As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media - and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify - thwarted the media blackout.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Saving The News

This is a new media age. The news of the Occupation has countless reporters, and some of the Web's best curators have taken on the task of weaving the Occupy stories together. In particular, Xeni Jardin has been a machine on Twitter, providing a one-woman breaking news channel of so many successive Occupy confrontations.

But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.

Storify's New Role: The Backbone of News

The world needed a shareable, embeddable way to gather the tweetstorm of breaking news and turn it into a lasting document. Storify has made that possible. After a closed beta period with professional journalists, Storify opened to the public in April.

In October, it rolled out a brand new editing interface making the tool vastly easier to use. And one week ago, just before the police raided Zuccotti Park, Storify made its move, redesigning its homepage as a destination featuring the most important stories on the social Web. Storify's vision is no less than a leveling of the media playing field. On the Storify homepage, lifelong and first-time journalists stand side by side.

"All news is social now," says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever's on the ground is the reporter, and whoever's curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn't matter who is whom. "We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources."

From a Dorm Room to the Front Page

While career journalists were being removed from Zuccotti Park, Ben Doernberg was watching the Web from his dorm room at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ben is a college junior, and journalism is not his major. But his Storify of the Occupy Wall Street raid reached tens of thousands of people and was embedded by the Washington Post.

"This is not actually my first Storify," he says, despite fun rumors to the contrary. "I was at Zuccotti Park about a month ago and happened to take a video that ended up getting on CNN, so this is kind of the second bizarre media day I've had in the last month."

Doernberg used Storify to track the reports of the media blackout. "I looked at Twitter around 1 o'clock, and everything was going insane," Doernberg says.

"By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time." What resulted was a comprehensive document of tweets, links, photos and videos of instances of the NYPD suppressing the media presence in Zuccotti Park. The Washington Post ran it, and the post has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

The 99% Media

The founders of Storify couldn't be more delighted that students are making headlines using their platform. The day after the raid on Zuccotti Park, Storify shared two student stories from the raid on its blog. Doernberg's was one. The other was by Columbia journalism grad student XinHui Lim, whose Storify post captured the grisly details from the ground and included embedded live-streamed video. At one point in the night, that amateur video stream had 23,000 viewers.

Damman says this is the perfect demonstration of the Storify redesign. These social media documents are the real story, and the NYPD's obstruction of credentialed journalists only shows how out of touch the police are. "The police in New York don't realize that it doesn't matter to not have journalists on the scene," Damman says, "because everybody is a reporter. What happened last night shows that they don't get that."

"Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%."

Herman agrees that Monday's events prove that the distinction between legacy media and new media is no longer important. During the raid, journalists became sources, regular people became journalists, and they traded places with each other throughout the night. It's all one medium now. "Let's not spite the Internet," Herman says. "Let's let the Internet be what it is."

The Gatekeepers

The NYPD's censorship efforts were thwarted by smartphones, Web technology and good, old-fashioned gumption. But authorities are working hard around the country to block journalists from covering the Occupation. Twenty six reporters have been arrested so far, ten of them in Zuccotti Park on Monday night.

Fortunately, those incidents are being captured on Storify, too, and the curator wants to make sure the free press is protected.

***Next page:** Josh Stearns of FreePress.net on new media, arrested journalists and the implications of the OWS blackout.*

Josh Stearns, Associate Program Director at Free Press, has been storifying journalist arrests at Occupy protests since September. He's using Storify as a living page, updating each time another journalist is arrested. You can help him by sending tips and tweets to @jcstearns.

Free Press is also holding a petition for their Save The News campaign urging New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to stop attacking freedom of the press.

Watching the Story Unfold

November 15 was a big night for journalist arrests, and Stearns was watching Twitter closely. "I think of Twitter as the place where I watch the story unfold," Stearns says, "but then I often look to a place like Storify or an article or liveblog where there's somebody intentionally trying to contextualize and weave things together."

One of the things Stearns struggled with during Monday's raids was "that reports were coming in at all different times. Trying to piece together when something happened" was a challenge, since both the events and tweets about the events were displaced in time.

"Twitter's so great for seeing the story unfold, but I think there's a lot of awesome work that can be done in contextualizing it." That's where Storify comes in. "I think Storify is a very flexible tool, being able to do that kind of rapid reporting or to bear witness over time."

Media Symbiosis

Stearns was impressed with Doernberg's work Monday night and how Storify enabled it. "His Storify wouldn't have been possible without people on the ground, and people on the ground weren't able to get their story out until his Storify collected those from all over the place and broadcasted it, and that story got into the Washington Post."

Storify provides the bridge between legacy and new media in situations like this. "I think there's really nice symbiosis between the two," Stearns says. "I think that's one thing Storify has done really well, positioning itself within a new media realm but making new media approachable for traditional organizations."

The Gatekeepers Are Changing

But legacy institutions aren't weathering the transition well. The Associated Press came down hard on its staff for tweeting too eagerly about their arrests in an email that feels awfully shy about new media participation. It warns AP reporters not to get "caught in the moment."

