From the website: In coedition with La Stampa we launched yesterday a new ebook series: the first title, Viaggio nella grande crisi, is a collection of eight original articles from some of the best La Stampa contributors - including Mario Calabresi, La Stampa's director, and Gianni Riotta - to explain the economic crisis we currently live in. The main idea is to move in-depth analysis articles into a more flexible reading environment with a different reading experience compared to the paper one. We think this is a challenge to be embraced with new territory to explore and lots of...

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation today, authors Tim Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach discussed their new book, Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload. The thesis of the book seems to be that the more information we’re bombarded with by the Internet, the more adept we need to become at assessing the credibility of sources. We should develop the same sorts of skills editors and reporters use to separate fact from spin. The authors talk about the inherent bias in a number of news sources these days that build their audience and income by...

Another news outlet has decided to sell short pieces on current events as standalone ebooks, reports paidContent. UK newspaper The Guardian has launched Guardian Shorts as , and the first title is Phone Hacking: How the Guardian broke the story. Although the series is Kindle only for now, the first title isn't listed as a Kindle Single but rather a standard Kindle title. The Guardian says that it will release "up to several" new titles each month depending on what's going on in the world, at lengths of 5,000-30,000 words and priced from £1.99 to £3.99 depending in part on...

From Stanford University's Rural West Initiative: This visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. The data comes from the Library of Congress' "Chronicling America" project, which maintains a regularly updated directory of newspapers. ...

Apple released its new operating system update, Lion, via the Apple Store this morning, which makes this an exciting day for a certain swath of geeks. How exciting? Well, Ars Technica has just published John Siracusa's 27,000-word review of the new OS, covering everything from iOS-inspired interface changes to continuous document saving to how background processes are handled. It's one of the most comprehensive third-party overviews you'll find, and it's available for free in a 19-screen article on Ars' website. But what's interesting is the website also offers it as a $5 ebook on Amazon.com, or you can pay a $50...

Eoin Purcell points us to a new BBC audio report on publishing, pricing, and piracy. "Some great voices and opinions there," she writes. Here's the BBC's own description. Despite £3bn being spent on books in the UK last year, a dark digital cloud of uncertainty still hangs over the world of publishing. In the second of his reports into the impact of technology on the world of books, arts editor Will Gompertz looks at what the digital revolution means for the publishing business. Listen to the report here. (Flash required.)...

The Nieman Journalism Lab has just announced Encyclo, an “encyclopedia of the future of news.” With 184 entries at launch, the encyclopedia provides background on the various entities and people who are driving innovation in news publishing and e-publishing. There are a few entries on e-book matters (most notably Apple and Amazon) as they touch on journalism, as well. Although Encyclo has forms for submitting feedback, it seems to be meant strictly as a curated resource, rather than fully contributor-sourced like a wiki. This is understandable in a resource that is intended to be of full professional quality....

[Nieman] Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers. You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, so why shouldn’t it fit you? If newspapers were in the restaurant business,...

That's the title of an article by Tim Carmody at the Nieman Journalism Lab.  Here's the beginning: In the brief moment between last week’s unveiling of The New York Times’s new smartphone- and tablet-centered subscription plans and today’s launch of Amazon’s Android Appstore, it’s worth taking a short historical detour, if only to see how differently the world looks today from the time, not long ago, when the Kindle was supposed to be a big factor in getting people to pay for journalism. First, an observation: the NYT’s new digital subscription plans don’t apply to...

Publishing analyst Mike Shatzkin, back from Digital Book World, has an interesting piece on his blog looking at the effect that non-publishers getting into the publishing business could have other publishers. He talks about a discussion he had with a distinctly non-tech-savvy publisher of renown who was now running his own smaller operation. This publisher felt that the advances in reducing the cost of small-scale publishing should make it that much easier for him to publish books. He wasn’t concerned by all the self-published stuff he would be competing with, since 99% of it would be dreck, but as...

I’m a journalist, and a member of the journalists union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (of which the Australian Journalists Association, the AJA, forms part). All members receive a monthly magazine with news and in-depth articles about the industry, but this year is special – it’s 100 years since a wily bunch of Aussie scribblers formed the AJA. So, a century into Australian journalism proper, the union has published a report of the state of the industry, and where it expects the future to lay. (SPOILER: online). The report is called Life in the Clickstream II (a similar report came out two years ago),...

Michael Humphrey has an interesting blog post on Forbes where he posits the use of video games as a method of conveying current news and events. He points to the CEO of Activision comparing the Call of Duty franchise to Facebook, pointing out that media is evolving, and the latest CoD game has already racked up 600 million hours of play time in just six weeks. And he talks about a new book called Newsgames: Journalism at Play that looks at the idea of combining gaming and journalism. While Humphrey is a bit critical of the way the book...