Returns remain a problem for the book publishing industry, although changes to the book-selling landscape brought about by Internet retail, e-books and new distribution models seem destined to make the issue loom less large than it did when mega-bookstores ruled...

Digital book printing overall is experiencing double-digital growth. The recession, although unwelcome in all quarters, has provided a boost to digital book manufacturing as publishers take a harder look at their processes and cut back on inventory and waste. Since...

Variety.com
Tribune innovation chief Lee Abrams (left) says he's "trying to get away from Barbie and Ken sitting behind a desk chit-chatting with each other with their nice teeth." The format, in addition to getting rid of the anchor desk, doesn't use traditional reports from on-air correspondents, reports Cynthia Littleton.

Big news today, both for The Washington Post and for its newest hire: the multimedia journalist Mark S. Luckie. [Go ahead, get it out of your system: Insert your favorite "Luckie" pun -- "the WaPo gets Luckie," "WaPo's Luckie charms," etc. -- here.] On August 23, Luckie — the former multimedia producer for California Watch, the current proprietor of the 10,000 Words blog and Twitter feed, and, let’s not forget, the possessor of one of the most delightful profile pics on the Internet — will join the Post’s newsroom as its National Innovations Editor.

Journalists, if you’re looking for evidence of the professional power of the personal brand, this is it. Luckie embodies the kind of learn-it-yourself/do-it-yourself ethos that is increasingly common — and even essential — in digital journalism: gather the tools you need, build a community, follow your own interests and passions and quirks. And if you’re (sorry!) Luckie: good things will come. As the soon-to-be-WaPoer tweeted of today’s news: “So happy right now I can barely eat my French toast : D”

I chatted with Luckie this afternoon; though many of the specifics of his role are still TK, he clarified a bit of what his Important-Sounding New Title will actually entail: experimenting with tools that will allow for better production on the Post website; fostering conversations and online engagement among readers; devising new methods of crowdsourcing. Pretty much your basic “innovations editor” job description — with the important caveat, Luckie notes, that the job will have a particular focus on “finding out what works for the Post.”

In other words: his role won’t be simply to “find out what’s cool and what’s hot,” Luckie says, but to “actually develop a strategy that will help not only the Post, but also the readers. Which is a big thing that I care about.” To that end, experimentation will be key, he says — but experimentation that’s respectful of the Post’s readership. “I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, we should be doing this’ if it’s not something that would work for the Post audience.”

But, that said, Luckie will look to other companies — non-journalism outfits like HBO and even NASA, he says — for ideas that he can steal for the Post. “I think the Post recognizes, and is moving toward, more digital integration — not just having a website, but having a destination. And an interactive destination.”

And in terms of that other interactive destination — the 10,000 Words blog — will Luckie be maintaining it once he’s started his new, uh, post?

“Yes!” he says. “I’m going to keep it going. I can’t not blog. I was in the museum the other day — I was just there to relax — and I was like, ‘This would make a great blog post.’ So that was a signal to me that, yes, I need to keep the blog going.”

> Oxfeld posts Chelsea column that was spiked in 1997
> J-schools know they need to change their curriculum
> Judge OKs sale of Brown newspaper chain to insiders
> Breen creates "spill" cartoons out of BP's own crude
> Bloomberg circles the wagons on misleading spill poll
> Editor of Denver's 5280 says city/regionals doing fine
> Paul Miller Washington Reporting fellows named
> Did WSJ go easy on Wylys because they're GOPers?

Village Voice
Maybe blame was spread so thin that no heads could justifiably be lobbed off, writes Foster Kamer. Or maybe nobody was fired because the tip came from editor-in-chief Col Allan. || Earlier: New York Post wrong about murder suspect getting a new liver.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Walt Disney will rely on a cable-network executive to boost performance at its ABC broadcast outlet. The company has installed Paul Lee, who has led an overhaul at its ABC Family channel, to take the reins as head of entertainment for the network that airs "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy." Mr. Lee's ascension comes after the sudden departure of former ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson earlier this week

SAN DIEGO (AdAge.com) -- Financial marketers, brace yourselves: Your advertising leeway may soon be further curtailed, thanks to the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection created by the recently enacted financial-reform law.

