Weekend read: How the news business has changed

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Time to get back into the weekend reading habit. Check this out:

"Colorful Hyperbole and Newspapering in 1982 and 2010" (McGuire on Media): Tim McGuire is a former editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis who now teaches journalism at Arizona State University and blogs regularly about the media. This recent post is interesting because it asks a handful of newspaper veterans to evaluate the sea change that has roiled the industry over the last several decades. (Note the reminder of how transformative the telegraph was for newspapering in an earlier era.)

"The Shakeup at MediaNews: Why It Could Be the Leadup to a Massive Newspaper Consolidation" (Nieman Journalism Lab): The crux of this long piece -- the "nut graf," if you will -- doesn't show itself until the subhead titled "Consolidation?" And the point is this: With so many newspaper companies now controlled by the same one or two investment groups, isn't further consolidation of the industry inevitable? Author Martin Langeveld, a longtime daily newspaper publisher now working as a consultant, offers a handy list of investor-owners to make his case.

Musical interlude: "The Dow Piano", or how the stock market's ups and downs in 2010 would be scored.

"Is Mobile Affecting When We Read?" (Read It Later): Yes, is the short answer from the people behind Read It Later, a platform to which readers save digital articles in order to, ahem, read them later. An analysis of what has been posted to RIL reveals that we're so thoroughly bombarded by online material that we're forced into priority triage, setting aside certain things for a leisure-time read. The iPad could find a big following as a result, say the RIL folks.

"The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving" (Columbia Journalism Review): Two recent instances of off-the-record comments being attributed once their source died offers a topic for discussion: Does the identity protection ever expire automatically?

Video interlude: I hadn't seen this Nike Foundation anti-poverty video (or its follow-up) until I came across this article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the controversy that has resulted.