Today is Pulitzer Monday, when the Pulitzer Organization and Columbia University announces the winners of the annual Pulitzer Prizes, considered to be the highest honors of the news business.

In honor of the occasion, I’d like to share the story of Mel Ruder, a small-town newspaper editor whose hard work led him to become the first journalist in Montana to win the coveted award.

Ruder was just of the Navy when he moved to the Flathead Valley area of Montana, near Glacier National Park, to start a weekly newspaper. He promised to fill it with photographs of “babies, beasts, and beauties” and lots of positive news, according to Pictures, a Park and a Pulitzer, a photo book showcasing his work published in 2000.

Ruder worked long hours, and according to the book, eventually assembled a small staff of full-time and part-time reporters and editors. At some point, he moved the paper’s operations to a log-cabin office on the corner of Hwy 2, just outside of Columbia Falls, where it still stands. That’s the office in the picture at the top of this post, which I took last month during a trip to the area.

Mel Ruder. Photo courtesy Great Falls Tribune

In June 1964, when heavy rains flooded the valley, Ruder was all over the story. “He went out on the floodwaters in a boat, and when the road was washed out he drove his car down the railroad tracks to photograph flood scenes,” the New York Times wrote in his 2000 obituary. “He worked day and night for nearly a week, feeding news steadily to The Associated Press and radio stations in the area.”

He even hitched rides on small planes to get aerial views of the damage, according to Pictures, a Park and a Pulitzer.

To keep local readers up with the events, he printed as many as 12,550 copies of the Hungry Horse News a day, compared with normal circulation of 3,900 a week.

Ruder was proud of the work he and his staff did covering the flood, and asked a journalist friend in Missoula to submit a nomination to the Pulitzer committee on their behalf.

The following April, Ruder was at work, photographing a local school event, when he got a call. For their coverage of the flood, the Hungry Horse News had received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished General Local Reporting, making them the first journalists in the state to be so honored.

When asked how he felt about receiving such as prestigious award, he said – on more than one occasion, according to the book – “I guess I can die now.”

Instead, Ruder continued to work at the newspaper until he sold it and retired in 1978.

Before last month, I’d never heard of Ruder or the Hungry Horse News, named after a small town not much more than a gas station, grocery store and a handful of shops where tourists can buy huckleberry jam or huckleberry pie or just about anything else made with huckleberries on their way to Glacier National Park.

While staying in the area, I saw Pictures, a Park and a Pulitzer a couple different places and was intrigued enough that I asked to borrow a copy so I could read more.

I can imagine that there are many modern day Mel Ruders who hired on at AOL’s Patch.com or a local independent news website to cover local news hoping that one day, if they were lucky, they’ll be called on to cover a natural disaster, strike, riot or some other significant story that could make their career and even win an award.

Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen? Given the realities of today’s news business, it’d be tough. Ruder called his own shots. He didn’t have to check in with the head of digital content in New York for permission to spend extra on hiring or other expenses.

Ruder’s Pulitzer story is worth remembering not only as a reminder that hyperlocal news was being practiced long before there was a Patch.com. When it comes to community journalism, the bar doesn’t have to be set artificially low.

Last week saw a trifecta of this type of journalistic indiscretion.

The story generating the most buzz came late in the week when The American Life xx Ira Glass retracted a piece the radio show had run in January called “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory” on poor working conditions and other abuses at the Chinese factory that makes Apple iPads after it was discovered that Mike Daisey, the writer/monologist who did the piece, made up some of his facts.

His embellishments came to light after a reporter for the Marketplace radio show talked to Daisey’s Chinese translator, who disputed much of what Daisey had said. Glass faulted TAL’s fact checking department, which had vetting Daisey’s piece, for not doing a better job of vetting the piece before it aired – and devoted its entire program last weekend to setting the record straight.

Other media outlets continue to weigh in on Daisey’s duplicity, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and NPR’s On the Media program (which as I write this, still has 15 minutes to go and is generating a ton of online comments). It’s also caused some media critics to dig up previously published stories questioning factual errors and fictionalized material in supposedly journalist work from Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris.

The TAL story wasn’t the only one. Also last week, writers were talking about Jon Flatland, a long-time newsman, columnist and one-time former president of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, who was exposed for copying other writers’ humor columns for years and passing them off. According to this report from Poynter, the journalism training group, when Flatland was confronted by another humor writer about work he’d cribbed, he abruptly resigned as interim managing editor of the Times in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota and left town.

