Editor’s Picks is a new, prominent module on the right hand column of Google News. It showcases five links from two dozen of the biggest news brands — from MSNBC, to The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica to the Guardian, Marketwatch, Reuters and the L.A. Times (but alas, no Yahoo News) — and offers easy-to-use instructions on how other publishers can get their content, for free, in front of Google’s many eyeballs. Publishers simply pick the stories they want represented and send ‘em off; that’s the proxy part because no Google person need be involved in editorial decision-making.

It’s a simple idea, really, a box of links, as old as the web itself. What seems revolutionary about, as Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber points out is that it seems like a departure from the ancient (2002) Google News dogma: “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors…No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.”

It kind of seemed cute then, this algo approach to the world. In the subsequent era, though, in which human editorial judgment has been diminished in value, and its funding put in jeopardy, it now seems like an approach from another age.

Go back to 2002, briefly, and we can see this simplistic Machine vs. Man way of thinking. In Google’s approach, the purest taken around news aggregation, man (and woman) was seen as interloper, getting in the way of the ultimate wisdom of the crowd. Newspaper people, of course resented The Machine, its ascendance and its job-killing nature.

For at least a decade, we’ve lived in this rhetorical age of either/or. Machine, symbolized well by Google News, and Man, symbolized by The Man, making his editorial decisions the old-fashioned way, on whim, wit and the indefinable “news judgment,” without regard to what the reader data said.

Now, we’re emerging, slowly, from the silliness. Newsroom editors are starting to use reader data, some through the day ( “The Newsonomics of WaPo’s Reader Dashboard 1.0“) to check their instincts against what the crowd of readers is saying it wants to read. The new tools and metrics able to inform human editorial judgment are getting better everyday, and there’s a new round of companies offering their real-time metrics-creating products to news publishers. That’s one positive sign we’re emerging from Man or Machine Dark Ages thinking.

And, now, Google News has — ta-da! — allocated a box, separate and independent from (let the record show) its algo news results, never mind that the algorithms themselves have been created, and are constantly tweaked, by humans. (Calling Werner Heisbenberg.)

That’s a small indication that the Machine is responding. What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.

So, chalk up Google’s move as a marketplace move. Yes, it acknowledges that The Machine is not all we need, and that some nexus of Man and Machine, the algo of that combination still being written, will be a new order of the day.

The Economist is running a major series on the global news industry, well-worth checking into, excerpts available for non-subscribers. As part of that effort, I’ve been asked to contribute, among a half-dozen others (among them, Dan Gillmor, David Levy, Ying Chan, Larry Kilman), weekly thoughts. For week 4, the question, “Is transparency the new objectivity?”

Here’s my take, below, and a link to others’ takes:

LET us think of news reporting like a window. If a journalist is inside the window, creating news, she should always have a few core principles firmly fixed. Getting it right. Making it clear. Providing understanding. Doing the right thing, without fear or favour. These are boring concepts, and ones we have not been able to communicate well to our readers. Civics are not sexy.

Those kinds of qualities, the complex of them, are far more essential than simplistic objectivity. Objectivity did not make sense when it was taught to me in an otherwise fine University of Oregon School of Journalism graduate program in the 1970s, and it does not make sense now.

Werner Heisenberg proved scientifically what has nagged at most of us as endless arguments of objectivity and “subjectivity” erupted in newsrooms, public forums and now in the blogosphere: an observer watching an event necessarily changes the “objective” reality of the event. In other words, there is no single objective truth waiting to be discovered, like a chunk of real estate such as The New World. There are many interwoven truths that need to be pulled apart, examined and rewoven endlessly. That’s what we do as journalists—unknot and re-weave.

Now, let’s look at the view from outside the window. Some windows are opaque; many need cleaning from time to time. The newsroom windows that many of us have inherited come from a milky tradition; the public can kind of see through them, but only with great effort.

Transparency—aided and abetted by openness, interactivity and ability to instantly respond, correct and make better—is a gift (which sometimes seems like a curse) from the innovation of the web.

