Monday squibs

A few things for your reading pleasure:

• ‘Cincy Enquirer’ To Drop Classifieds 2 Days. The latest money-saving moves from a big American daily, also includes shrinking the size of the pages and combining sections.
• The Internet Is Bad For The Truth. This is an odd, not-too-believable argument: the internet is bad for the truth because it allows for too many voices, not the handful that use to drive “the very process by which we form opinion, or taste, or ultimately a sense of the truth.”
• Why journalists need to stop playing catch-up, start focusing on the next news model. A cogent argument from Daniel Victor for journalists to take hold of the task of driving the development of new models for news.
• Multimedia Projects You May Have Missed in 2008. I’ll be spending at least part of my day working my way through this list, from Regina McCombs at Poynter. Note to students: expect to see some of these when classes resumes next week.
• Neiman Reports – Special edition on the future of digital journalism. I’m not sure when I’ll have time to read all 39 articles in the Neiman Report, so Cindy Royal’s recap of some of the highlights is invaluable.
• Not Just Another Column About Blogging. Jack Shafer, at Slate. Includes this: “If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.” Well worth the read.
• Looking back at the state newspaper multimedia in 2008. A very personal look back from Colin Mulvany, who continues to find hope amid the bad news afflicting newspapers.
• Pew: young people signal an online news future. I’m with Terry Heaton on his reading of the recent Pew survey on news sources. The truly significant bit isn’t that more people are getting their news from the internet than from printed newspapers (for the first time ever) but that as many 18-29 are getting their news from the ‘net as they are from TV. Related: Doug Fisher’s Inernet as news ‘source’?
• Media firms increasingly charged with copyright violations. Robert Picard wants media organizations to sit down and reach agreements on revenue distribution for online use of intellectual property. The alternative, he writes, is government stepping in with more regulation.