has reduced his full-year 2009 estimates by $.10 to $1.16. Current consensus is $1.24. The issues: A local ad meltdown affecting the newspaper business and TV stations and a decline in filmed entertainment./p pSays Greenfield:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"The greatest cut in our estimate is in News Corp's Television segment, and primarily in the br /OO Station group, where trends appear to be deteriorating rapidly. Our forecast now br /assumes a near 20% organic TV operating income decline in FY09 (the estimated reported br /decline is a higher 27% given recent TV station asset sales)./p pBut it's not entirely bad news. News Corp. sits on a hefty $6 billion in cash, and it should have $9 billion by year-end 2009. At a time when cash is king (and in this environment, it's emdefinitely cash, not content/em, that is king), this gives the company a nice dose of security./p pNews Corp. shares are trading down almost 9% today to about $8.40. Its 52-week high was $24.95./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/j9lkwMvPzQ8hWlMyebjNibiSHro/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/j9lkwMvPzQ8hWlMyebjNibiSHro/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=SW3x6FsG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=SW3x6FsG" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=MS5UKbXV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=mvo9Cz0t"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=jMIg7ygM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=jMIg7ygM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=L2qSxqOj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Pgdhrfgb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=SKvyhBdA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Wg7aVtR6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/gC_4lXcx_VA" height="1" width="1"/

pThe Associated Press, source of so much of today's financial news, is doing a little in-house education on its own finances. In a a href="http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13640" title="memo to staff"memo to staff/a sent out yesterday and posted today on Romenesko, AP assured staff it's on a "solid financial footing" with a positive cash flow but is taking steps to keep spending "in line" including a company-wide strategic hiring freeze, which we will re-examine regularly." It also sought to reassure staff on the status of its retirement funds but suggested that staffers directing their own investment plans diversify. /p p -- bAP's revenue mix/b: Yes, it's more diversified than ever but newspapers still make up 25 percent of AP's revenue and the controversial change in rate structure we've been writing about here. "With the heavy economic difficulties the media industry is facing, and the new rate structure being rolled out to our newspaper members under Member Choice, we are facing a challenging 2009. bWe remain financially secure, but our cash flow will be affected/b and, as a result, we will be cautious with new initiatives while looking for opportunities to economize." br / /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-editors-on-singleton-sure-were-concerned-about-costs-but-were-the-ones-"Editors On Singleton: Sure, We're Concerned About Costs—But We're The Ones Getting Whipped/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-ap-asks-publishers-to-re-sell-its-content-will-share-revenue/"AP Asks More Publishers To Re-Sell Its Content, 50/50 Rev Share/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-ap-challenges-grow-as-cost-cutting-papers-look-for-line-items-to-slash/"AP Challenges Grow As Cost-Cutting Papers Look For Line Items To Slash/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-interview-tom-curley-ceo-associated-press/"Interview: Tom Curley, CEO, Associated Press; Portals, Local Content—'The Mother of all Battles'/a/li /ul piOur mobile application for Blackberry and other Smartphones brings you the latest headlines when you're on the go. Go a href="http://m.paid.mwap.at/"here to download/a./i /p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=hqEAxs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=hqEAxs" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=GtNJM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=GtNJM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=4NcrM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=4NcrM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=REFpm"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=REFpm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=TVLSM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=TVLSM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=FyApM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=FyApM" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/416994296" height="1" width="1"/

Earlier this morning, Rich Greenfield, the scary smart media analyst at Pali Capital, slashed his price target on News Corp to $20 from $27, citing big concerns over slowing advertising revenues for newspaper and television stations. And since this is a global problem, there is little room for News Corp to hide.

He is forecasting a 1.5 percent decline in revenues for News Corp.’s newspaper business, a 9.5 percent decline in its TV revenues and a 7.8 percent decline in revenues at its filmed entertainment division. Greenfield cut his earnings and overall revenue estimates on the media behemoth as well. The good news? Rupert Murdoch is sitting on $6 billion in cash, which means he could grow revenues through acquisitions. Cash, if not king, is indeed a king-maker.