For journalists today it is a two-way window. On the creation end, no matter how much they crowdsource, use Twitter and engage with communities, core journalistic principles of fairness remain fundamental. On the viewing end, the new transparency helps us get it more correct, we would hope. Window washing, then, becomes the new order of the day

Here’s my take, below, and a link to others’ takes:

MEDIA isn’t what it used to be. We used to be able to think of TV news, radio news, and newspaper news distinctly. Digital media is rapidly blurring these long-established boundaries. We need to think about video, audio and text (not TV, radio and newsprint) because it is clear that the journalism-producing companies of 2015 must be proficient in producing all of them. That is a work in progress, as newspaper companies climb the curve of creating video and TV company personnel struggle with the daily art of writing for the page, not for broadcast.

More immediately, the diminishment of the print press is a great cause for concern. Why? It is not the words—the text, to which we can not be married—it is the thinking; the analysis; the time; the resources; the usually strong tradition of resisting advertiser pressure on what we write, and what we do not write. It is the willingness to take on investigations that take time and aren’t sexy. The press has a different, long-established culture to commercial television and radio, even as the business of TV and radio are changing quickly in the digital age. Changing technologies, business models and devices are one thing, harder-to-define culture is quite another, and the best of the press culture, updated for the digital age, must be maintained.

In any city, the number of print journalists far outnumbers broadcasters, even though in America the daily reach of TV news is fairly close to that of newspapers. Too often broadcasters follow up on (and feed off) work begun by print journalists. (At worst, it is “rip and read”, driven by ratings, with far less of a balance of public service and profit.) Without that daily work in print, the whole ecosystem of news spins out of balance, as it has already begun to do.

Finally, while print-based operations are flagging, commercial TV and radio broadcasters can only argue that they are doing better by comparison. Their businesses are more flat than growing, threatened also by changes in audience and advertising behaviour. They have no guaranteed future either. Diminishment of the old is the order of the day; more reason to get on with building the new, the right way.

It has seen a huge jump in people visiting its website. On Monday, a peak, in this amazing, still-unwinding tale, the Guardian saw nearly 4M uniques.  That compares with 2.8 million average day visitors in May, and that was an above-average month for the Guardian, when it landed 51 million uniques overall. (That larger worldwide unique reach is consistent of what we’re seeing among most big news brands: the ubiquity of access ushered in by the smartphone, and now the tablet, has exposed evern more people to the power of major national/global news producers in the UK and U.S.)

The spike is an almost 30% increase.

Normally, the Guardian divides its traffic into thirds, consistent with several other major UK news brands (“The newsonomics of the British invasion“). That’s a third in the UK, a third in the US (with five times the population) and a third in what we’d call ROW — rest of the world. This story, though, changed those dynamics, with 50% coming from UK, as national readers were rapt, following the developments, with 20% U.S. and 25%  ROW. Given the overall increase in visits, I’d read that more as intense UK interest than lesser U.S. interest.

It wasn’t just the blow-by-coverage, the live blog and running analysis that brought in readers. With such social tools as the Twitter monitor, watching comment as the Murdochs were grilled Tuesday in Parliament, the Guardian reinforced its central, ongoing role in the story. That feature alone, with a timeline and tag cloud, generated more than 1000 re-tweets and almost 500 Facebook shares, all helping contribute to that traffic spike.

Dear Ken Doctor, Today, we are delighted to announce extraordinary news that will greatly enhance your future in-flight experience on American Airlines. We have just finalized the largest aircraft order in aviation history. Beginning in 2013, American will acquire 460 new fuel-efficient aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, replacing and transforming our narrowbody fleet. In about five years, American expects to have the youngest, most modern and fuel-efficient fleet among U.S. airline peers.

Ah, transformation. Lovely word.

American intends to go from one of the oldest (our backs testify) fleets in the industry to the newest. What else might this remind us of?

Who’s got the oldest platform in the news business? Think Johannes Gutenberg. Think 1450. Yes, the printing press.

So, now let’s imagine that news publishers actually seize the opportunity of the day, the gift from the digital gods (and Mr. Jobs): the tablet. Erica Ogg’s GigaOm piece reminds how hugely the iPad is driving Apple’s business, and the unprecedented adoption of the device, and offers this astounding number: 222 million, the number of iOS devices “floating around in people’s pockets.” I’ve written about how tablets are the link to a successful new business model for publishers (“The Newsonomics of the Tablet as Missing Link“), and that appears to more true everyday. It’s a replacement product for print, for readers and for advertisers — and for revenue. We see fits and starts at making that replacement real, mainly among a handful of smart, national-to-global media companies, but most others see the tablet as just another problem, one other device to purpose content to, rather than what it is: a gift.