For Stearns, the important question is why. "The question becomes, were [the police] effective only to the point because they were only paying attention to one kind of media? And what was the intention behind that?"

"Why was there the decision to have a media blackout? Why were helicopters grounded? Why were journalists kept to the edges? If we ask those 'why' questions, and it turns out there was actual intentionality behind it, then that's profoundly troubling." If the police are really concerned about any message getting out at all, Stearns worries, they will learn to adapt to new media eventually.

Adapting To The New Reality

For some law enforcement agencies, that adaptation is already underway. "We've heard about Occupy protests around the country where they do strobe lights that actually blind camera phones and other kinds of cameras. Or things like the BART stations in San Francisco shutting down the cell networks when the protests come in."

Law enforcement isn't the only force that threatens freedom of the press. The technology companies who make the devices used by citizen journalists are a bottleneck for what kinds of reporting are possible. And many of the big ones have shown a disturbing willingness to comply with authorities.

"Whether it's Amazon taking down all of WikiLeaks that was stored on their cloud servers because Senator Joe Lieberman asked them to," Stearns recounts, "or whether it's Apple and their patent for the camera [that blocks recording in designated areas], or Verizon blocking NARAL text messages, regardless of what issue it is, as the platforms change, the gatekeepers are changing."

Taking Back The Media

Stearns sees hope in the way Storify and social media platforms have broken the police barricades around the media. "The one thing I think is really encouraging is that people are actually feeling ownership of their media," Stearns says. "People feel like, 'This is my phone. I'm creating my media on this.' People want to take back the media."

This is what the Storify founders have in mind. "This is a chance to create this whole new form of news," Herman says. Storify held a gathering called Occupy The News at its San Francisco headquarters on November 7, where career journalists from a range of publications came together to discuss the possibilities of new media. You can soak in their insights - where else - on Storify.

A tumultuous time like ours is ripe for a disruption of the ways in which we capture our stories and work toward the truth. The gatekeepers are changing, but the media are changing faster. There have never been more ways to experiment with information. Thanks to platforms like smartphones, Twitter and Storify, the barriers to participation are vanishing.

You can see all Storify posts about the Occupation on the occupy topic page.

Check out our guide on How To Curate Conversations With Storify.

Sign the petition to Save The News.

Have you ever used Storify? Share your posts in the comments.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. Hardware, specifically smartphones and tablets, set the ball rolling. The tablet form factor has been on our minds for a while, but it wasn't until the iPad's capacitive touchscreen that tablets took off with consumers.

BBC.com conducted an interesting study of tablet users this year, which showed that the hands-on interface provides users with a sense of control. That's the key to making engaging tablet content.

Ten-inch tablets are a fine way to view a website, but new kinds of interfaces can better take advantage of the touchscreen (and lack of physical keyboard). That's why software companies have gotten out ahead of publishers in providing reading apps that can turn any content into tablet content.

Flipboard is a celebrated example, and it also just launched an iPhone version. It can pull any Web content into its pleasant, touch-controlled layout, and it also offers publishers enhanced options for Flipboard-optimized content. Many other Web companies have aped this model, the latest of which is Google. None of these apps has emerged as the answer, but the new Google Currents has some interesting advantages for publishers.

The other vision of tablet reading is the "content-shifting" model, best exemplified by Instapaper. Instead of simply viewing Web content through a new layout, Instapaper saves clean versions of Web pages on demand. When you click the Instapaper bookmarklet on an article, that article is synced to your Instapaper in a cleaned-up version containing only plain text and embedded media.

Unlike Flipboard and the like, there's no value-add for publishers here. Rather, Instapaper is, in a way, a competitor. If publishers want to make money off the content they host themselves, they have to make their own reading experience that's better.

New Ways of Writing

To match this new way of reading, publishers have to be bold. The iPad and the Kindle Fire both offer newsstands for publication apps, inviting media organizations to make in-depth tablet experiences, not just paperless magazines.

One of the best examples we've seen so far is The Guardian iPad Edition, which launched the same day as Apple's iOS 5 Newsstand. It sneaks the Web view in here and there, and it streams in some content, but much of the experience is native, giving the reader that sense of control that matters so much on the tablet.

But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. But Storify has blurred the line again, turning social media into a full-fledged sense-making platform that can power a news site more like the ones we're used to.

The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It's a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it's creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. And then there are next-generation tools like Jux, which has blown the notion of the blog wide open. Now anyone can make an eye-popping, full-screen, multimedia periodical that's fully touch-enabled and reformats to fit the desktop, the tablet or the smartphone as needed.

New Ways of Advertising

New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. Yes, some legacy media companies are beginning to see real revenue from digital content, but the fact is that Web users have gotten comfortable with content being free. That means more ads.

Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.

Disclosure: Federated Media is also RWW's advertising partner.

As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media - and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify - thwarted the media blackout.

Saving The News

This is a new media age. The news of the Occupation has countless reporters, and some of the Web's best curators have taken on the task of weaving the Occupy stories together. In particular, Xeni Jardin has been a machine on Twitter, providing a one-woman breaking news channel of so many successive Occupy confrontations.

But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.

