The 2.D’oh! Roundup: Oldpapers, Winning Money and McCain in Plain View

The Print ‘n’ Read Feature

This week’s Print ‘n’ Read feature–my recommendation for an online article so worthy that you might actually want to print it out and read it offline–is rich with irony. It’s a 74-page PDF about the future of journalism–as seen by the people who are running newspapers.

It’s tempting to dismiss this report, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, with a consider-the-source wave. But the report [“The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America’s Daily Newspapers?”] is based on a thoroughgoing study based on face-to-face interviews and legit-survey-style questionnaires sent to newspaper leaders.

It’s at least an intellectually honest attempt by journalists to assess what’s happening to them. As a result, it’s less idiotically defiant and self-serving than many similar efforts. The people surveyed seemed downright chastened.

I’ll spare you the details, but it’s full of stories of optimism and ambition and furious attempts at innovation, all against the backdrop of a breathtaking descent into financial ruin.

My favorite oddball gem, so sweet and earnest and foolish you just want to pinch the cheek of whoever thought of it and send ’em to bed: Some unidentified newspaper tried to sell copies of its important investigative report on Amazon.com.

How to Thrive in a Down Economy, Part LCVII

I love playing with ComScore’s news releases. Everybody pays attention to the top of the list to see how the Big Dogs are doing. I like scouring for other details.

Like this latest, from a list of Top 10 gainers over the last month. With a 30-day rise in traffic of 409 percent, the entry at the top is. . .GSN.com, home of the Game Show Network.

Why the spike of such an inane property? Always hard to tell. But it’s worth noting that the economy’s lousy, and GSN gives out cash prizes. And its latest sweepstakes? You can win a $500 gas card.

Dataviz of the Week: Partisanship in Plain View

On the impossibly-cool datavisualization site Visual Complexity I found this gem, Voting Patterns Among U.S. Senators, which depicts voting relationships among U.S. Senators in 2007. It was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland and published this spring.

The graphic demonstrates that Democrats tended to vote as a herd in 2007. The GOP? Not so much.

And why is the senior Senator from Arizona hanging out in the middle, unaffiliated, with Sen. Sam Brownback? He was campaigning for President and didn’t vote much.

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