So imagine that headline: “Within 5 Years, We’ll Have the Youngest Fleet (of Tablets) in the Industry”. Maybe, knock a couple of years off of it. How soon will we see that e-mail in our inboxes, our walls and our Twitter readers?

Here’s my take, below, and a link to others’ takes:

PICTURE the journalist in the new social era. She is twitching, nervous system all lit up by the pings and arrows of outrageous (and occasionally insightful) comment traversing across her screen every waking moment. After being forbidden to participate in the social universe only a few years ago, her employers have now made getting involved part of the job description. Tweet, make new friends, “link in”, for godsakes.

At this early point in the socialisation of news, our nervous systems are most affected. Evolution is only beginning to change our brains and our hearts, and to build new muscle. We’re learning how to crowdsource, how to use audiences to find stories and angles, how to detect trending topics that really help us decide what to report.

We are learning that we are not islands of wisdom and knowledge. As the old gates rust, the old gate-keeping mentality is disintegrating with it. We were arbiters of what our readers could read. A monopoly metro was not just commercial (and why do you think those high ad rates are so hard to match online?), it operated as a community monopoly mindset. Editorial page writers called it agenda-setting, but it was really deciding what was best for everyone.

Now that world is fast fading into history. I think the best metaphor for what is replacing it is this notion of circles, most lately appropriated by Google. Digital life works best when it augments our long-honed human habits in positive ways. We’re used to consulting circles of close buddies, some associates, a few family members and sometimes a wide group. We know what to share with whom and what we’re likely to get back. We’re now trying to recreate that in the digital world. Technology is helping, but is still clumsy; witness the unending invitations we all get to join this or that group.

Inevitably, journalism is getting socialised. It is really a model of shared governance, borrowed from other professional cultures. Power is not as absolute, and can be better informed. Yes, readers are becoming their own editors, as I pointed out in the first law of Newsonomics. But the role of the editor and the passionate journalist, in leading (whatever the popular trend of the day) remains just as vital a part of this new sharing. The Guardian’s steadfast leadership in the News Corp scandal is one great reminder of that.

Sure, there are some publishers who recognise the business value of cheap user-generated content, and are ready to dispatch professional journalists to their earlier and earlier retirement. I think that is a losing play. I believe that readers expect us to lead, and listen, and lead.

As important as how journalism is changed by socialisation is how socialisation is changing the business of newspapers. We already know, in talking to numerous publishers, that the social/news link is valuable. Those who track incoming links (Google vs Facebook vs Twitter) will tell you that social links convert better. More registrations. More pages read. More likelihood of becoming a new reader of the site. That’s testament to the power of social recommendation—ancient, village-spawned word of mouth exponentially multiplied in our time. Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.

Here’s my take, below, and a link to others’ takes:

CALL IT Journalist Spring. A wild-eyed optimist just arriving for this stage of the news revolution might be overwhelmed by the unexpected flowering of journalism, news-gathering and news-writing, increasingly un-tethered from traditional ties.

Okay, our just-arrived optimist would have to have somehow missed Journalist Winter, an unprecedented winnowing of the news herd, with more than 10,000 jobs lost in newspapers in the U.S. and thousands more in the UK and Europe. That winter aside (for a moment) we’ve never seen such potential for the news reader, and, I believe, the global news business.

As in any revolution, what we have seen first is great disruption. Disruption inevitably means destruction, bad and good. For this exercise in optimism, let’s look at four surpassing positive impacts of this great news disruption:

The local newspaper editor is no longer the supreme arbiter of what his readers read. In the old print days, many regional newspaper editors (and in America, that has meant all the 1500+ newspapers, save three national ones) decided what their readers would read, defined what their readers would think was news. We were gatekeepers, holding all the keys. The internet took those keys away, defeated distance and opened hundreds of millions of readers’ eyes to other news organisations – from great to god-awful. So the rough justice of an evolving meritocracy has replaced the old print walled garden.