Storify's New Role: The Backbone of News

The world needed a shareable, embeddable way to gather the tweetstorm of breaking news and turn it into a lasting document. Storify has made that possible. After a closed beta period with professional journalists, Storify opened to the public in April.

In October, it rolled out a brand new editing interface making the tool vastly easier to use. And one week ago, just before the police raided Zuccotti Park, Storify made its move, redesigning its homepage as a destination featuring the most important stories on the social Web. Storify's vision is no less than a leveling of the media playing field. On the Storify homepage, lifelong and first-time journalists stand side by side.

"All news is social now," says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever's on the ground is the reporter, and whoever's curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn't matter who is whom. "We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources."

From a Dorm Room to the Front Page

While career journalists were being removed from Zuccotti Park, Ben Doernberg was watching the Web from his dorm room at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ben is a college junior, and journalism is not his major. But his Storify of the Occupy Wall Street raid reached tens of thousands of people and was embedded by the Washington Post.

"This is not actually my first Storify," he says, despite fun rumors to the contrary. "I was at Zuccotti Park about a month ago and happened to take a video that ended up getting on CNN, so this is kind of the second bizarre media day I've had in the last month."

Doernberg used Storify to track the reports of the media blackout. "I looked at Twitter around 1 o'clock, and everything was going insane," Doernberg says.

"By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time." What resulted was a comprehensive document of tweets, links, photos and videos of instances of the NYPD suppressing the media presence in Zuccotti Park. The Washington Post ran it, and the post has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

The 99% Media

The founders of Storify couldn't be more delighted that students are making headlines using their platform. The day after the raid on Zuccotti Park, Storify shared two student stories from the raid on its blog. Doernberg's was one. The other was by Columbia journalism grad student XinHui Lim, whose Storify post captured the grisly details from the ground and included embedded live-streamed video. At one point in the night, that amateur video stream had 23,000 viewers.

Damman says this is the perfect demonstration of the Storify redesign. These social media documents are the real story, and the NYPD's obstruction of credentialed journalists only shows how out of touch the police are. "The police in New York don't realize that it doesn't matter to not have journalists on the scene," Damman says, "because everybody is a reporter. What happened last night shows that they don't get that."

"Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%."

Herman agrees that Monday's events prove that the distinction between legacy media and new media is no longer important. During the raid, journalists became sources, regular people became journalists, and they traded places with each other throughout the night. It's all one medium now. "Let's not spite the Internet," Herman says. "Let's let the Internet be what it is."

The Gatekeepers

The NYPD's censorship efforts were thwarted by smartphones, Web technology and good, old-fashioned gumption. But authorities are working hard around the country to block journalists from covering the Occupation. Twenty six reporters have been arrested so far, ten of them in Zuccotti Park on Monday night.

Fortunately, those incidents are being captured on Storify, too, and the curator wants to make sure the free press is protected.

***Next page:** Josh Stearns of FreePress.net on new media, arrested journalists and the implications of the OWS blackout.*

Josh Stearns, Associate Program Director at Free Press, has been storifying journalist arrests at Occupy protests since September. He's using Storify as a living page, updating each time another journalist is arrested. You can help him by sending tips and tweets to @jcstearns.

Free Press is also holding a petition for their Save The News campaign urging New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to stop attacking freedom of the press.

Watching the Story Unfold

November 15 was a big night for journalist arrests, and Stearns was watching Twitter closely. "I think of Twitter as the place where I watch the story unfold," Stearns says, "but then I often look to a place like Storify or an article or liveblog where there's somebody intentionally trying to contextualize and weave things together."

One of the things Stearns struggled with during Monday's raids was "that reports were coming in at all different times. Trying to piece together when something happened" was a challenge, since both the events and tweets about the events were displaced in time.

"Twitter's so great for seeing the story unfold, but I think there's a lot of awesome work that can be done in contextualizing it." That's where Storify comes in. "I think Storify is a very flexible tool, being able to do that kind of rapid reporting or to bear witness over time."

Media Symbiosis

Stearns was impressed with Doernberg's work Monday night and how Storify enabled it. "His Storify wouldn't have been possible without people on the ground, and people on the ground weren't able to get their story out until his Storify collected those from all over the place and broadcasted it, and that story got into the Washington Post."

Storify provides the bridge between legacy and new media in situations like this. "I think there's really nice symbiosis between the two," Stearns says. "I think that's one thing Storify has done really well, positioning itself within a new media realm but making new media approachable for traditional organizations."

The Gatekeepers Are Changing

But legacy institutions aren't weathering the transition well. The Associated Press came down hard on its staff for tweeting too eagerly about their arrests in an email that feels awfully shy about new media participation. It warns AP reporters not to get "caught in the moment."

For Stearns, the important question is why. "The question becomes, were [the police] effective only to the point because they were only paying attention to one kind of media? And what was the intention behind that?"

"Why was there the decision to have a media blackout? Why were helicopters grounded? Why were journalists kept to the edges? If we ask those 'why' questions, and it turns out there was actual intentionality behind it, then that's profoundly troubling." If the police are really concerned about any message getting out at all, Stearns worries, they will learn to adapt to new media eventually.