Since he didn’t offer an analysis of the Internet part of News Corp.’s business, especially MySpace, I emailed him to find out what he thought about that. He didn’t go into much detail but he did say, “MySpace is one of their BEST-performing assets right now…MySpace is doing great.” Last year Murdoch said he expected MySpace to bring in about $750 million in revenue for its fiscal year ended in June, the lion’s share of the $1 billion in revenue forecast to come from the company’s Fox Interactive division. If the big shift from old media to online accelerates, Rupert’s kingdom does have enough assets to capitalize on that shift. But then, I wouldn’t count on any ad dollars just yet.

Photo courtesy of Pinar Ozger via Flickr.

pimg src="http://paidcontent.org/images/uploads/cosmogirl.gif" alt="image" align="right" border="0" width="170" height="108" /Magazines may have been weathering the economic downturn better than newspapers, but the current upheaval in the financial markets makes it only more likely that survival will be more difficult. And so, in advance of an increasingly pessimistic outlook, Hearst has decided to shutter iCosmoGirl/i magazine, the second mag the publisher has closed this year, a href="http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2008/10/10/hearst-folds-cosmogirl" title="Portfolio reported"Portfolio reported/a. In a statement, Hearst said that its teen publishing activities into iSeventeen/i, it's premiere title in that area. While iCosmoGirl's/i December issue will be its last, it will continue on as a web-only publication. /p p It will remain part of the Hearst Teen Network of websites, which includes a href="http://www.seventeen.com" title="Seventeen.com"Seventeen.com/a, a href="http://www.teenmag.com" title="Teenmag.com"Teenmag.com/a, a href="http://www.eSpin.com" title="eSpin.com"eSpin.com/a, a href="http://www.MyPromStyle.com" title="MyPromStyle.com"MyPromStyle.com/a, and a href="http://www.MisQuinceMag.com" title="MisQuinceMag.com"MisQuinceMag.com/a. The move follows a similar one taken by Time Inc., which closed iTeen People/i as a print property this summer, while continuing its existence in an online-only version. /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-hearst-digital-partners-with-sheknows-not-just-about-portals-anymore" title="Hearst Digital Partners With SheKnows: Not Just About Portals Anymore"Hearst Digital Partners With SheKnows: Not Just About Portals Anymore/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-online-mags-experience-limited-success-in-luring-print-subscribers-repo" title="Online Mags Experience Limited Success In Luring Print Subscribers: Report"Online Mags Experience Limited Success In Luring Print Subscribers: Report/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/hearst-magazines-revamps-mobile-sites-for-lifestyle-titles-embraces-ad-fund" title="Hearst Magazines Revamps Mobile Sites For Lifestyle Titles, Embraces Ad-Funded Approach"Hearst Magazines Revamps Mobile Sites For Lifestyle Titles, Embraces Ad-Funded Approach/a/li /ul piA Complimentary Webinar from Innodata Isogen--bBeyond Cost Arbitrage: Best Practices for Delivering Large-Scale Editorial Outsourcing Services/b. a href="http://content.adbureau.net/accipiter/adclick/CID=000010470000000000000000/SITE=TEST/AAMSZ=SPONPOST_NEWS/MONTH=SEP/relocate=http://www.innodata-isogen.com/knowledge_center/editorial_outsourcing?bdls=16267"Register now/a/i./p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=dlVQ7R"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=dlVQ7R" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=1YBOM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=1YBOM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=HpWjM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=HpWjM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=3KMbm"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=3KMbm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Zq6bM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Zq6bM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=iJUyM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=iJUyM" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/416957060" height="1" width="1"/