Nieman Journalism Lab
Megan Garber would like to see someone take the PolitiFact model and apply it to following up on facts, rather than checking them.

TheAtlantic.com | ProPublica.org
It's "the best use of Tumblr I've seen yet," writes Alex Madrigal. He points out five things that make ProPublica's new site great.

New York Observer
"I love funny writing, but I'm sick of snark," says Nick Catucci, who is leaving nymag.com to become Rolling Stone online editor. "Rollingstone.com has tremendous potential, and new ideas for shaping the coverage come to me constantly."

Los Angeles Times

CNN "We have a loyal audience," says "This Week" executive producer Ian Cameron. "But we brought in an admired anchor to do things a little bit differently." That anchor -- Christiane Amanpour -- tells Geraldine Baum: "I'm not touting being an outsider, but I'm certainly not pretending I'm not."

In his assessment of the journalistic implications of the WikiLeaked Afghanistan War Logs earlier this week, Jay Rosen made a provocative prediction:

Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect — not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget…. The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works…and often fails to work?

It’s early still, of course, but it’s all too likely that Rosen’s forecast — the leaked documents, having exploded, dissolving into a system ill-equipped to deal with them — will prove accurate. I hope we’ll be wrong. In the meantime, though, it’s worth adding another layer to Rosen’s analysis: the role of journalists themselves in the leaked documents’ framing and filtering. If, indeed, the massive tree that is WikiLeaks has fallen in an empty forest, that will be so not only because of the dynamic between public opinion and political elites who often evade it; it will also be because of the dynamic between public opinion and those who shape it. It will be because of assumptions (sometimes outdated assumptions) journalists make about their stories’ movement through, and life within, the world. The real challenge we face isn’t an empty forest; it’s a forest so full — so blooming with growth, so booming with noise — that we forget what a toppling tree sounds like in the first place.

Publication, publicity

It used to be that print and broadcast culture, in general, offered journalists a contained — which is to say, automatic — audience for their work. When you have subscribers and regular viewers, their loyalty insured by the narrowness of the media marketplace, you have the luxury of ignoring, essentially, the distribution side of journalism. The corollary being that you also have the luxury of assuming that your journalism, once published, will effect change in the world. Automatically.

And investigative journalism, in particular, whether conducted by Bly or Bernstein or Bogdanich, generally operated under the sunshine-as-Lysol theory of distribution: outrageous discoveries lead to outraged publics lead to chastened power brokers lead to social change. (For more on that, give a listen to the most recent Rebooting the News podcast.) Journalism was a lever of democracy; publication was publicity, and thus, as well, the end of an outlet’s commitment to its coverage. The matter of distribution, of a big story’s movement through the culture, wasn’t generally for journalists to address.

Which was a matter of practicality, sure — as a group, reporters are necessarily obsessed with newness, and have always been stalked by The Next Story — but also one of design. There’s a fine line, the thinking went, between amplification of a story and advocacy of it; the don’t-shoot-the-messenger rhetoric of institutional newsgathering holds up only so long as the messengers in question maintain the appropriate distance from the news they’re delivering. And one way to maintain that distance was a structured separation from stories via a framework of narrative containment. Produce, publish, move on.

The web, though, to repeat its ur-observation, is changing all that. Digital platforms — blogs, most explicitly, but also digital journalism vehicles as a collective — have introduced a more iterative form of storytelling that subtly challenges print and broadcast assumptions of conceptual confinement. For journalists like Josh Marshall and Glenn Greenwald and other modern-day muckrakers, to be a journalist is also, implicitly, to be an advocate. And, so, focusing on the follow-up aspect of journalism — not just starting fires, but keeping them alive — has been foundational to their work. Increasingly, in the digital media economy, good journalists find stories. The better ones keep them going. The best keep them burning.