Adapting To The New Reality

For some law enforcement agencies, that adaptation is already underway. "We've heard about Occupy protests around the country where they do strobe lights that actually blind camera phones and other kinds of cameras. Or things like the BART stations in San Francisco shutting down the cell networks when the protests come in."

Law enforcement isn't the only force that threatens freedom of the press. The technology companies who make the devices used by citizen journalists are a bottleneck for what kinds of reporting are possible. And many of the big ones have shown a disturbing willingness to comply with authorities.

"Whether it's Amazon taking down all of WikiLeaks that was stored on their cloud servers because Senator Joe Lieberman asked them to," Stearns recounts, "or whether it's Apple and their patent for the camera [that blocks recording in designated areas], or Verizon blocking NARAL text messages, regardless of what issue it is, as the platforms change, the gatekeepers are changing."

Taking Back The Media

Stearns sees hope in the way Storify and social media platforms have broken the police barricades around the media. "The one thing I think is really encouraging is that people are actually feeling ownership of their media," Stearns says. "People feel like, 'This is my phone. I'm creating my media on this.' People want to take back the media."

This is what the Storify founders have in mind. "This is a chance to create this whole new form of news," Herman says. Storify held a gathering called Occupy The News at its San Francisco headquarters on November 7, where career journalists from a range of publications came together to discuss the possibilities of new media. You can soak in their insights - where else - on Storify.

A tumultuous time like ours is ripe for a disruption of the ways in which we capture our stories and work toward the truth. The gatekeepers are changing, but the media are changing faster. There have never been more ways to experiment with information. Thanks to platforms like smartphones, Twitter and Storify, the barriers to participation are vanishing.

You can see all Storify posts about the Occupation on the occupy topic page.

Check out our guide on How To Curate Conversations With Storify.

Sign the petition to Save The News.

Have you ever used Storify? Share your posts in the comments.

But the study also found that the benefits of tablets extend beyond news. Subjects reported a range of improvements tablets brought to their lives, and many of them were unexpected. The study broke down tablet owners based on how long they've had tablets and found that all of the positive effects increased over time. Tablets aren't a fad; they're fundamentally changing the way people use the Web.

The majority of tablet owners agree that these new devices "offer more than just portability and convenience," and that sentiment only increases over time. Roughly the same proportions use the tablet at home more than they anticipated. Only 48% of people who have owned a tablet for less than six months use it more than they expected to, but that proportion increases to 57% by the end of the first year.

It takes some time for people to get used to their tablet. Only 44% find that tablets are a seamless part of their lives in the first six months. But by the time they've owned a tablet for a year or more, nearly 70% feel that it's an integral part of their routine.

Another interesting finding was that tablet owners report increased efficiency more than they do "fun," which runs counter to the popular perception of tablets as unserious devices meant for play. While 62% reported that tablets let them do things more efficiently, 51% said their tablets let them have more fun. And 67% of the subjects said they were "excited to see what tablets become capable of," so the future of tablet computing looks bright from consumers' standpoint.

Tablets Whet News Consumers' Appetites

As far as the content consumed on tablets, the study concentrated on news, a media category that has a ways to go to recover from the disruptions of the digital age. It found that 78% of tablet owners follow more news stories, in terms of both volume and variety, than they did before.

Respondents reported that tablets substantially improved many aspects of the news experience. 81% reported that "tablets make following the news more interesting and enjoyable," and 78% felt that "tablets substantially improve the news experience overall."

Tablets Bring Immersion and Control

One of the strongest signals of what tablet owners like about the experience is the customization and control it offers. 85% of tablet owners find it easier to customize and interact with tablet-specific content.

Tablets Can Make Advertising Work

Control over the experience played into subjects' preferences for news content itself, but it even factored into the way they felt about advertising, that crucial element of the news business.

"The advertisements on my laptop just drive me nuts," says Mindy, one of the subjects. "On the tablet, I didn't have that experience."

"Maybe I wouldn't mind the ads so much if... it's leading to something relevant to me," adds Lauren, another subject, "but if there's something fun that I can do with an ad to personalize it and make it really fit [for] me, then it's something I might click on, and I might send it to my friends."

This video interview with Mindy and Lauren shows an example of an AdJitsu 3D mobile ad, which we reported on last week:

Methodology

The study was conducted by Latitude with a three-phase methodology:

The first phase consisted of exploratory, qualitative phone interviews with tablet owners and news consumers, looking for insights into the role of tablets in users' lives to direct the rest of the study.

Phase two involved a 20-minute online survey with n=1099 news consumers between the ages of 18 and 54, 88% of whom were current tablet owners. This phase also used interactive elements to capture reactions to ad campaigns and elicit insights about how to make tablets work best for consumers.

The final phase was a week-long immersion trial in which heavy tablet owners were deprived of their devices, and non-tablet owners were immersed in tablet content. These trials were followed by in-depth interviews in which subjects articulated the benefits and drawbacks of their experiences.

What do you think? Have tablets changed the way you browse? Share your thoughts in the comments.

