Four Wednesday

1. Platinum Equity is exploring a possible sale, er divestiture, of the San Diego Union-Tribune. UT

2. The Associated Press releases new social media guidelines. AP (via Romenesko)

3. Simon Dumenco says punishment of Huffington Post writer for "over-aggregating" copy obscures the fact that over-aggregation of copy is a central Huffington Post strategy. Ad Age

4. Feeling claustrophobic about this weekend's Carmageddon carpocalypse? JetBlue had a solution - for $4, the Car-mageddon fly-over would have taken you from Long Beach to Burbank, or vice versa, allowing you to avoid all ground congestion. The trip would have taken 45 minutes, not counting security checks, but the flights are sold out anyway. JetBlue

Four Tuesday

1. News Corp.-owned MySpace is about to be sold for an astonishingly low $30 million and will probably devoured (half the staff could be laid off). No one is surprised. And no one has heard of the potential buyers. All Things D

2. The merging and consolidating at AOL-Huffington Post begins in earnest this summer. Many of the AOL landing sites will be folded into Huffington Post - Politics Daily gets rolled into HuffPost Politics, for example. As a result AOL's brands will drop from 53 to 20 and HuffPost will expand from 28 to 36 sections. TechCrunch

3. AOL's streamlining reminded me of a 2009 post I wrote. Maybe I was on to something. Reporter G

4. The New York Times Co. has partnered with USC to offer online extension courses. This is about branding and making money. Only one of the 40 courses has to do with journalism. Inside Higher Ed (found via LA Observed)

The FCC discovers local journalism is (f)ailing

A report commissioned by the FCC finds what everyone in the journalism business already knows: There is a dearth of good, in-depth local reporting. AOL-Huffington-Patch is not going to reverse the trend, either (though AOL-Huffington-Patch disagrees). From a Poynter summary of the report:

The FCC report says that newspapers and TV news networks have half the staff that they had in the 1980s and that newsrooms now stand at pre-Watergate employment levels. As a result, local news coverage is in trouble. Courts, schools, legal affairs, environment, state government and education once were priority beats. Now they lack reporters to cover them. The number of newspapers with bureaus in Washington has declined. Local news coverage of religion “is all but gone[.]”

While NPR gets good marks, local radio news coverage is following the trend of having too few people following the reports of other outlets. Again, from Poynter:

Despite the abundance of local media outlets, Waldman said, there is “a shortage of media reporting.” In Baltimore, for example, there are 53 news outlets, but a Pew study  said most of the content came from one TV station and The Baltimore Sun. “So far the news media is not filling this key need” to report news and not just repeat what others have reported, Waldman said. About 15,000 reporters have left newsrooms in the last decade in America, he said.

A return from the rapture

New duties at work have led to (an obvious) slowdown on the blog. Hopefully I'll find my rhythm again in a few weeks.Until then, here are some links to tide you over:

1. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg only eats the meat that he kills. He's taken to cutting goat and pig throats in a nod to sustainable farming. CNNMoney

2. NPR wants to know your platform preferences. NPR

3. "Long tails" in support of long tales online. Nieman Lab

4. AOL-Huffington Post announces a financial reporting team and a Canada-theme. Huffington Post (via LA Observed)

5. FishbowlLA co-editor Pandora Young said on Facebook that she got threats of legal retribution for reporting what people said about Finke. The "offending" post is here: FishbowlLA

6. Food writing, like all other forms of writing, is being changed by social media, Internet platforms, and dying newspapers. Poynter

7. You'll go broke going broke. Tribune Co. has paid $157 million to lawyers, bankers and advisers working on its bankruptcy case. WSJ

Four to break the silence

The blog has been quiet for most of the week, as my new job has required much more of my time. That said, here are some links to get you through Good Friday:

1. Yahoo! News Network helps prove once again that you don't have to best to be first. According to the number crunchers at Poynter, the online network is the top destination for news and information on the web, besting CNN by about 6 million unique hits a month. Poynter

