behind the news

The Week that Was: In Which Chaos, Indeed, Ensued

The week in new media
March 27, 2009

Hold onto your Firefox tabs: chaos has come. Here’s the evidence. And here, in part, is the reason. (Feeling overloaded? Namaste.)

Will the San Francisco Chronicle go nonprofit?

The White House launched the first of what should be many “Open For Questions” online town halls. President Obama appointed Susan Crawford to be his special assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. And Jonathan Adelstein will oversee the administration’s rural broadband buildout.

The Los Angles Times and the Chicago Tribune merged their foreign staffs. Blender stopped blending. There’s been a “fundamental shift in orientation” at the Wall Street Journal. And even Google’s cutting jobs.

But…the UK press is increasingly popular among US audiences. (Speaking of: the BBC World Service re-designed its homepage.) And here are Five Simple Ways for papers to avoid extinction. And here are a few simple ways to become a “death of newspapers” blogger.

Nieman Reports issues its spring 2009 edition, “Voyages of Discovery Into New Media.”

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Ghost tweeting. Twonetization. Twenthusiasm. Twockery. Twouble. Twaxonomies. Twonferences. Twee-R.

And…Blago continues to make a mockery of us all.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.