It displays full-screen photo galleries and audio and video content in addition to text articles. It enables browsing by section, topic, or author, and users can save favorites for easy browsing from the app or the phone's home screen. It even allows downloading of the personalized homepage and favorites for offline reading. The feature set reflects a solid understanding of the needs of new media consumers on the part of The Guardian's mobile team, which we've been watching for a long time.

The British newspaper cites record-breaking visits to its mobile site and thousands of downloads of its native iOS apps. Georgina Henry, head of The Guardian's website, also points to Android's dominant smartphone market share as a reason for the launch. "With over 150 million activated Android devices worldwide," Henry says, "the potential audience for this product is huge."

The features of the Android app are comparable to those of the US version of the iPhone app, which is also free. For the iPad, The Guardian offers a standalone photo browsing app called The Guardian Eyewitness, while the browser sends users to the full Guardian site.

Free vs. Paid

The British version of the iPhone app offers more features and is powered by paid subscriptions (£2.99 for 6 months or £4.99 for 12 months). After 509,264 downloads of this app, 86,000 users paid for subscriptions. For comparison, the New Yorker's iPad app, which offers more exclusive in-depth content rather than daily news articles, has seen only a slightly better proportion of users purchase subscriptions.

We weren't sure whether this monetization strategy would work when the subscription-based app launched earlier this year, but The Guardian takes enough pride in the numbers to announce them. It's worth noting that the Android app follows the free model.

The New York Times, The Guardian's counterpart from across the pond, offers its own range of mobile apps, most of which offer some free content but require subscriptions for full access.

Maximum Eyeballs

Offline reading is a standout feature of reading list apps like ReadItLater. Personalization is a sweet spot for news that aggregator apps are racing to perfect. By adding these, plus full-screen multimedia content, all packaged into a free app, The Guardian's new app makes a compelling bid for users' top spots for news reading on Android devices.

My wife and I are empty nesters, but we have a cell plan that also includes my stepson. The three cell phones cost us $175 per month with AT&T, and that is for my iPhone data plan and messaging plans. We live in an urban area where we can choose between DSL and cable options, although in our apartment building AT&T DSL/U-Verse is our only choice for Internet connectivity unless we want to go to a broadband wireless plan.

Why use Vonage? Well, the AT&T U-Verse VOIP wasn't attractive, just because I already give them so much of my dough to begin with. And yes, I can save $5 a month if I combine both U-Verse and wireless into a single combined bill; the last time I did that when I had to change my billing, it took forever to get sorted out.

Add to this our Netflix account, which was $22 per month, and that will rise to $28 a month if we don't adjust things and keep to the same plan of rental DVDs and streaming. I like the video streaming when I travel because it allows me to watch the movies I want in the hotel without having to pick from their selection, but my wife isn't as much of a fan of streaming.

Add to this the cost of actually going to the movies: in our apartment building is a five-screen theater, which makes it very convenient. We probably see two movies a month, and at St. Louis prices, that is still about $30 per month.

So add everything together, and it comes out at a surprising $297, so the Netflix increase is less than two percent of this total. Note that we don't have an actual land-line telephone, and this total doesn't include the cost of my office communications either.

Close to $300 a month for communications and entertainment? Wow. Remember when TV was free and you could pay $20 a month for dial-up? But at least we have high-speed Internet, and I can get movies that I want to watch whenever and wherever I may be in the world.

On the second day of ReadWriteWeb's 2Way Summit Tuesday, a team of Onion staffers walked attendees through the publication's history, from its fictitious beginnings in 1756 all the way to its modern experimentation with social media and expansion into broadcast.

Today, The Onion's Website boasts 7 million unique visitors per month, plus an additional 2 million visits to A.V. Club, The Onion's non-satirical sister publication dedicated to arts and culture coverage. Most recently, the publications expanded to Philadelphia, with The Onion launching a print edition there and A.V. Club Philadelphia going live in February 2011.

From left to right: The Onion's Features Editor Joe Garden, Editorial Manager Kate Palmer, Writer Geoff Haggerty, Digital Product Manager Matt Kirsch and Digital Director Baratunde Thurston.

Leading the charge on the digital front is Baratunde Thurston, The Onion's Director of Digital, who was joined at the 2Way Summit by Digital Product Manager Matt Kirsh.

"In terms of our strategy, we just try to be everywhere," said Thurston. "We're trying to be where our audience is, because that audience isn't necessarily the type to come to theonion.com as their start page everyday. That kind of strategy of content distribution is over."

Two key components to that strategy are mobile and social, or as Thurston jokingly called it, "mocial," a newly-coined buzzword later repeated by the W3C's Jeff Jaffe during his kenote at the 2Way Summit.

On the mobile front, The Onion has produced mobile versions of its Websites, which are coded with HTML5 and developed in-house. Additionally, apps for iOS and Android have proven quite popular among the publication's readership, which Thurston said was more savvy with the Web and mobile devices than that of many other print media organizations. Those mobile applications have garnered over 2 million downloads to date.

Social media have also been at the forefront of how The Onion connects with its audience online. With 2.9 million Twitter followers and 1.8 million Facebook fans, the publication is able to not only broaden the reach of its content, but interact with that community in creative ways.

