Four Friday

1. World's oldest Sunday paper considers closing. Newspaper Death Watch

2. Mark Halperin at Time magazine doesn't like town hall mobsters (but he still likes Drudge). TIME

3. Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, has some thoughts on health care reform: Beware the "death panel." Facebook

4. Errol Morris looks at the lies about lying. Part 1 and Part 2

The deal that wasn't was the worst

Keith Olbermann last night named New York Times reporter Brian Stelter the third worst person in the world for reporting that the heads of GE and News Corp. had brokered a deal to end the bickering between Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly. Stelter earned the ignominy, Olbermann said, because no deal was ever made. Olbermann then went on to name News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch as the very worst person in the world for meddling in O'Reilly's show. James Poniewozik at Time sums up the logic here.

Sunday in Iran

Yesterday's protests left 13 dead, according to Iranian state television; CNN has put the number at 19 dead, and some reports are as high as 150.

Another protest is reportedly planned for today at 5 p.m. Tehran time, the New York Times reports.

Iranian authorities have deemed reform candidate and opposition symbol Mir-Hossein Mousavi a criminal; he's said he's ready for "martyrdom." Meanwhile, state television says police have arrested family members of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a vocal supporter of the opposition movement.

Steve Clemons of Washington Note and the New America Foundation reprints a letter to a colleague about Mousavi supporters targeting Iran's thuggish morals-police, the Basij (h/t Talking Points Memo):

Basij hunting

By the way, two nights ago I went out to see a few things ... as the general crowds spread into their homes militia style Mousavi supporters were out on the streets 'Basiji hunting'.

Their resolve is no less than these thugs -- they after hunting them down. They use their phones, their childhood friends, their intimate knowledge of their districts and neighbours to plan their attacks -- they're organised and they're supported by their community so they have little fear. They create the havoc they're after, ambush the thugs, use their Cocktail Molotovs, disperse and re-assemble elsewhere and then start again - and the door of every house is open to them as safe harbour -- they're community-connected.

The Basiji's are not.

These are not the students in the dorms, they're the street young -- they know the ways better than most thugs - and these young, a surprising number of them girls, are becoming more agile in their ways as each night passes on.

What's an update on Iran without an update about Twitter? "Six lessons learned" from the New York Times. Change comes on the ground, not online, from the Berkman Center. Etaoin Shrdlu calls bullshit on Clay Shirky claims.

Helene Cooper analyzes the extent to which America's shifting foreign policy has inspired reformers in Iran to challenge the hard-line regime.

Robin Wright looks at the way mourning, martyrdom and the death of a woman on the streets of Tehran could shape opposition strategy.

Foreign Policy talks to a Mousavi surrogate to find out what the reform candidate wants.

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

Behavioral-science politics

The Obama campaign enlisted some top names in the field of behavioral science to help craft its winning message, and now the Obama White House is doing the same in crafting policy. Michael Grunwald of Time magazine has the story:

It's no coincidence that Obama's budget proposes an ambitious program of automatic-enrollment pensions for workplaces that don't offer 401(k)s or that his stimulus package has billions of dollars for smart meters. Behavioral science — especially the burgeoning field of behavioral economics that has been popularized by Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Predictably Irrational, Nudge and Animal Spirits, which is the new must-read in Obamaworld — is already shaping dozens of Administration policies. "It really applies to all the big areas where we need change," says Obama budget director Peter Orszag.

Rise of the newspapers

The newspaper industry isn't crumbling everywhere. In Asia, it's booming. From Time:

Asia's media expansion has mirrored the fall of its dictators, as newspaper readers thrill at no longer getting just the day's propaganda. In Indonesia, the number of newspapers has increased from a few dozen when strongman Suharto was deposed in 1998 to roughly 800 today. The market is so buoyant that a new English-language paper, the Jakarta Globe, revved up its printing presses last November, just as several cash-strapped American papers were readying their final editions. "The Indonesian middle class is growing, and many households subscribe to two newspapers," says Ali Basyah Suryo, strategic adviser to the start-up Globe. "People like to hold the newspaper in their hands and even clip stories or save copies. It's seen as a valuable product."

-snip-

Even in China, where state censorship directives are dispensed daily to newspaper editors, a press revolution is under way.

Lawmakers all a-Twitter

Does knowing a plane crashed in the Hudson 15 minutes earlier than it's reported by the New York Times count as revolutionary? I'm not sure it does, but I am interested in the Twittering going on in the halls of Congress, as attention-starved lawmakers slip the surly bonds of their staff flaks and Tweet from inside closed door meetings and gatherings.

