MediaNews is adding comments to its newspaper articles, but they're outsourced to Topix.net, which is not only providing technology but community management.

Ben Compaine cites an economist's study of the Washington Post that provides "another data point" in the online paid-content discussion:

For awhile part of the Sunday morning newspaper-reading ritual at my house has been to dig through the "guy toy" inserts from Lowe's, Home Depot, CompUSA and Best Buy.

Three of those companies are doing pretty well (in fact, Home Depot just opened another store within walking distance of my house). One is doing very poorly: CompUSA, which announced Friday that it's throwing in the towel and will close its stores after the holiday sales.

Oddly enough, there's a lesson in this for newspapers.

Journalism organizations are factories.

I don't mean the manufacturing and distribution process of newspapers (printing), but rather the way news is handled. It's shuttled along a Henry Ford assembly line through reporter through copy desk (subeditors to you Brits), handled by a series of specialists, processed by automated machinery, combined, reorganized and shot out the door as a unitary product, whether it's print or online.

NPR's David Folkenflick reported Friday on the continuing campaign to change basic cable TV from flat-rate to "a la carte" pricing. He explained Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's efforts as an attempt to impose conservative "family values" restrictions on cable, removing from basic services anything that might offend.

A post by Mike Smith at the Readership Institute includes a remark that "Web use of news sites peaks at noon, creating a perfect bell curve." This prompted me to take a look at a typical weekday's composite daily usage curve for Morris websites, which I hadn't done in awhile. It looks like this:

Absolutist declarations of the form "______ is dead" are a cheap way to get links, and universally they are nonsense. Steve Boriss' declaration that "citizen journalism is dead" and "expert journalism is the future" is an example. He incorrectly cites Mark Potts' Backfence and Steve Outing's shutdown of the Enthusiast Group as examples.