One example cited by the team was the Web-fueled development of an Onion News Network broadcast story titled "Al Qaeda Attacks Internet With Photo of Adorable Piglet". Prior to airing the story, staffers planted a photograph of a piglet wearing red boots on various Websites and then used Twitter and Facebook to help the photo go viral. Tapping into the very heart of the Web, they even published a poll asking readers whether they thought the piglet was cuter than Justin Bieber. The whole experiment led to a surge in followers for the Onion News Network Twitter account.

The digital team shared other social media successes they experienced, including an Oscar night Twitter follower bump for one anchor and the overwhelming popularity on Facebook of a headline that read "Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He's Not A Festering Pile Of Shit".

Today, National Public Radio (NPR) became the latest media group to join Tumblr, and I spoke with senior strategist Andy Carvin to find out how the organization plans to leverage the quickly growing platform.

"Part of what we do is experiment on different platforms, and it seemed apparent to us that there was a sizable number of NPR fans on Tumblr," he says. "It's less about pageviews and more about engaging a community that enjoys NPR."

Carvin says NPR is taking a very experimental approach to Tumblr in terms of curating content to share, engaging one-on-one with followers and determining how to voice the blog. He adds that he is eager to get feedback from fans, but that there is no "grand plan" for what they intend to accomplish.

Tumblr and the Media

By joining Tumblr, NPR also joins a growing list of traditional media outlets - including Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone - attempting to reach fans on the popular service. But why is Tumblr such an attractive new medium for these organizations? Carvin says it's all in the visuals.

"Tumblr is a visual medium. Photos and snippets of quotes really stand out, while Facebook might have a sentence or two in a wall post and thumbnail with a link to a story," he says.

Why not use Posterous? "Who's to say we won't," Carvin says.

He believes Tumblr has attracted a media presence because of the ease at which a variety of media can be quickly presented on a site. It's this established media presence that led NPR to chose Tumblr over Posterous, at least for now.

"It's important to pick and choose your battles. It's easy to overextend yourself on every single platform rather than figure out sweet spots," he says. "We recognize that there's a large group of people online that love what we do [...] It's important for us to stay engaged with these folks at a personal level and not just a 50,000 foot level."

The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new version adds the ability to "follow" people or publishers via a feature called "My News." This will be the default Digg home page, and it's prompted many to compare the new Digg to Twitter and Facebook. Another big change is that publishers may now automatically submit their content. This changes the game for both power users and publishers, because previously the secret to getting onto the Digg front page was for a power user to submit the story. That's no longer the case.

Up till now, the definition of a "power user" on Digg has been someone with the ability to make stories popular simply by submitting content or "digging" it up. There was also a lot of back-scratching that happened behind the scenes among both power users and publishers: 'You digg my content, I'll digg yours.' Digg has attracted a lot of criticism in the past for these practices inside its community.

Simply put, Digg's power users wielded a lot of power because they dictated which publishers got pushed onto the Digg homepage. Digg is a large source of traffic for publishers, particularly tech news publications. In the past, tech sites like Ars Technica and Engadget have received a hugely disproportionate number of Digg frontpages, compared to other tech sites, since they were favored by power users.

With the new Digg, publishers may opt in to having their articles auto-submitted to Digg via RSS feed. But will this stop the gaming?

How The New Digg Affects Power Users

We spoke to Digg power user JD Rucker, a.k.a. oboy on Digg, to discuss the impact of Digg's changes on his community.

Rucker recently wrote a post entitled The New Digg: A Shift in the Balance of Power, which argued that "the new Digg will make many current 'power users' impotent" but also create opportunities for new types of power users.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, JD Rucker explained that "rather than submit [articles], current long-time power users will be able to expose content that they like through their Diggs."

This list of diggs is similar to a list of daily tweets, since people follow what the power user diggs. It's also similar to Facebook, because other users may 'like' what they digg by digging it too.

The idea, said Rucker, is that the power users who succeed at attracting followers will become "tastemakers" - which is the term Digg founder Kevin Rose used when he announced the new Digg in May.

What Happens Behind The Scenes

Many people aren't aware of the amount of "gaming the system" which goes on in the social Web. I consider myself fairly naive about a lot of it. But I know this much: despite the altruistic front of many successful people in the social Web, many of them have gamed their way to the top.

The following is how JD Rucker explained how Digg's power users will (or won't) adjust to the new Digg. It also reveals the power games that are played on the site:

"They [power users] can still network via IM and control publisher accounts to keep themselves relevant, but the vast majority will fail miserably because they won't be able to adjust to the new algo[rithm]. They'll spam, spam, and spam some more until they either give up and move on to other sites or abort operations altogether.

Others are already planning on leaving.

The "savvy" ones who have built-up networks not reliant on IM, [and] who will also have access to multiple and/or strong publisher accounts, will soar."

I asked Rucker what he meant by "control publisher accounts." He replied with this generic example: "Bob Power User, who is getting paid by RandomDiggDependentSite.com, is currently using his and his team's power user accounts to submit." Rucker described this as "a small cottage industry."

