"Daily print circulation has dropped from a peak of 62 million two decades ago to around 49 million, and online readership has risen faster, to almost 75 million Americans and 3.7 billion page views in January, according to Nielsen Online.

But no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue, a fact that may presage an era of news organizations that are smaller, weaker and less able to fulfill their traditional function as the nation’s watchdog."

Media Cloud is a massive data set of news — compiled from newspapers, other established news organizations, and blogs — and a set of tools for analyzing those data. Some of the kinds of questions Media Cloud could eventually help answer:

— How do specific stories evolve over time? What path do they take when they travel among blogs, newspapers, cable TV, or other sources?
— What specific story topics won’t you hear about in [News Source X], at least compared to its competitors?
— When [News Source Y] writes about Sarah Palin [or Pakistan, or school vouchers], what’s the context of their discussion? What are the words and phrases they surround that topic with?

" Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share."

"There are plenty of people to share the blame for the collapse of the nation's financial system. Greedy speculators, mortgage executives and banking chiefs; pliant credit rating agencies; and absentee government regulators come to mind.

But what about the self-described watchdogs in the media? As a consistent consumer of newspapers and TV news, and a frequent reader of magazines, I didn't have much sense that the nation's financial system could implode until it was starting to do so.

"I get this from friends, family, you know, 'How come you guys didn't see this coming?' " said Peter Coy, economics editor for BusinessWeek magazine. "How come all the journalists missed this big story?"

His answer: They didn't."

(GUESS WHAT: progressive media did.)