Here in Oregon, the (Portland) Oregonian last week fired long-time breaking news editor Kathleen Glanville after discovering she’d lied to the paper about the circumstances surrounding the death of the paper’s editorial page editor, Bob Caldwell,  who had been a close friend. An Oregonian reporter telephoned Caldwell’s house as part of reporting this front-page story on his death and spoke to Glanville, who was there on her day off consoling his wife. Caldwell’s wife had shared with Glanville the location and circumstances of his death – in the apartment of a 23-year-old woman who had been exchanging sex acts for money for textbooks. But Glanville told the reporter that Caldwell had died in his car, a fact the paper didn’t learn until the following day when it obtained the official police report.

The Oregonian ran a clarification the following day, and Glanville took to Facebook to thank the paper for many happy years of employment and say she understood why the paper felt the need to fire her for violating journalistic ethics. “There are times in people’s lives when you have to make a decision about what is most important,” she wrote. “I am sorry that my decision — which came from love — cost me my job. I will always cherish the many people who I have worked beside for so many years.”

Why do reporters and editors lie?

I contacted Craig Silverman, who writes Poynter’s Regret the Error blog and is an authority on newspaper industry screw ups for his take  on the problem.

In the case of Daisey and the Oregonian editor,”People felt their lies served a higher cause and purpose,” Silverman says. “They were able to justify their actions to themselves, so anything was fair game after that.”

Aside from that, journalists lie because everybody lies, Silverman says, whether they’re a doctor, carpenter, journalist, athlete, postal worker etc. ”This doesn’t excuse it, but it means we have to do a better job of sniffing out the lies,” he says.

To better understand the situation, Silverman suggested reading this piece written by Jack Shafer, Reuters’ columnist covering politics and the press. In it, Shafer says:

I’m still waiting for somebody who got caught lying while practicing journalism to say why he did it. I have my theory: 1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten. That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance.

What about you? Have you ever been tempted by deadlines or a dull source to embellish the truth? Ever made gotten away with making something up? Ever caught another reporter in a lie? Join the conversation by leaving a comment.

Want to feel inspired about what you do?

Spend a few minutes with We are Journalists, a Tumblr site for journalists about journalists. According to Romenesko, a St. Petersburg Times reporter patterned it after the Occupy Wall Street movement’s We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr site.

My favorite line: “Don’t call me ‘the Media.’”

How many times have you been with family or friends and heard them go off on how “the media” are doing this or that while you’re thinking, “Hello, I’m the media, too?”

Want to share your own journalist experience? Submit a post using this form.

The day had to come when content farms realized there are only so many articles they could churn out about how long to let paint dry or how to get a bump out of a sweater before they – and everybody else – had had enough.

For Demand Media, that day came last week.

According to Business Insider, the Santa Monica, Calif., company sent an email to freelance contributors informing them that for the foreseeable future, the controversial publisher of eHow.com and other traffic-driven content sites is scaling back on quick hit “how-to” other assignments. Instead, the company told contributors, it will focus on “more targeted categories and other forms of content such as slide shows, video series and feature articles.”

Did Google contribute to the change when it switched to a new search engine algorithm code named Panda? Yes and no. Panda sniffs out and passes over material that content farms churn out by the thousands and tens of thousands a day. When Google first launched Panda last spring, eHow wasn’t affected. That changed with a later update, according to WebProNews, prompting Demand Media officials to launch a clean-up effort. Later, during an August call with analysts who follow the stock, Demand Media officials said they’d removed 300,000 eHow articles.

News of Demand Media’s decision to cut down on what it’s assigning spread quickly through the freelance community. I saw notices of the Business Insider story within hours of its posting on two different writer message boards.

Demand Media Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford attempted to put a positive spin on the development, saying the company remains “one of the largest pools of writing assignments available in the world,” in an official statement to Business Insider. “We don’t feel like it’s that dramatic of a change because it’s not like every assignment was being taken. It’s all about quality for us.”

But reaction from current and former Demand Media writers was mixed. “I feel bad for people who have nothing to fall back on now, but are you serious?” one writer who’s worked for Demand Media posted in a message on one of those writer message boards. “Who didn’t know this party was going to end, especially once Panda hit?”