That's right, some power users control publisher Digg accounts. This practice will continue on the new Digg.

A Whole New Ballgame: Let The Games Begin...

We like to write about how wonderful the social Web is and how it has improved society and business. That's certainly true, but the Web is also big business, and it is ruthlessly gamed by many social media 'pundits' and publishers alike. The new Digg is partly an attempt to clean up some of that on its site by preventing its power users from controlling the submission of content.

JD Rucker stated in his post that the new Digg showed "guts" because it is such a big change. I agree. The new Digg cleverly mimics Twitter and Facebook, becoming a place where you can 'follow' influencers and publishers to get your daily news fix. What's more, power users now have the opportunity to attract large followings, which is a chance for some of them to become influential personalities.

However, the new Digg won't stop the games of power users and the publishers who glom onto them. There's too much (online) power and money at stake. It's game on again!

Follow ReadWriteWeb on the new Digg

Coatney's new position will be to be a liaison for other media publications that want to extend their reach on Tumblr the way companies like Newsweek, The New Yorker and The New York Times have. His philosophy is that editors should not simply be shameless self-promoters, but should instead leverage these various platforms to engage with their communities at the personal level.

The move to Tumblr is a clear sign that the micro-blogging service is very interested in helping traditional media find a new voice online. For Coatney, this isn't the first time he's shifted gears in his media career. Before joining Newsweek, he worked as a writer and editor for Time Magazine, where he also helped to create the first iteration of Time.com.

A study released this month by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that people who engage with the arts through various digital media are three times more likely (59% over 21%) to attend live arts performances, and do so twice as often (6 events per year over 3) as non-media participants. Titled Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, the survey concluded that "media-based arts participation appears to encourage - rather than replace - live arts attendance."

The report, which can be viewed in its entirety online for the first time this year, outlines several examples of how arts organizations are reaching out to audiences with online media initiatives. The New York Public Library, KQED Public Media and the Smithsonian Institution are just a few of the groups providing arts media online via services like YouTube and iTunes U.

St. Louis-based television network Higher Education Learning Channel takes its offerings to the next level, providing iPhone and iPad apps for new audiences to engage with videos and sound recordings of local performances.

"We are faced with the Internet, social media, and other new technologies, and I believe the arts field must embrace them and integrate them into our work," said NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman.

Digital Performance

But the reach of new media in the arts doesn't end once organizations attract audience members to their venues; many performing arts productions are integrating technology and interactive media into the actual performances. Last summer, the National Symphony introduced real-time program notes that were delivered to the audience via Twitter.

Composers have even begun to write music that specifically calls for the use of computers and technology during performance. Computer programs that allow for the live processing of sounds created from the actions of the performer have widely expanded the possibilities of sound creation beyond the normal realm of instrumentation. Other programs can produce rich visualizations based on live sound inputs, creating unique artistic experiences with each performance.

Other music composers, like Eric Whitacre, have gone as far as to use social media to create virtual crowdsourced performances of their music. For his choir works "Sleep" and "Lux Aurumque," Whitacre released a video of himself conducting each piece so that users could record the various tracks (soprano, alto, bass, etc) and submit them. Whitacre then synced them together to create "virtual choir" performances which were then published on YouTube.

It's terrific for a music lover like myself to see social media and technology used in these unique ways to increase awareness for the arts among new audiences. These last several examples only focused on music, but there are many other ways new media is being used in theater, dance and other live arts.

Photo by Flickr user DeusXFlorida.

Earlier this month, we mentioned that the Financial Times had reached 130,000 downloads of its free iPad application in its first two weeks. The app is being downloaded nearly ten times faster than its iPhone companion, which launched last year but required an online subscription to use. All this just from the U.S. launch of the app; the U.K. version has yet to be released into the AppStore.

The faster pace of downloads is likely due to the fact that the app is free, and provides access to the Financial Times content that is normally behind subscriptions. The newspaper is running a two-month sponsorship to fund the app and grow its popularity, and will likely switch to a monthly subscription model soon.

One reason why a digital subscription via the iPad is likely to succeed for the Financial Times is because much of the readership of the paper (like that of the Wall Street Journal) is mainly wealthy financiers and business executives - just the type of audience that's likely to subscribe and more likely to own the expensive iPad. According to the Los Angeles Times story, the paper estimates that by 2012 a full third of its revenue will come from its digital efforts. As with the report regarding online ad revenues from yesterday, this news from the Financial Times is very encouraging for the online media industry.

But the Financial Times is leveraging its upper-class audience in other ways as well. According to the Los Angeles Times, the paper hosts events and conferences aimed at these high-rollers. At the forefront of these events is the Business of Luxury Summit, which has become a strong source of profit for the paper thanks to high-end sponsorships and expensive registration prices, with executives from companies like Estee Lauder, Calvin Klein and Jimmy Choo drawing in the wealthy attendees.

The ability of traditional news outlets to break their dependence on print ad revenues is certainly a welcome change and a good sign that the industry can in fact survive at a healthy level online. The Financial Times, however, may be a poor example since they have a significantly different audience - one that may be more willing to pay for an online subscription.