2. Forbes surmises that the unpaid bloggers at Huffington Post provide more value to the site than Arianna Huffington wants to admit. Although they don't drive enough traffic to boost ad revenues in a significant way, they are the reason that Google treats HuffPo as a news site rather than a content farm, Forbes concludes. That means HuffPo stories get ranked alongside the New York Times and Los Angeles Times in a Google News search, rather than pushed down to the Demand Media level. And if you look at the Poynter link above, you'll see Huffington Post is sixth on the list (and partner AOL News is fourth). Forbes

3. As the use of wireless mobile devices increases, the companies that make them want to claim a wider swath of the broadcast spectrum from television broadcasters. The lack of public debate in the process is notable. New York Times

4. The news that Oscar-winning filmmaker Tim Hetherington had died in a mortar attack in Libya came from a fellow photographer's posting on Facebook. Wired

AOL-Huffington might double its Patch force

Arianna Huffington, now the editorial voice behind AOL's news team, has announced the company will hire as many as 800 writers to work on its 800 or so Patch sites across the country, Bloomberg reported. From the story:

“Each site will now have its own team,” Huffington said in an interview. “It’s always greater and better to have a team.” Until now, content for each Patch website has been produced by a single full-time local editor and freelancers.

Teams also help prevent exhaustion from setting in. Individual Patch editors do almost everything necessary to publish their city-based sites. That is tiring and can lead to myopic story selection.

An extra body could also pick up slack for projects, since it's likely there will be Patchwide stories and series. For example, I'm told California's Patch sites paired up with California Watch to help localize the latter's series on earthquake safety in public schools - "sloppy" and "mess" were some of the words one Patcher used to describe the process. It may just be growing pains.

Here's more from the Bloomberg story:

“We are basically going to make Patch a lot more social,” said Huffington, 60. “It’s a great way to have people in the town, from the mayor to high-school kids, engaged.”

That sounds nice. I don't know what it means.

Four things that won't surprise you

1. Journalist and pundit Jonathan Alter is leaving Newsweek, possibly for a gig at Bloomberg.

2. Visits to the New York Times homepage are down between 5 percent and 15 percent since the paywall went up.

3. Tribune Co. and MediaNews Group are the leading bidders for the Orange County Register.

4. A freelancer has sued on behalf of unpaid contributors to AOL-Huffington Post.

(All links found via Romenesko)

AOL puts the "free" in freelancing*, **

AOL plans to fire all of its freelancers at Moviefone and Cinematical, but wants them to know they're still welcome to write for the sites - for free. In other words, the Huffington Post blogger model. Here's part of the email (via fishbowlLA) to the freelancers:

We will, indeed, be moving away from a freelancer model and toward one relying on full-time staffers. Sometime soon -– this week, I believe –- many of you will be receiving an email informing you that your services as a freelancer will no longer be required. You will be invited to contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system; and though I know that for many of you this will not be an option financially, I strongly encourage you to consider it if you’d like to keep writing for us, because we value all of your voices and input.

AOL-Huffington, redefining "value" one website at a time.

*Update: I'm told AOL Patch freelancers still get $50 a pop, so this policy has not hit them yet.

**Update II: The AOL editor who sent the above email was fired for its "erroneous" tone, the Wrap reports. Apparently, freelancers aren't being invited to become unpaid bloggers. They're being invited to apply for paid positions. However, if they don't get them, and they want to continue writing for Huffington Post or another AOL platform, they are free to do so. For free.

Four today

1. Ever wonder why some news stories sound like press releases? Sometimes it's because the news stories basically copy huge blocks of text from press releases. A new site, churnalism.com, will help watchdog this shameful habit. PBS

2. Governments employ many layers of lawyers to figure out how not to tell people what's going on. ProPublica has gone through the excuses used to skirt the Freedom of Information Act to show just how its done. ProPublica

3. What's in a name? In the case of Medill journalism school, way too much. Daily Northwestern

4. AOL/Huffington Post is becoming fair and balanced. fishbowlLA