Another writer, apparnetly one who still works for Demand, wrote in a comment on the Business Insider piece: “Earlier in the year, (Demand) ramped up its production to record-high levels and hired on lots of new writers. They are still advertising, too, LOL. I’ve seen available assignments as high as tens of thousands for a long time, just in the general title pool, but never in the four-digits until this summer. Now it’s in the low three-digits area, which means the titles are all but gone from there. Some are still coming in, but not many. This IS a huge change…”

What do you think: if you work for Demand Media, how is this affecting your paycheck? If you write for other content sites, are you concerned they’ll follow suit?

I understand why the arrangement makes sense for Helium, but questioned whether it made sense for writers. If a writer finds a publication they’d like to work for on a regular basis, they’re stuck going through Helium unless the publisher is willing to pay the finder’s fee.

Helium President and CEO Mark Ranalli responded to that and other issues I raised in several comments he left on the post. He later agreed to discuss the matter in greater detail in an interview, and share more about what the company is up to these days. In a nutshell, he says, “We wake up every day at Helium thinking that what we’re creating is good for the writing community,” he says. “We think we have writers best interests at heart.”

The Changing Faces of Content Sites

I first talked to Ranalli two summers ago, for a Writer’s Digest piece on the pros and cons of writing for content sites, which have also been called content farms, content mills or “the devil” by certain media industry pundits.

A lot’s changed since then. In the summer of 2009, three of the top content sites – Demand Media, Associated Content and Helium – were stand-alone startups figuring out how they were going to make money. At the time, most were paying peanuts to freelancers and anyone else who passed muster and was willing and able to churn out SEO-based articles fast and cheap.

Since then, Demand Media’s gone public and is still pursuing an SEO-based business model, creating content for its own branded sites such as eHow. Yahoo bought Associated Content in May 2010 to be the basis for its push into hyperlocal news.

According to Ranalli, Helium has chosen a different path. The company still retains freelancers to write keyword-based articles for low rates. However, it’s also made a major push into custom publishing through its Content Source division, acting as what Ranalli calls a content engine or “online assignment desk” for publications and businesses that he says number in the thousands.

What Helium Pays Content Source Contributors

According to Ranalli, less than 10 percent of the 187,000 professional or amateur writers who’ve registered with and worked for Helium in the past five years have produced copy for any of Helium’s Content Source partners, none of which he’ll name due to client confidentiality.

The pay for Helium Content Source assignments varies. At the low end, it’s $10 or $15 for a daily or weekly 200- to 250-word announcement-type post on a hyperlocal blog. Ranalli says top-tier writers can make $1,000 for a multi-source feature story for a highly specialized business-to-business publication.  ”More are in the range of $50 to $100 a piece than in the thousands,” he says. “That’s also where the demand is for the content. A lot of platforms are building out their digital inventory” and can’t afford to pay more.

Those fees jibe with rates at least one freelancer who Helium approached recently says she was offered for a rush assignment, $40 for 400 words for the website of a local CBS TV affiliate. She turned it down because the pay was too low.

In addition to freelance writers, Helium also works with freelance editors and copyeditors; Ranalli didn’t share rates for that type of work, saying he wasn’t familiar enough with what Helium pays to comment.

New Owner Signals New Era?

As for Helium’s startup status, that’s changed too. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. bought the company two months ago. Donnelley is a $10 billion business that made its name in book, magazine, catalog and direct mail printing bought its way into the digital media business. No doubt the deep-pocketed partner will help Helium grow. One way that’s already happening: 800 Donnelley sales reps are marketing Helium’s services to present and prospective customers. That can’t help but have an impact for Helium, which has a total of 35 employees.

As for the $10,000 finder’s fee, Ranalli says some companies that have used Helium Content Source have paid it. “We’ve run into publishers who’ve said we’re going to start an engagement, use you for a certain time, and then build an inhouse team,” he says. “If you think about the amount of energy companies put in to finding (talent), that fee is consistent with an agency model, where you hire a recruiter and they find people” for your business.

Helium doesn’t police writers to check whether they’re contacting publishers they’ve previously worked with through the company. Helium depends on its publishing partners to notify them if that every happens. But Ranalli isn’t worried about it. Publishers come to Helium, he says, because they don’t want to deal with everything that goes with hiring writers directly – making assignments, editing copy, processing 1099s etc. “They’re trying to get out of managing a freelance staff. We make it simple for the company to get what they’re looking for, and for Jane to get the work.”

