Tired of writing great content online, only to have a mainstream site or blog pick it up, and bury the link back to your own website so that you’re essentially getting ripped off in terms of traffic? Well, other people are tired of this trend as well. Whether you’re a newspaper with a small distribution & website, or a personal blog, you should take interest in this proposed committee. (via NYTimes’ David Carr)

“As words and articles became digitized over the last 15 years, they began to float, there for the plucking and replication elsewhere. Words like “curation” and “aggregation” became the language of the realm, sometimes used as substitutes for describing the actual creation of content. What had once been a craft was rapidly becoming a task. Traditional media organizations watched as others kidnapped their work, not only taking away content but, more and more, taking the audiences with them.

Practitioners of the new order heard the complaints and suggested that mainstream media needed to quit whining and start competing in a changed world, where what’s yours may not be yours anymore if others find a better way to package it. (read more here)“

In a desperate, calculated move, Rupert Murdoch has caved into the phone-hacking-scandal fallout further today by shutting News of The World, and they issued a statement:

“The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account,” the statement said, “but it failed when it came to itself.”

The statement acknowledged the gravity of allegations that the paper hacked into the cellphones of celebrities, politicians and even crime and military combat victims in its pursuit of scoops.

Earlier this week, Britain was rocked by reports that a private investigator hired by the tabloid had illegally accessed – and deleted – voicemail messages on the phone of a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and later found murdered. Now we can look forward into an investigation and the liability of the newspaper management. More here…

Jane Scott, the legendary journalist who covered four decades of rock ‘n’ roll for The Plain Dealer, died early Monday after a long illness. She was 92. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Busch Funeral Home of Fairview Park. A memorial service will be held at a later date in Cleveland.

Her byline appeared in the newspaper thousands of times, above music features, concert reviews and her long-running “What’s Happening” column in Friday! magazine.

More here…

The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for revealing that politicians in a small, working-class California city were paying themselves exorbitant salaries. But for the first time in the Pulitzers’ 95-year history, no award was given in the category of breaking news — the bread and butter of daily journalism.

In a year when the big stories included the devastating earthquake in Haiti and the Gulf oil spill, the Pulitzer Board didn’t like the entries in the breaking news category enough to honor any of them with the most prestigious award in journalism.

The Los Angeles Times won for its series revealing that politicians in Bell, Calif., were drawing salaries well into six figures. The newspaper’s reporting that officials in the struggling city of 37,000 people were raising property taxes and other fees in part to cover the huge salaries led to arrests and the ouster of some of Bell’s top officials. Read more here…

Courtesy of the NY Times:

“Bob Herbert, a columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page, is leaving the paper after nearly 20 years. Mr. Herbert’s resignation was announced in a memo to Times staff members on Friday. His last column will appear in the paper on Saturday. Mr. Herbert, who started his Times column in 1993, was known for his combative style, blunt language and progressive politics. In a message accompanying the announcement, Mr. Herbert, who is 66, said he was eager to move on to a new form of writing.

“The deadlines and demands were a useful discipline, but for some time now I have grown eager to move beyond the constriction of the column format, with its rigid 800-word limit, in favor of broader and more versatile efforts,” he said. “So I am leaving The New York Times and the rewards and rigors of daily journalism with the intent of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves on the wrong side of power.”

Read more here…

Stunning data visualizations, and practical hands-on software training along with dozens of story ideas for any news organization will make IRE’s 2011 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference a must-attend for data-driven journalists.

Prepare for the Census, learn the latest tools for handling data and gain insight into how journalists who got advance access to the Wikileaks data trove sifted for stories. Whether you’re a CAR beginner or advanced computer programmer, this year’s CAR conference Feb. 24-27 in Raleigh, N.C., will teach the skills you need to advance your career, with our widest range of speakers yet. More info here…

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has chosen the Mediterranean island of Malta to host the 2011 World Newspaper Advertising Conference, where publishers and advertising directors from around the world will gather on the 24th and 25th of February.

With newspaper companies emerging from a severe advertising downturn, the annual event will focus on ideas and strategies for increasing revenues in the near term. The conference will bring together some of the world’s most innovative newspaper advertising executives and will provide market insight and strategies for print advertising, cross-media advertising and for increasing advertising department efficiency. In addition to strategies and case studies from publishers, the conference will feature presentations from agencies and advertisers on what they expect media to deliver in today’s advertising market.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.

Learn more about WAN-IFRA at www.wan-ifra.org…

(By Dylan Stableford – The Wrap: The newspaper industry, devastated during the recession, had another bad year in 2010. Overall, circulation for newspapers in the U.S. declined 5 percent during the six months ended Sept. 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Fas-Fax, the industry’s semi-annual scorecard. Just one American newspaper — the Wall Street Journal — managed to increase its circulation during that period — up 1.82 percent. Some papers, like the San Francisco Chronicle (11.2 percent), saw its paid circulation take a double-digit tumble.

From a Great NPR Piece
“So you might have heard a story yesterday about a little magazine called Cooks Source. Up until then, you might never have heard of Cooks Source. But maybe you’ve heard of “the Internet.” Cooks Source now undoubtedly wishes it never had.”

“On Wednesday evening, a blogger named Monica Gaudio posted a story in which she told of learning that Cooks Source had taken a piece she wrote about apple pie — specifically this one — and simply copied it into the magazine. As you can see from the scanned page (Gawker, for instance, has it), the magazine credited Gaudio with a byline. It didn’t pretend to have come up with her story itself; it just seemed to believe it could copy her story and run it in a free, ad-supported (and therefore revenue-generating) magazine without telling her, let alone compensating her.”…Gawker did a great piece as well…

Randy Michaels, Tribune Co.’s embattled chief executive, has decided to resign his post at the Chicago-based media company and intends to leave the company before the end of the week, sources close to the situation said.

He will be replaced by a four-member office of the president. Sources said the four would be Eddy Hartenstein, president and publisher of the Los Angeles Times; Tony Hunter, president and publisher of the Chicago Tribune Media Group; Nils Larsen, Tribune Co.’s chief investment officer; and Don Liebentritt, chief restructuring officer.

The development comes after weeks of turmoil at the bankrupt company, brought on by assertions that Michaels and his management team displayed boorish behavior and fostered a sexist, hostile work environment. Even as the Tribune Co. board met Tuesday to discuss Michaels’ fate in light of the crisis, new complaints by current and former employees were emerging.

Read more here, and an explosive Gawker piece on Michaels’ upcoming resignation here…