News is being broken out of its old, calcified molds. You could buy news one way, in a single package, a daily newspaper or a magazine. The container (newsprint largely) defined the news. Now, we’re at the beginning of the change. Kindle Singles first gave us the radical notion that a book didn’t need to be book-length; “50,000 words,” as my publisher told me with Newsonomics, not 40,000 or 60,000. Such innovations as tiny Atavist are helping redefine longer-form and investigative journalism into the length that stories or series need. Longer than a traditional newspaper story, shorter than a book, more flexible than a magazine feature, we’re starting to see various kinds of breakouts from the old form. The iPad itself will soon spawn many new news “products” as publishers figure out how to create niche news and feature content to fit the lives, and life stages, of their readers.

Storytelling can be mixed and matched: Journalism schools used to force students to choose: news/editorial (meaning print/newspapers), magazines or broadcast. That channeling meant that news and feature journalists learned one craft, some well. Today’s journalism students face radically new curricula emphasising multimedia storytelling, teaching the next generation of students to use all the tools available, picking the best to tell the particular story. Readers (especially those entering the 4G era through iPads) are the beneficiaries when the craft is done well, using the new techniques atop old-fashioned shoe leather reporting and taxing analysis.

National boundaries no longer define news: I recently chronicled (in time for American Independence Day from you-know-who) the British news invasion of America. The internet has not just taken down walls between cities, counties, regions, provinces, cantons and states. It has removed them from between countries. Most quality London dailies see only a third of their web visitors coming from Britain, an equal number (or more) from America and the other third from the rest of the world. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal see a quarter to a third of visitors coming from overseas. BBC.com has planted a strong flag in America, even as it is assailed at home. Language now defines what we can read more than nationality, and auto-translate programs will further obliterate national bounds in the next five years. That means more choice, more perspective—and maybe less provincialism for all of us.

Most of the Schadenrupe is subterranean, more spoken than written, with Robert Niles Online Journalism Review piece a clean argument for “rooting against News Corp.”  Comeuppance, a good, old English word befitting an English scandal, works as well.

On a business level, it’s almost Biblical, reaping what one has sown. In getting the better of his business partners over the years, and by making promises of editorial independence that he knew to be hollow, he’s survived and prospered by wily wit, abundant capital and the kind of sheer arrogance that can make both great and grotesque journalism, both of which he can now claim.

You play rough, you get hurt occasionally. You play really rough, heedlessly rough, leaving your own editorial arrogance unbounded, and you get run over. News Corp is now getting run over, as everyone from Scotland Yard to P.M. James David Cameron (correction; it’s that whole Fox/Avatar/Hackgate complex!) to worldwide media pile on. Piling on; that’s what media does, as any News Corp publication, even the Wall Street Journal, should know.

In its astounding editorial this morning,the Journal page showed it had failed to get the Edelman memo, as that p.r. company advises on repairing the damage to News Corp. Contrition (“We are sorry“) was the talking point of the day, not condescension and name-calling. While it glossed over a few of the apparently massive illegalities exposed, including pervasive police bribery leading to the forced resignation of the head of the Yard and top counter-terrorism chief. It also intentionally and disingenuously blurred the bright line between the influence all media exercise — “The idea that the BBC and the Guardian newspaper aren’t attempting to influence public affairs, and don’t skew their coverage to do so, can’t stand a day’s scrutiny.” – and the buying of influence and execution of crimes in its pursuit.

The Journal did make a number a fair points:

• The scandal shouldn’t be used as a blank check to regulate the free press.
• Others did some (phone hacking) as well, though, apparently, to nowhere close the extent.
• Politicians are not to be trusted.
• The Journal has gotten significant investment and stabilization, as other newspapers have cut more, because of News Corp’s coffers and Rupert’s drive.

All good points, but ones that have to made by others at this point, not as would-be deflection shields for the Journal’s parent company.

The Journal itself, with its publisher gone in a heartbeat, wouldn’t be hurt with a little contrition either. It is, unmistakeably, owned by News Corp and run by Rupert Murdoch. As such, it should distance itself from what anyone would think is wrongdoing, and use its space, to defend its own Journal standards – long-held standards (no matter what nasty things the Journal editorialists want to say of the Bancrofts, its former owners) that we hope have been strongly maintained in the three and a half years since News Corp bought the paper. With its own editorial oversight committee feeling compelled to issue a statement, however wan, yesterday, it’s time for the Journal to take off the gloves in this matter and give a hand to making sure its own readers’ trust is rewarded.