Current Freelance Opportunities

If you’re interested in writing for Helium, here are some assignments the company is looking to fill that are listed in this post on its official blog:

• Writers with a specialty and expertise in writing about technology and computers
• Business journalists with experience covering sustainable business practices
• Experienced financial writers for an ongoing bi-weekly assignment aimed at appraising merchants with the latest financial information that impacts their accounts
• Recipe writers who can write original commentary and stick to weekly deadlines
• Writers who can tackle computing subjects like cloud computing and business analytics

Writers who want to work for Helium Content Source have to send a cover letter, resume and two clips relevant to the assignment they’re applying for to experts@helium.com, and according to Ranalli, go through the company’s usual journalist vetting process. Find out more about writing for Helium on its journalists page.

Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Having just wrapped up work for a long-term client and not yet landed work of the same caliber to take its place, I definitely was tempted.

Helium Content Source Service for Publishers

Except for one not-so minor detail. The writer was an editor at Helium, a content site I’ve written about extensively here and elsewhere, debating the pros and cons for freelancers of working for it and similar establishments.

These days, in addition to running its own website, Helium also provides editorial services to other publishers through its Content Source service. Publishers can buy articles from Helium’s existing content pool or choose a subject and have Helium contract with one of its writers to create it, which was the offer made to me.

As difficult as it is to say no to assignments, turning this down was a no-brainer. I’ve worked as a freelancer for long enough I don’t need a middle man to get assignments from “prominent business publications.” To start now would be taking a giant step backwards. Also, I have no idea what the assignment paid, since the information wasn’t included in the initial email; as a result, I have no clue whether it would have been worthwhile even to go through the motions of sending in a resume and samples of my work, which was also required.

The $10,000 Red Flag

What I found out later made me feel even better about turning down the work. I was curious how Helium is marketing itself to publishers, so I checked out the company’s website.

Here’s what I found: a clause buried deep in Helium’s content source publishers agreement states that a publication that wants to retain a writer who previously provided it with content through Helium must agree to first pay the company a $10,000 bounty. Here’s the specific wording (added emphasis is mine):

Customer, conditional upon the payment of the fees, may directly contact, recruit or solicit writers who have provided content to Helium which has been purchased by the Customer through the Helium Content Source. If Customer hires such Helium Writer as either an employee or independent contractor during the term of this Agreement or for one year following the termination of this Agreement, Customer shall pay Helium $10,000 per writer hired. Customer further agrees that it will not attempt to solicit or contact any other Helium writer that it identifies through Helium other than as provided for in this Agreement.

Just think: if I’d taken that assignment and it turned out that the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or Portfolio.com was on the other end of the assignment and loved what I’d written so much they wanted to bring me on as a regular contributor or hire me outright, they’d have to pay Helium what amounts to a $10,000 headhunter’s fee or quit the contract and wait for an entire year before approaching me – like that would ever happen. It’s a hefty enough amount that my guess is no magazine or newspaper would consider approaching a writer directly.

It also raises an interesting point for writers who do work for Helium. Say you aspire to work for a publication but are unaware it’s one of the company’s Content Source partners. If you successfully pitched them a story, would Helium go after the publication for taking it? What if a publisher came to you not realizing you wrote for Helium? What would you have to do to prove that you hadn’t gotten the work through Helium? Seems like things could get very complicated very quickly.

If anyone reading this has worked on an assignment for a publisher through Helium Content Source I’d love to hear about it. If you haven’t, now that you know more about this, would you?

I know a bit about this since it’s how I made most of my living for the majority of the past two years. Only I never knew there was a new name for the job I was doing.

More journalists are taking on the responsibility of working as content strategists, and as they do, they’re sharing what they’ve learned with other writers and editors.

I’ve come across two recent articles about the subject that are worth passing on. One looks at why editors make good content strategists. The other focuses on common mistakes companies make when creating or carrying out content marketing strategies – good info should you be one of those editors hired to manage such a project.

From Editor to Content Strategist

In a post called Making the Leap from Editor to Content Strategist on the American Society of Business Publication Editors website, Sara Zailskas makes a compelling case for why editors are uniquely suited to this type of work. Zailskas was an editor before losing her job a year ago and retooling her career to work as a content strategist for Realtor.org, the website for the National Association of Realtors.

Zailskas writes about rubbing shoulders at a recent conference with content specialists who didn’t come from the news biz and who were still learning about things like editorial calendars and how to execute the same message in multiple media, “concepts editors in trade publications use daily,” she says. “As editors, we often underestimate how transferable our editorial experience is, and those skills are particularly important to content strategy.”