And yet, to return to the WikiLeaks question, that ethos of continuity hasn’t generally caught on in the culture more broadly — among journalists or their audiences. And one reason for that is the matter of momentum, the editorial challenge of maintaining reader interest in a given subject over a long period of time. Political issues caught in congressional inertias, military campaigns that stretch from months to years, social issues that hide in plain sight — their temporality itself becomes a problem to be solved. There’s a reason why, to take the most infamous example, political campaigns are so often indistinguishable from an episode of “Toddlers and Tiaras“: campaigns being year-long affairs (longer now, actually: Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are probably digging into Maid-Rite loose-meats as I type), journalists often focus on their trivialities/conflicts/etc. not necessarily because they think that focus leads to good journalism, but because they think, probably correctly, that it sustains their audiences’ attention as election season slogs on.

Which is all to say — and not to put too expansive a point on it, but — time itself poses a challenge to the traditional notion of “the story.” Continuity and containment aren’t logical companions; stories end, but the world they cover goes on. The platform is ill-suited to the project.

Followupstories.org?

While addressing that problem head-on is no easy task — it’s both systemic and cultural, and thus extra-difficult to solve — I’d like to end with a thought experiment (albeit a small, tentative, just-thinking-out-loud one). What if we had an outlet dedicated to continuity journalism — a news organization whose sole purpose was to follow up on stories whose sheer magnitude precludes them from ongoing treatment by our existing media outlets? What if we took the PolitiFact model — a niche outfit dedicated not to a particular topic or region, but to a particular practice — and applied it to following up on facts, rather than checking them? What if we had an outlet dedicated to reporting, aggregating, and analyzing stories that deserve our sustained attention — a team of reporters and researchers and analysts and engagement experts whose entire professional existence is focused on keeping those deserving stories alive in the world?

Sure, you could say, bloggers both professional and amateur already do that kind of follow-up work; legacy news outlets themselves do, too. But: they don’t do it often enough, or systematically enough. (That’s a big reason why it’s so easy to forget that war still rages in Iraq, that 12.6 percent of Americans live below the poverty line, etc.) They often lack incentive to, say, localize a story like the War Logs for their readers. Or to contextualize it. Or to, in general, continue its existence. An independent outlet — and, hey, this being a thought experiment, “independent outlet” could also include a dedicated blog on a legacy outlet’s website — wouldn’t prevent other news shops from doing follow-up work on their own stories or anyone else’s, just as PolitiFact’s presence doesn’t preclude other outlets from engaging in fact-checking. A standalone shop would, however, serve as a kind of social safety net — an insurance policy against apathy.

As Lab contributor C.W. Anderson remarked on Monday: “I wonder what it would take for a story like the ‘War Logs’ bombshell to stick around in the public mind long enough for it to mean something.”

I do, too. I’d love to find out.

Photo of U.S. soldiers in Pana, Afghanistan, by the U.S. Army. Photo of Jay Rosen by Joi Ito. Both used under a Creative Commons license.

Statement from NPR

NPR would like to make it clear that we are not involved in any way in the petitions now circulating that encourage the White House Correspondents Association to select NPR for the lead White House correspondent seat. The first petition was put forward by CREDO Action, an advocacy site that is managed by Working Assets. MoveOn.org has now joined CREDO and is also promoting a petition. NPR was not consulted about either petition and we learned about them via Facebook and e-mail. We have no position on the petitions, and no comment on the other media organizations that are competing for the seat. NPR made its case directly to the White House Correspondents Association by submitting a letter of interest, which is the standard protocol and a process we respect. Our request for consideration is based on NPRs long record of high-quality reporting on the White House, our commitment to covering government and politics, as well as our large audience (over 27 million listeners to NPR programming on member stations and over 11 million unique visitors every month via NPR.org), and our reach across the U.S. and beyond.

