The weekend? Don't relax; read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Another weekend, another reading list:

"Meaty News Topics Are Popular -- And More Profitable" (Journalism 2.0):  This is encouraging: The top news topics over the summer involved serious issues -- unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates, egg recall -- as opposed to celebrity fluff. That's according to a company that works with publishers to monetize content, as measured by website traffic and ad revenue per thousand page views. Huzzah!

"The Newsonomics of the Ad Recovery" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Not so encouraging is this: Advertising is coming back, but newspapers aren't getting as much of it as their TV and magazine peers, says media analyst Ken Doctor. What's more, the pace of online ads is up, too, but newspapers haven't gotten digital as quickly as they should, so they aren't in a position to take best advantage of that trend. Sigh!

"This Is Not a Blog Post" (Slate): Did you know that blogs were morphing into Web magazines and 'zines were becoming blogs? Don't care? Well, some people do, and this piece in Slate explains why the descriptor "article" will bestow gravitas whereas "post" won't.

"How Free Can It Be?" (The Fiscal Times): More on paying or not paying interns -- from a writer who uses unpaid assistants to write a story about using unpaid assistants.

Dazed and Confused yet? Time for a video interlude with bonus music backup.

"New York Times to Launch Texas Regional Edition by Month's End" (PoynterOnline): Three of anything makes a trend, right? (Ask any newspaper assigning editor.) So that must be what we have with the New York Times partnering again with a new online operation to produce specialized pages for its national edition in select U.S. cities. The Times already set up such arrangements in San Francisco with the new (2010) Bay Citizen and in Chicago with the new (2009) Chicago News Cooperative. Now it's Texas's turn. I wonder what metro is next?