contentious.com

"Any journalist who uses email for interviews should understand that using email gives the source the ability to prove that you asked a manipulative or opinionated question (if you did) or that you used an answer out of context (if you did, and if the question might provide some context for the answer that your story didn’t). If you and the source later have a dispute about what was asked and answered and what you promised or didn’t about the direction of the story, you would be in a ridiculous position claiming that the source can’t use your emails.

"What if, at the end of this email exchange, Bradshaw had told the journalist she couldn’t use his name? She would have argued (correctly) that he knew this was an interview and if he wanted anything to be confidential, he needed to say so up front. Journalists rarely grant confidentiality to a source after the interview. So how does a journalist claim after the fact that something was to be private?"

Paul Bradshaw ponders an issue I've been dealing with for years: If a journalist interviews you, are you both on the record? I say yes. That's been my policy for years.

"Backupify president Rob May has now announced that Backupify will back up all online accounts for free and with unlimited storage. The offer will be open until January 31, 2010. The move is an attempt to attract at lot more users. May noted that storage is cheap while customer acquisition is very expensive, and so he and the company want to give more users a chance to try out the full service."

"Paul Bradshaw asks: “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

"What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. Here, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either."

"Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too. Done poorly — and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl — a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments."

Kevin Sablan explains why topic pages are great "searchbait," and a useful tool to help improve traffic to news sites. This is something that could work on any kind of news site, including local or niche news.

"Unfortunately, e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users' reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers have explained to consumers in clear unequivocal language what data is being collected about them and why.

"As a first step towards addressing these problems, EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy. We've examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share."

If this works, it might allow me toread my Kindle books on other e-readers, so if I want to switch to another e-reader my current e-books aren't marooned on my Kindle. Makes me less tied to that device in the long run. If it works.

Could local/niche news sites emulate any part of the Examiner's formula to improve their findability?

"Whatever the journalism value, the Examiner is honing a formula of SEO friendly headlines and body copy, Social Media links, sheer article volume and technology approaches that ought to make news sites envious and more than a little embarrassed they haven't done the job as well with their original journalism."