Last week I published this: "How 'Inception' Became the New World Cup (and/or Justin Bieber)." But guess what? Bieber himself is back, baby!

AP - In a July 29 story about a bankruptcy court proceeding involving Brown Publishing Co., two Ohio newspapers being bought by the Delphos Herald Inc. were misidentified. The Ada Herald is a weekly newspaper, not a daily, and the name of the daily newspaper in Van Wert is the Van Wert Times-Bulletin, not the Van Wert Times.

AP - A Montana man who recently published a book about surviving two attacks by grizzly bears has died of natural causes. Jim Cole was 60.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- You can plug in and charge the new Chevy Volt from General Motors Co. You can plug in and charge the new Leaf from Nissan Motor Co. But the similarities end there, and consumers can expect the advertising to play up the differences.

Slate Group memo regarding the demise of The Big Money

We regret having to share the news that we're ceasing publication of The Big Money as of today. This has been a difficult decision, in part because so many aspects of the project have worked as we hoped. Jim Ledbetter and his team have done a first-rate job on the magazine itself, cultivating a talented crew of young writers, coming up with terrific features like Recessionary Road and The Facebook 50, and responding with speed and style to business news. In his short time as Publisher, Brendan Monaghan has broken new ground for the Slate Group as a whole, most importantly by masterminding our recent Untethered Conference.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the site is not pointed toward profitability on a fast enough timetable. We've struggled to grow the sites traffic to carry enough ad inventory to run a profitable business. There are some specific reasons for this slow growth which relate primarily to the category rather than to the quality of the magazine. Our timing also could have been better. TBM launched the week of the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, and its existence has coincided with a deep trough in advertising market for business-oriented publications.

The decision to close TBM as a separate destination doesn't signal a move away from business as a category or a subject. To the contrary, we expect Slate's engagement with business to get much stronger as a result of folding in aspects of what the separate site has been doing. We are not planning to keep the separate TBM brand alive -- basically because we think "Slate Business" has more power in the marketplace. Existing TBM pages and links will stay live, and The TBM URL will redirect to a Slate Business landing page, which will include new Slate Business content plus highlights from the TBM archive. We have not yet figured out all of the details, but we are planning to merge some of TBM's most successful features into Slate.

Most importantly, Jim and Brendan are both staying on with the Slate Group. After dealing as quickly as possible with some transition issues, Jim is going to become a full-time, staff business writer for Slate. He's excited about this prospect, as is David. Brendan is going to take the lead in developing alternative revenue streams and partnerships as VP of Business Development. Our expectation is that "Untethered" will become a Slate-sponsored event, and that Brendan and Jim will continue to work together on the program and marketing of it. We hope to do other business/technology conferences as well.

The Slate Group had a strong first half (revenue for the first six months is up 26% over 2009) and is very much on track with our objectives. Slate, Foreign Policy, and The Root are all doing well. Slate.fr, in which we are partners, is going great guns. Our overall strategy is unchanged. We remain interested in launching sites and projects and are always available to hear your ideas for new ones. Part of being a quasi start-up means being unsentimental about sites we like that aren't working as businesses and quickly evolving our model in response to a fast-moving marketplace. We are experimenters. This was a great experiment, but not every experiment results in a breakthrough.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank The Big Money staff for all the hard work they've done over the past two years. Jim, Brendan, Elinor, Chad, and Caitlin have all shown themselves to be stars and should close the books on the site proud of the work that they did for TBM.

Please pass along press queries to us or Alissa Neil. And let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Jacob [Weisberg] and John [Alderman]

Chicago Tribune
Tribune Co. is proposing to pay severances to its top 43 executives if they're asked by a new board to leave when the company emerges from bankruptcy. The package amounts to 2.5 times salary and bonus for CEO Randy Michaels; 2.25 times salary and bonus for COO Gerry Spector; and 1.75 times salary and bonus for Chicago Tribune publisher Tony Hunter and Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein. Thirty-two others would get 1.5 times salary and 18 months of benefits.