One of the site engagement metrics that I monitor is pages per visitor.

It's a number that's under a lot of downward pressure as social media, especially Facebook, becomes more dominant in the user experience.

A column by Aurora Sentinel editor Dave Perry is making the rounds on Facebook, I think primarily because the weekly paper is arguing that Denver is better off with a strong daily newspaper than without one, and that's something journalists like to hear. I happen to agree, but I gagged when I got to the part of the article that describes the impact of the Internet:

Most of you really don’t have a clue what’s happened.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Bluffton Today, a hyperlocal newspaper whose evolution reflects many of the major forces operating on journalism in this country.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis is moving to an office tower down the street. In the process, staff archaeologists unearthed a video of the 1995 unveiling of Star Tribune Online to the staff. Jamie Hutt posted it on YouTube. It's an hour long, which is more of watching myself than I can stand, but Adrian Holovaty made it through and pointed me to this:

A couple of recent (re)launches that address the continuing growth of mobile Internet usage:

Business in Savannah got a shiny new responsive design last month. Chris White wrote about it. The BiS brand is used for the daily business coverage of the Savannah Morning News as well as a separate monthly business magazine.

What happens when your job is automated out of existence? "Knowledge workers" have imagined themselves immune, but machine learning changes everything. It is great that technology lifts the yoke of labor from humanity. It's not so great when humanity is left with nothing. In our economic system, the benefits of such change do not accrue to the freed labor. We may need to rethink that.

It is the Fourth of July, Independence Day in the United States, a day when we dress up in red/white/blue outfits, eat hot dogs and barbecue, and set off small explosives. It also is a day for pontificating about what it is to be an American. We don't really need a special day for that, as we now are in a state of continuous political campaigning and under a barrage of propaganda from our "deregulated" broadcasting industry.