There's been plenty of backlash around the globe towards any sort of law that requires a "three strikes" policy for kicking users off the internet for three unsubstantiated accusations of unauthorized file sharing. In many places, attempts at such laws have been abandoned. However, down in New Zealand, after one such law was proposed, a group of concerned citizens protested, and had the provision removed, while also adding in a provision that put liability on copyright holders who filed false claims. However, at the last minute, the country's copyright minister, simply changed it and put the three strikes provision right back in. This resulted in some outrage, and a meeting was set up between the copyright minister and those who had fought hard for the earlier change. As a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/09/new-zealands-copyrig.html"Boing Boing/a notes, the a href="http://it.gen.nz/2008/10/07/ministers-why-we-changed-the-copyright-act/" target="_new"meeting did not go particularly well/a: blockquotei When it opened, [Associate Minister of Commerce, responsible for copyright] Judith Tizard spent 30 minutes telling us why the change had to be made. She began by strongly expressing her anger that we had complained to her at this stage in the proceedings. None of us, she said, had been to see her before this on this topic. When we protested that we had worked with the Select Committee, which had removed this provision - and balanced it with one which made licence holders liable for false accusations - she said that this was completely inappropriate of the Select Committee, because Cabinet had already decided this was going ahead. We should not have been surprised, we were told, that this provision was reinserted by the government at the last minute before the bill was passed.... br /br / She set forth strong views about how the launch of Sione's Wedding had been ruined, about how studios in Auckland were running out of work, and about how artists were mortgaging their homes to make films and music and were not making any returns on their investments, all, she said, because of Internet piracy. br /br / One of the Internet group tried to ask her whether the term piracy was appropriate, but she insisted that it was because people's livelihoods were at stake. She also said that, since the Internet Service Providers were making money from providing Internet they were making money from copyright infringements and they have to find a way to deal with it. This was couched in very strong language. /i/blockquote What you see here is cognitive dissonance at work. This government official has decided what the problem is and who's at fault, and simply will not listen to any of the reasonable explanations for why she's wrong. But given that last paragraph and based on that reasoning, we should be taxing ISPs to provide money to newspapers. After all, "people's livelihoods are at stake" and ISPs are "making money from online news." Or, we should be taxing auto companies to provide money to horse-drawn carriage makers. After all, people's livelihoods are at stake, and car companies are making money from the roads that were built for horse-drawn carriages. And, of course, we should be taxing any book publishing company that prints the bible, and supplying the money to monks. Their livelihood as scribes is at stake, and they are now making money based on taking away work from these monks. br /br / If Tizard's logic were to prevail, there would be no innovation and no competition -- because any innovation or competitor would put someone else's livelihood at stake, and would build off of the market they had helped create. Most people see why this makes no sense. Unfortunately, the person in New Zealand making the laws does not. br /br / a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081009/2144022508.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081009/2144022508.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081009/2144022508op=sharethis"Email This Story/a br / br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=71be2f850b747be81cc44fa8127f1543" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=71be2f850b747be81cc44fa8127f1543" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=Tqzgm"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=Tqzgm" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/416887515" height="1" width="1"/

A disk that may carry personal details on some 100,000 British military personnel is missing, the Ministry of Defense said Friday. The military acknowledged a report in The Sun newspaper that contractor EDS lost track of a portable hard drive, but said it could not comment on the claim that it contained names, addresses, passport numbers and drivers license information of service personnel, along with data on 600,000 potential recruits.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=GM2JM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=GM2JM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=VA4um"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=VA4um" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=nTd2m"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=nTd2m" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ibtimes/tech/~4/416840461" height="1" width="1"/

CopperGate Communications, the Everywire Home Networking Company™ announced today that Calcalist, the business news arm of Yediot Group, the leading daily newspaper publisher in Israel, ranked CopperGate the most promising start-up in Israel. In addition, the newspaper ranked CopperGate “one of the most successful start-ups in the country”. The selection was based on voting by a panel of venture capitalists and Israeli technology industry experts. (PRWeb Oct 10, 2008)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/home_networking/most_promising/prweb1455294.htm

As more newspapers in the US drop their partnerships with the Associated Press, E#38;P asks if emerging news collaborations, with the likes of the Press Association and Politico, can replace the papers' long-standing relationship with the agency.img width='1' height='1' src='http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/367/f/5716/s/216d5ca/mf.gif' border='0'/div class='mf-viral'table border='0'trtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=EditorPublisher: What alternative to AP for US newspapers?link=http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872622" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif" border="0" //a/tdtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=EditorPublisher: What alternative to AP for US newspapers?link=http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872622" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif" border="0" //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/21182818993/f/5716/c/367/s/35050954/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/21182818993/f/5716/c/367/s/35050954/a2.img" border="0"//a