"Once the pay model is implemented next year, the majority of our readers will be unaffected when using the site and will continue to have the same experience they have always had," said Green. "The pay model will be designed so readers that are referred from third party sites such as blogs will be able to access that content without hitting their limit, enabling NYTimes.com to continue being a part of the open web."

Green later commented on Kafka's post, adding that while third-party referrals will count towards a reader's daily limit, it will not prevent them from viewing the content. So if a user reaches the limit via thrid-party links and then trys to browse articles on the Times' homepage, the paywall will then be triggered. Users will still be able to access articles via third-party sites and services at all times, so is the Times' paywall paper thin?

This seems like a pretty significant loophole that would make it fairly simple to get around the paywall once it goes up. If I want to read a specific story on the Times' homepage after I've hit my limit, I can simply search for that story on Google or Twitter search and get around the wall via an outside link from another site.

The Times seems to be focused on monetizing the users that browse their webpage for content on a frequent basis, rather than those that arrive from other sites. So while the key to the front door only works a few times each day, the windows on the side of the house are wide open.

What is also unclear is how the New York Times' paywall algorithms will determine which sites and links will apply to this exemption. As it stands now, it would seem that all sites and all links will not affect a user's daily limit, but whether this applies to search engines or news aggregators is unknown. We have reached out to the Times for comment on this question and will update this post if and when a reply is received.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Photo by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik.

"More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four - the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links."

This is one of the assertions in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "New Media, Old Media."

This figure seems wildly out of sync with the admittedly non-statistical experience of the editorial staff at ReadWriteWeb.

No Original News on Twitter?

Another surprising finding was about original news on Twitter. According to the study, there was no original news at all on Twitter.

"Here half (50%) of the links were to legacy outlets; 40% went to web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET. The remaining 10% went to wire stories or non-news sources..."

Pew used the term "links" here, though earlier in the report they ask, "What types of news stories do consumers share and discuss the most?" Have they limited their discussion of Twitter solely to Tweets with links? It is a common way of sharing news on Twitter, but not the only way. ReadWriteWeb has reported several times on not just news reporting but breaking news on Twitter.

Questions to Pew about these figures and their sources were not returned by posting time. We will add an update when and if they are.

A Difference in Emphasis

Which stories were deemed most important differed between mainstream media and social media and between types of social media.

"Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda - the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied. On YouTube, the top stories overlapped with traditional media eight out of 49 weeks. "

Of all the social media covered in the study, YouTube had the most international focus. The report states that 26% of the news videos watched were of non-U.S. events. But the most-watched videos were not of "the most important or pressing topic of the week, but rather what image or video was the most interesting to view."

Examples included Susan Boyle on "Britain's Got Talent" (the most popular video during one week in June and viewed 100 million times in less than a month) and a drunk bus driver endangering students.

Update

We received this email response from Pew's Tom Rosenstiel.

The blogs looked at are the ones that are tracked by the prominent blog-tracking sites Icerocket and Technorati. They follow millions of blogs each day, so no complete list would be possible.

As we described in our methodology, we collected the articles that were most linked to on blogs that made the top five lists on Icerocket and Technorati each weekday. Of those, 99% were from legacy outlets as you noted.

Also, as we noted in the report, we relied on the "news" categorization that Icerocket and Technorati used. We made no judgment as to whether a story was considered news versus some other type of story.

It also made no difference what the type of blog was making the link. It only mattered what the story was that they linked to - so if a knitting blog, for example, linked to a Washington Post story about the deficit, that would have been included.

Your own experience may be different depending on the blogs or social media you follow, of course. This is a quantitative statistical analysis over far more material than one person would encounter.

Some have argued that Technorati has been a less than robust source for social media information for some time. Icerocket has recently show signs of substantial re-invigoration but was on the fade for a while.

The relationship between social media and traditional media is a strong one, a reality that should be pretty clear for anyone involved in both. The way that the study was done, however, focusing on a slice of a slice of a slice, may make it less indicative of the state of that relationship as a whole than it might seem at first blush.

Warthen was co-founder, and CTO for, Ask Jeeves. As Ask.com it remains the fourth most consulted search engine. It was sold to Barry Diller's InterActive Corp for $1,85 billion in 2005. After Jeeves, Warthen acted as CTO for Eye Games, "a pioneer of full-body motion interactive webcam video games that presaged the Nintendo Wii" and Answerbag, acquired by Demand Media in 2007.

"Allvoices technology is in support of the human element - where global citizens are the creators and curators of the content - to make both the site and the business model scalable," Warthen told us. "These human/algorithm hybrid systems have been at the core of most of the work I have done, where the people involved are considered part of the system and not "outside" of the system."

Anyone fascinated by natural language issues, or horrified for that matter, might be interested to know he intends to make it part of Allvoices.

"Applying natural language technology to the problems of the automated newsroom is very powerful," he said. "This is an area I'm excited to bring to Allvoices' existing team of NLP experts."

Ask.com started as a natural language search engine but dropped that aspect eventually.

Disclosure: Lo these many years ago, I worked at Ask Jeeves when Warthen was its CTO.