“Hiding Online Footprints,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Angwin and Spencer Ante lays out how Mozilla inserted anti-tracking cookie killers into its latest browser, and then removed them. Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, had plausible explanations for the moves, but the point of this web on web journalism is that we’re getting to see inside the cookie war, in-depth. The reporting is part of the “What They Know” series done by Angwin, Emily Steel, Jennifer Valentino-Devries, Jessica Vascellaro, Steve Stecklow, Tom McGinty and others. It’s a must-read primer for anyone in the digital business — and Pulitzer bait for explanatory reporting — exploring the swift-moving world of digital tracking, and its implications.

Kudos to Bob Moon of Marketplace for challenging conventional wisdom, succintly.

How many times have you heard that a real recovery is up to us consumers, who now make up “70% of the economy.” Forget the old manufacturing/industrial complex, focus on the consumers, whose wallets are semi-sealed, we’ve been told for last two years.

In a report this week, Moon talks with Standard and Poor’s David Wyss, who tells us that really the 70% is more like 40% because of statistical gymnastics, and that of that 40%, only 70% of it really counts because 30% of what we spend is on exports, which of course don’t produce much in the way of American jobs. So we’re down to a real impact to 19.6%. How does “the economy” magically get moving again? Damned if anyone really knows, at this points, but, clearly, consumer spending isn’t what we really thought it to be as a driver.

Given the week’s news, you could hear Keller take his deepest breath when asked whether the Times will agree to “share” with 30% of its circulation revenue with Apple. After the breath, he noted “it was above his pay grade.” Calling Janet Robinson.

Early in the conversation, Keller had talked about those essential journalistic qualities of fairness, accuracy, timeliness and integrity, in describing what’s key to what distinguishes a news organization like the Times. Later, though, when asked about Times being liberal, I was struck by how the Times’ — and Americans’ — struggle with that term. Keller cited a column of Dan Okrent, the Times’ first public editor. It was entitled: “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” Keller talked about the oft-quoted first line of the column, “Of course, it is,” and then he went into a defense of liberal, urban values of being open, free-wheeling and tolerant, though distinguishing how it’s not, of course, “Liberal” politically.

It’s a tough dance, and one that conservatives love to watch. I’m struck by how different the dance is in the UK, another English-speaking country with a fairly decent history of democracy and free press. There, the Guardian — which is now getting a global profile for its work, courtesy of its embrace of the Web — is proudly liberal. In fact, it still calls itself the “world’s leading liberal voice”.

This is a tale of two countries, but one that may play out differently in our digital age. Many readers, in the U.S. and increasingly worldwide, respect the Times’ small-l liberal values; those reflect how they take in the world. So I wonder as the Times becomes more fully digital in a news world dividing itself differently into Huffington Post/News Corp/Guardian niches, whether someday, it may more fully embrace those liberal traditions and instincts.

This week, we see a notable project, harnessing the power of a local network to do — journalism.

With the deep recession making homelessness a widespread and enduring phenomenon, the Seattle Times, worked with seven local blogs (West Seattle Blog http://westseattleblog.com/blog/, Beacon Hill Blog http://beaconhill.seattle.wa.us, My Edmonds News http://myedmondsnews.com/, Seattle Local Health Guide http://localhealthguideonline.com/, Rainier Valley Post http://www.rainiervalleypost.com/, Mercer Island – Surrounded By Water http://mercerislandblogger.wordpress.com/ and Aurora | Seattle http://www.auroraseattle.com/).

The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.

One problem: the human brain. While we can all churn out the content 24/7, our brains’ evolution progress seems to be, at the minimum, multi-generational. Yes, we can multi-task at better speeds, but the toll – eulogized by Nick Carr and others — is unknown. We still like sum-ups and intelligent pointers.

So against that backdrop, let’s point out two recent additions to the web that help us followers of the news industry make sense of the new news. Irony: they are both weekly; helping us catch up on what seems to be a duration of time that still makes some atavistic sense to us.

Mark Coddington at the Nieman Journalism Lab does an admirable job with his aptly named “This Week in Review.” And Matt Creamer‘s “Best Media Writing of the Week” on AdAge does the same. Note the catchy names of both, and that both are packages of well- and thoughtfully recommended links.

Sid Harman, dial home.

First up this a.m. is Suzanne Yada’s good, detailed take on all the little social, interactive, map-based and other smart things the site has done. It’s a lot of little things done right, and culled from years of its founders’ experience on the web. Her big complaint: Not enough news, and not enough people to create local news.

Meanwhile, check out:

• Editor Erik Wemple’s welcoming letter, laying out some basics of the site.
• PaidContent’s interview with Robert Allbritton, who runs the company behind TBD, and Politico.

More to come.

Yes, budget cuts have hurt the form, but it’s getting new life — witness the energy brought by ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Investigative Reporting, among others — that’s extending back to major dailies. The partnerships with the foundation-funded national investigative groups has helped, as has the determination of those heading certain newsrooms and investigative pros, doing the work, even as their papers are challenged seemingly on every front.

Citing a McKinsey study on how industries deal with the advent of “low-cost rivals,” Rick lays out good arguments for how the industry approaches are too little, too late, too limited. He’s right. In mid-2010, there isn’t a cohesive industry strategy. In fact, lower-cost entrants — AOL, Yahoo/Associated Content, Demand +++ — aren’t just pests; they’re changing the economics of producing content. That’s not a small issue. It may well lead the next wave of disruption.

This Onion video ran in early June, and it’s an evergreen must-see for all newsrooms. A hoot; just hope it doesn’t give Sam Zell any ideas.

The mobile revolution is transformative, not a niche of what is mainstream today. As Mashable points out, “The mobile wealth creation/destruction cycle is in its earliest stages”.