These jobs won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Like custom publications, advertorials and other quasi-journalism endeavors, content sites ultimately fall under the responsibility of a company’s marketing department, so content strategists have to learn how to play nice. That’s not always easy to do, especially if you’re coming from a newspaper or magazine newsroom and are used to a strict separation of editorial from advertising or marketing. If this is something you’re interested in, Zailskas points out that you won’t always have the final say on decisions, and you need to be a great communicator because it’s very likely you’ll have to explain the rationale behind everything you suggest. Based on my own experiences in this area, I agree with those last two points 100 percent.

Read what else Zailskas says editors need to be prepared to do in the complete post.

How Not to be a Content Marketing Failure

The next pearl of wisdom comes from Joe Pulizzi, the mind behind Junta42, an online matchmaker that helps pair up writers and other independent contractors with companies that have content marketing projects.

Pulizzi is a content marketing evangelist, speaking on the subject at conferences on a regular basis. Last month, he posted a video from a recent conference presentation on the ways content marketing strategies can bomb. (Sidetrack: Pulizzi’s post came out the same day Zailskas’ did – how cool is that?) The video runs about 50 minutes, with a solid explanation of the concept at the beginning and the really good stuff coming in the last half. Pay attention to what he says about mistakes and how to fix them: I’ve lived though some of those and can vouch for his analysis – it’s right on.

Here’s a link to the video on Vimeo: Why You are Failing at Content Marketing.

You know that old saying, 1+1=3?

Well, that’s the idea behind content curation, which I touched on briefly in a recent post on why it’s important to include links in blog posts.

Curating content – some people call it aggregating content – means assembling links to news stories, photographs and other storytelling elements in a way that adds value to what’s already out there on the subject (while still giving credit to the original sources).

Think of it as the value-added reseller model of news – take another organization’s basic reporting and add something original to it that makes it more relevant to a particular audience.

Drudge Paves the Way

The Drudge Report practically invented content curation. The 10-year-old site is nothing more than a whole bunch of links pointing to stories on politics and news of the day from an amalgam of other sources. The Huffington Post takes it a step further, wrapping reporting from its own news staff around links to stories produced elsewhere.

In a recent Columbia Journalism Review Q&A Slate Editor David Plotz told the magazine’s Lauren Kirchner “everybody does some form of aggregation. Even the primary news sites, even The New York Times does things which are effectively aggregation,” Plotz says. He adds:

They don’t call it aggregation—no one calls it ‘aggregation,’ actually — but there are blogs that round up things other people have written, and quote heavily from them, and attempt to benefit from the work that other journalists have done. What they’re doing is applying their intelligence to it. They’re saying, ‘The New York Times can make sense of what this blog is getting at, and frame it for you in a different way, even though this blog has done the primary work on it.’

If everyone’s doing it, you should too, especially if you work as a journalist, since it’s a skill that more news organizations want their reporters and editors to have. Who knows, maybe you already do. If you’ve ever put together a list of “Top 10 Pacific Northwest Bookstores” or “Best Places to go Deep Sea Fishing” or “101 Parenting Tips I Couldn’t Live Without” that links out to news reports or other websites, you’re already doing it.

Examples of Content Curation

Here are some other examples of content curation, which I purposely took from a variety sources to show how common the practice has become:

Mediabistro Revolving Door - This twice-weekly newsletter produced by Mediabistro, the media industry website, chronicles the comings and goings at (mainly New York) media and advertising companies. Basically it’s just one big list. Mediabistro asks media industry people to check in when they get a new job and someone at the company monitors those emails, and also reads newspapers, media trade magazines and websites. Foith what else might be happening at a particular publication track who’s up and who’s out at Vanity Fair, The New York Times, CBS, Chiat Day and the like.

Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism (The Atlantic) - The magazine’s associate editor Conor Friedersdorf is also founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to pointing to exceptional nonfiction. In each issue, Friedersdorf recommends a few of what he considers to be the week’s best magazine or newspaper articles. Earlier this month, he published a list of the best long-form journalism from 2010. He divided stories into categories such as The Art of Storytelling, Crime & Punishment and Profiles. Along with a headline, Friedersdorf also included his own short description of what each story was about. When he created the list, organized it into subjects and added his own descriptions, Friedersdorf acted as a curator, much the same as a museum curator organizes a gallery showing by placing paintings in a certain way and adding labels explaining why they’re important.