From Time magazine:

At least four GOP Representatives, for instance, Twittered in real time President Obama's meeting two weeks ago with their conference on Capitol Hill to discuss the stimulus plan, raising questions about the levels of privacy members can now expect from closed-door meetings.

That's a micro-blogging trend I can get behind.

The Sunlight Foundation even offers a running feed of Congressional Tweets (you can even download a widget for you website). After watching for a few minutes, one realizes how boring legislators can be. However, there are nuggets of news there - for instance, a couple lawmakers just Tweeted that the stimulus bill is unlikely to come up for a vote until Friday.

As Twittering becomes more common on Capitol Hill it's also likely to become more formalized (think about the campaign blogs), meaning they will be written by staffers to promote their boss's agenda. But for now, let's hold out hope that something interesting leaks out.

The children are the future

Few people love journalists - especially other journalists, and most especially publishers who see journalists as mini-black holes from which no profit can escape.

But lots of people love kids - especially their own, and even people without children feel a certain responsibility to make the world a better place for the generations to come.

So, it's perhaps a good thing that the professional journalism preservation crowd has begun to employ a generational appeal when trying to focus minds the Great Newspaper Quandary.

Don't just save journalism for journalists. Do it for the kids.

Walter Isaacson gave the generational-appeal argument a shot in last week's Time magazine to knock down the "information wants to be free" excuse for giving away journalism:

When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.

I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.

(As an aside, I'd argue that information is free. I never had to pay for it, save for a few copying costs charged by cheap-ass cities, in all my ten years in print. Yet every story I produced required time, consideration, experience and editing - none of which come for free. Indeed, one could argue that plants want to be free, too, but unless we learn to forage we have to pay farmers for cultivating the lettuce and the corn. If we want to change how the economy compensates people for their work, that's another matter.)

Steven Brill, in a post today on Romenesko, makes a point similar to Isaacson's, although with somebody else's child. Brill endowed a journalism institute at Yale and promises the students who enroll jobs at the end:

The implicit and now-traditional part of the deal is that if you do all this and become a Yale Journalism Scholar, I will also get you a job – which I do, placing them with alumni of The American Lawyer, Court TV and Brills Content (plus Yale alumni) all over the country and world.

The problem is that now I fear I am guiding them off a plank. As one parent put it to me last fall, "why are you luring my daughter into something that will never pay her loans when she could go to work for McKinsey?" I have been trying to construct an answer for her.

Appeals to owners' business sense have hit a wall. Corporate bosses are busy running amok in their mad plan to save newspapers by killing the newspaper business. Those who think they see the cliff ahead are riding herd toward it, hoping resurrection will be found on the rocky ground below.

Appeals to readership have limited success because most people don't know, or really care, how news is produced as long as it's there when they open the front door or turn on the Internet machine. Arguments for newsroom self-preservation fail because they sound arrogant and feed counter-arguments that aging journalists are simply afraid of the new, or are selfishly trying to earn a living, or are jealously guarding bandwidth from roaming hordes of citizen journalists.

Will a focus on the young people who hear the calling have more success? Will owners come to realize they have a responsibility not just to their bottom line but to generations to come?

Maybe, if the appeal echoes in the halls of our top newspapers and news organizations, which have to realize that their future sits in the offices of the crumbling community newspapers around the country.

Off a cliff

This New York Times graphic paints a grim picture of the economy. Over 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008, most of them shed in the last four months. The accompanying story is here.

What does it all mean? Justin Fox at Time gives a little background here on how to read an unemployment report.

Even magazines are doing it

Condé Nast, which owns the New Yorker and Vanity Fair among others, told its publishers to trim 5 percent of their staff and cut 5 percent from their budgets. Condé Nast's Portfolio will take an even bigger hit, slashing 20 percent of its staff and publisher only 10 times a year.

Not to be outdone, Time Inc. plans to cut 6 percent of its staff - about 600 jobs. The companies best known properties are Sports Illustrated, People, Time and Fortune. That's about 600 jobs. From the New York Times:

No magazines are scheduled to close, but some are likely to be severely cut back. Ann S. Moore, Time Inc.’s chairman and chief executive, was already planning an overhaul because of the upheavals in print media, but she was forced to speed up those efforts amid the financial crisis and looming recession.