Four in the morning

1. North Korea's official news agency claims that Current TV journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling confessed to crossing illegally into the country during their secret trial. Lee and Ling were sentenced to 12 years hard labor for the alleged transgression. NYT

2. Google offered several established artists the chance to work for free. The artists - some anyway - declined to consider "exposure" as payment. NYT (h/t fishbowlLA)

3. The federal government has raised anti-trust issues about Google's planned online book registry, with critics, including librarians, saying the company will have effectively cornered the market. Time

4. What's the Boston Globe worth (assuming the New York Times Co. decides to sell)? A buck, says Ken Doctor at Content Bridges: "A buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands, says the buyer. I give you the great potential of the Globe brand, a top 25 news web site and improved ability to re-jigger the pieces, thanks to our new contracts and cost-cutting, says the Times." Content Bridges

The daily battle for Detroit

The decision to cut delivery of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News to three days a week has opened the door to a new daily newspaper - the Detroit Daily Press.

The name itself is a finger in the eye of the former dailies, as Ken Doctor points out, but also a clever mashup that will give subscribers and advertisers a sense of establishment. But who wants a daily newspaper anymore?

Doctor answers:

Daily newspaper publishers have been making the point that the new economics of the news business simply won't pay for business (and staff and product) as usual. They are right, of course -- given their economics, but not necessarily the next guy's.

In making reductions, they've had to hit the panic button more often than the strategic switch, and that inevitably may have left them open to competitors of all kinds. They may not have protected their flanks well enough in cutting back. If the entrepreneurial pioneers turn into a parade, newspaper publishers will have a new headache: intensifying competition for the local ad dollar, and for readers' share of attention.

In Detroit, the exposed flank is home delivery. Publisher Dave Hunke may well have been right that the Detroit Newspaper Partnership was unsustainable in its traditional form, and that cutting whole days of home delivery made sense for Gannett and MediaNews. He exposed the flank though -- a big flank of maybe more than a 100,000 baby boomers and up (in age) who want the newspaper delivered to their home. They don't want an e-edition to be read on a computer, and they don't want to wait 'til they get trundled off to an old-age home (DNP has decided to keep up daily delivery to senior citizen facilities). They want a newspaper. Delivered.

Four at night

1. Peter Y. Sussman at Huffington Post calls for a little perspective when it comes to the citizen-journalism project:

By all means, let's keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

Huffington Post

2. Ken Doctor at Content Bridges considers the algorithms of the new Google News:

As print shrinks, Google will replace its daily functionality, its daily utility -- and it's been on that road for awhile -- with Google News, v2. It sounds like Google News, v1 meets Google IG meets AdWords for news, a new algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. Importantly ... Google is recognizing how fundamentally lazy we all are. In effect, we're taken to be the corpulent creatures in Wall E. Google seems to be saying: you don't have to do anything, we'll be your new paperboy.

Content Bridges

3. Jason Pontin at Technology Review proposes ways to save print journalism - starting with an assessment of print journalism's true value:

The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

Technology Review via Newspaper Death Watch

4. Rob Fishman at Huffington Post reports on the words war between David Carr of the New York Times and Michael Wolff of Newser, and analyzes where they're getting their ammunition:

It's hip for bloggers to bite the hand that feeds them, and Wolff's got some oral fixation. It's not good enough for him to kick the Boston Globe or Seattle Post-Intelligencer while they're down; he needs to cite their own articles while he's doing it. We all have a personal stake in The New York Times, but for Wolff it's more than that, it's his bread and butter. Without the news, he's just an -er.

Huffington Post