Wednesday#8217;s edition of the Exploding Newsroom: Jim Willse, the editor of the New Jersey based newspaper, the Star-Ledger, talks about the future of the newsroom now that the conditions have been met to avoid a sale or closure of the paper. “We face a significant challenge,” he says. You can follow the online editor John Hassell#8217;s Exploding [...]img width='1' height='1' src='http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/367/f/5716/s/216d5ce/mf.gif' border='0'/div class='mf-viral'table border='0'trtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=‘A significant challenge’ over at New Jersey’s Exploding Newsroomlink=http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/?p=3540" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif" border="0" //a/tdtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=‘A significant challenge’ over at New Jersey’s Exploding Newsroomlink=http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/?p=3540" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif" border="0" //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/21182818989/f/5716/c/367/s/35050958/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/21182818989/f/5716/c/367/s/35050958/a2.img" border="0"//a

After months of planning and hard work behind the scenes, we are proud to launch a new revamped MediaShift website -- call it MediaShift 2.0. The basic idea was to transform the one-person blog into an online magazine with more writers, more content and more input from you. In a survey of MediaShift readers, you told us clearly that you'd like to hear from more voices on the blog, so that's what we will aim to do.

Here is what has changed with the new-look MediaShift:

> Bolder, graphical home page that features more stories.
> New breakdown of sections for better navigation.

> MediaShift News page gives roundup of headlines from the best sources for new media news and opinions around the web

> Events page tells you about upcoming conferences and meetups -- you can send in your listings too.

> Best of MediaShift that highlights the best posts from the past.

> Featured Comment highlights one great comment from you.

> Today's Poll lets you have your say on a timely issue.

Here is what is staying the same:

> Our focus on how new technology and the Internet our changing the media world around us, whether that's the popularity of online video, the rise of smartphones, the remaking of newspapers, or the changes in journalism education.
> A commitment to mixing reporting and opinion journalism in thoughtful pieces that go beyond the usual quick-hit blog posts.

> A global view that looks at changes in the U.S. and abroad.

> Walking the talk of journalism experimentation, involving the MediaShift audience in more ways and giving them more ways to follow MediaShift and join in -- whether through Twitter or Your Take or Today's Poll.

New Editors, Correspondents and Embeds

While many of these changes are cosmetic, MediaShift also is transforming itself in its editorial as well. First and foremost, we have hired two new editorial hands to help us boost our output:

> Simon Owens, associate blogger. Simon has had a nascent career in small-town newspapers (and now in new media consulting), and cut his teeth in covering online media on his personal blog, Bloggasm. He'll be writing an in-depth weekly report similar to my Digging Deeper posts.

> Mike Rosen-Molina, associate editor: Mike has dual degrees in law and journalism from UC Berkeley, and has worked at daily newspapers and at the JURIST. He will be helping to edit the influx of content from new MediaShift correspondents and embeds, while also writing monthly reports for the site.

Along with them, we have a strong line-up of correspondents and embeds for MediaShift, who will be contributing regular reports from their workplaces or institutions or covering a vital area for the site:

> Jessica Dheere: Lebanon correspondent
> Sokari Ekine: Africa correspondent

> Jaron Gilinsky: Israel correspondent

> Lucie Morillon: Free speech correspondent

> Elle Moxley: Beijing Olympics correspondent

> Jeffrey Neuburger: Legal correspondent

> Alfred Hermida, University of British Columbia embed
> Roland Legrand, Belgium newspaper embed

> Tim Peek, NBC embed

> Alana Taylor, NYU student embed

> Mark Van Patten, Bowling Green newspaper embed

Due to the chorus of complaints about Alana Taylor's embedded report from NYU (including from the PBS ombudsman Michael Getler), we will now require all embeds to establish clear communication at their workplaces and schools about their reports for MediaShift so there will be less surprises.

Join Us

If you are interested in contributing regularly for MediaShift -- or even guest-blogging -- please use our Contact Form to let us know. We are still looking for the following:

> Asia correspondent
> Europe correspondent

> mobile technology correspondent

> local radio or TV station embed

> book industry correspondent or embed

> music industry correspondent or embed

> PR firm embed

> Hollywood studio embed

Finally, a very big and hearty thank you to the great folks at Mule Design Studio, for their great design and back-end work, as well as all the PBS techology support staff and producers. We couldn't have done it without all of your hard and tireless work!

One big bonus: Mule is also finishing up a redesign of MediaShift Idea Lab, which will launch in the coming weeks and unify the look of both sites. As always, we welcome your comments and criticisms of the changes -- and thoughts on what else we can add -- either in the comments below or via our feedback form.

Photo of bright lights by lilyo via Flickr.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».