SecondAct’s weekly Hot Topics - Here’s one example I know intimately, because I help write it. Early Friday mornings, editors and bloggers at this website for people over 40 go through the week’s news for a roundup of six to 10 items they think readers will want to know about. Some items are recaps of stories that appeared in newspapers such as the the Times or U.S. News and World Report, like the Schwarzenegger-Shriver split. Other items are follow ups on subjects or people that SecondAct has written about before. Others still summarize new research or just published government statistics, such as theunemployment numbers for people over 40 I crunch the first Friday of every month. Put them together and you get a report that you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.

This week’s top three media stories could rightly be termed the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The Good is the last Harry Potter movie opened today, finally. It’s been 14 years since the first book about the boy wizard was published, and 10 years since the first movie. Millions of kids have grown up with both – including my three – which is why we’ll make seeing the last movie a family affair.

Harry Potter has been very, very good to this blog. The single most popular post I’ve ever written was on J.K. Rowling’s writing style. Even though I originally wrote it in summer of 2009 and updated it last November when “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1″ came out, it still gets more page views that almost any other post on my blog. So thanks, Harry Potter fans, for helping make WordCount a success.

In Content Aggregation, How Much Copying is Too Much?

The Bad in the media business news this week involves the brouhaha that arose after Huffington Post indefinitely suspended contributor Amy Lee for a lengthy summary of an AdAge story that cribbed too much of the original and buried the link to the original. While HuffPo editors apologized for the overly-aggressive aggregation, pundits called Lee a scapegoat for a common practice on the news site of repackaging other news organization’s work.

The incident has led to a discussion of what constitutes fair use in the age of content curation. When your job is to aggregate news from other sources, how much is too much? How can you tell if someone’s gone too far?

Since some of the blogging I do falls into the category of content aggregation, I brought it up with my editor this week. Her advice: Take “just a snippet,” always include an attribution and always link back to the original.

“HuffPost is careful to adhere to copyright law and fair use guidelines,” a HuffPo spokesperson said in a statement, according to a New York Post story on the matter. “Our editorial approach is that when excerpting a story, we should only offer enough of it to give readers a sense of the story and the ability to comment on it, without removing the incentive to go to the original source to read more.”

Do they follow their own advice? You be the judge.

If you aggregate content for your own blog or paid blogging gigs, what do you do?

News of the World Scandal Hurts Other Murdoch Businesses

Finally to The Ugly. The fallout from the News of the World phone hacking scandal keeps coming. To date, it’s stopped NOTW owner Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy out the remaining shares of a British satellite TV company he didn’t already own; led some former top NOTW editors to resign and others to be arrested; and former Wall Street Journal shareholders to say they’d never have sold to Murdoch had they known then what they do now.

When original allegations of phone tampering surfaced in 2007, News of the World officials called it an isolated incident. But one reporter for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper stuck with it. This week, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik related how that persistence paid off in ”Guardian Reporter Rocks Murdoch Empire.”  The Guardian’s Nick Davies followed the phone hacking story for years before the public, and public officials, started taking an interest. “A blind man in a dark room could see that the official version of events didn’t make sense,” he tells Folkenflik.

Here are links to the week’s top media industry stories:

The end of the World as we know it (The Economist) – The News of the World scandal is as juicy as anything the infamous tabloid ever reported on: spying, hacking and other skulduggery, outraged politicians, policemen on the take and even a dragon lady editor. They couldn’t make this stuff up.

Move to close newspaper greeted with suspicion (New York Times)

10 ways journalists can use Google+ (Journalism.co.uk) – Yet another social network to try to figure out how to use for work.

Long Story, Shortlist, First Edition (New York Times) – The new feature is a compilation of the best “long form” stories appearing in the paper during the past week. Find it on Twitter at #LongReads. Other places to find longer non-fiction online:

• @TheByliner
• @SomethingtoRead
• @ESPNReader

Knight Foundation sponsors DEMO conference, scholarships available (Knight Digital Media Center) – The foundation is giving 20 scholarships of $1,000 to journalists to attend the annual tech innovation confab, which takes place Sept. 12-14. Application deadline is July 15.

The new midlist: Self-published E-book Authors Who Earn a Living (Publishing Perspectives) – Great stuff for anyone who’s curious how much not-so-famous authors can make selling ebooks.

The value of toxic feedback (Urban Muse Writer) – As author Joni B. Cole explains in this guest post, it’s possible to learn from even the harshest criticism.