INN founders talk to each other regularly, by phone, online and at the occasional conference. Yet, they haven’t had a way to easily do things in common, to harness common technology, to do common business deals. A recent deal, executed by the Investigative News Network, promises to bring some order, a model perhaps, out of the motley chaos.

INN’s deal with Reuters is a test, and a significant one for both INN members and Reuters, which will begin distributing an INN-branded product, as an add-on to its wire, by the September meeting of the Online News Association.

“This is about understanding our commercial value,” INN’s CEO, Kevin Davis, told me. “Only the market can tell us how much it values our content.” The idea: piggyback on Reuters’ extensive marketing and sales operation to take high-grade, but  non-traditional branded content to many potential customers, from online-only sites, to newspapers to broadcasters. The payoffs for the 30-plus (of the current 52) INN members that have opted into the deal:

• Revenue, potentially, as Reuters and INN member sites, share licensing revenue;
• Brand awareness of these high-achieving, but nascent brands
• A few services provided by Reuters to those who opt in, proving them with some access to assets they otherwise couldn’t afford.

The deal also pushes INN’s tech abilities ahead. In using the Thomson Reuters-powered Calais, INN is able to draw its diverse content set together, and then subdivide by topics and by regions, at once making the sum of the parts greater than the individual pieces, and more marketable.

Davis says the deal includes full-text from those sites opting in, but that data and video are not included.

For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization“). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers those three promises to INN members. The big hope: the establishment of  a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.

For Reuters, which in the past year, has put together similar packaging deals with Examiner.com, The Wrap, SB Nation, CCTV and others, it’s a smart way to increase the content offered under its brand, but without the cost. It is learning the chops of next-age curatorial syndication, borrowing lessons from HuffPo, user-gen content and Demand Media.

What would have been an unlikely match several years ago — disparate online start-ups and a 164-year-old traditional news wire — has now taken on a logic of its own.

Give the Financial Times credit, of course. Surely, the Apple rethinking — it released new guidelines, reversing course, allowing publishers to offer differing prices and products inside and outside the Apple store — was underway before the FT grandly announced on Tuesday that it was embracing web apps, and downplaying iOS apps, as its product and market strategy. Certainly, though, the FT’s trailblazing move –in part under consideration at other major publishers — tipped the balance. What Apple has been risking with its our-way-or-the-Android-highway stubbornness has been in central place in mobile news and feature reading. With a 80% plus market share in tablets, and proof positive that even a great product, the iPhone, can be surpassed in the marketplace by an almost-as-good Android-powered set of products, it, in Peter Kafka’s words, blinked.

Far more important for Apple to maintain the iPad as the best, most complete way to do our digital reading. Readers don’t care about the tiffs between Apple and publishers; we all just want everything in one orderly place (nothing hurts like an incomplete Newsstand). Yes, Apple will go some potential revenue, by giving up the attempt to choke off 30% of publisher sub revenue ’til the end of time. Its gains, though, may be impressive:

• It still maintains huge market dominance with the iPad, as the onslaught of Android-, HP-, Microsoft- and RIM-powered products hit the market. With its ahead-of-the-pack product development, it may better retain that lead for the tablet, as it has been unable to do with smartphones.
• It can still gain substantial subscription revenue shares. As I suggested as this imbroglio began, taking 30% for a brand-new sub isn’t totally unreasonable. With now 225 million iTunes customers (most presumably still alive), it can offer impressive lead generation. What’s unreasonable is to take that 30% forever. As I pointed out in a post last night — and I know that Apple execs have become aware of this crack in their system — publishers can sell through iTunes and then market “All-Access” wider subscriptions directly to the people who are reading their products every day. So better for Apple to take some money up front, work out a fair business development relationship and move on.
• Still getting too little attention is the potential for Apple to make a huge amount of money with iAds. It controls the ad serving technology, which offers dazzling interactivity. I’ve heard that it has kept its iAds partnerships separate from its subscription store relationships. That makes little sense if Apple wants full-throated business deals with major publishers. It can, uniquely, offer new ad revenue and access to potential subscribers. Major publishers antes up huge, often-affluent target audiences. Why not make better deals?

For now, hubris has taken a short vacation. Let’s celebrate for a day, and then we’ll see what tumbles out of it.