To do great writing, read great reading. Here’s some great writing I’ve been reading this week:

A newspaper lover’s newspaper – How could you not love Dave Eggers? He comes out with a book that redefines the memoir. He edits a respected literary journal, he makes movies and on top of all that, is incredibly good looking (here’s photographic proof in case you need it). He’s also an unabashed newspaper lover and Panorama is proof, as this Chicago Tribune Q&A with Eggers shows. Panorama is a McSweeney’s Issue No. 33, a one-time only, Sunday-edition size print newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. It came out over Thanksgiving 2009; copies are $16 and you can get one shipped via FedEx. Or you can see images here.

Reinventing the metro daily – That’s what Jonathan Weber says he’s setting out to do as editor of the yet-to-pick-a-real-name Bay Area News Project, the Warren Hellman-funded nonprofit news organization. SF Weekly.com’s The Snitch caught Weber’s Feb. 24 presentation, which was part explainer, part job fair. Right now Weber’s hiring 15 people, half of them reporters. Interested parties can read more about open positions here.

No apologies – How many blog posts have you read – or written for that matter – that open with an apology? “Dear Reader: I’m sorry it’s been 3 months since my last blog post.” Or “Dear Reader: I’m so busy I don’t have time to write something longer.” Hey, so what? We really don’t care why you were away so long. We just want to know what’s on your mind today. Marketing guru Seth Godin nails this one in typical Zen master fashion in a post called Why are you apologizing? The post isn’t about blogging, but it could be. It’s also an example of good writing that’s short: not everything worth reading has to be long.

A picture’s worth 1,000 words – Not everything worth reading is words either. Case in point – this chart put out by the Obama administration showing U.S. job losses from December 2007 to January 2010, roughly the length of the recession. All politics aside, look at how striking that image is – a deep V that bottoms out right around the time George Bush left office, and starts creeps back up again once Obama shows up. Sure, there’s some text on the page, but really, what else do you need to know?

Great writing doesn’t always equal the most page views, but that’s OK - Om Malik is a respected analyst, pundit, blogger and all around smart guy who built the GigaOm network of seven blogs covering Silicon Valley and the tech industry. Malik came to his own defense recently after another blogger called him out for not having the traffic of a TechCrunch or Mashable. That’s true, but it’s not the point, Malik wrote. Instead of going for quantity, go for quality, value and relationships.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s a uptick in the stories and blog posts on the evolution of the news business and the role independents – writers and others – are playing in it? The sputtering economy is speeding up the pace of change.

Here are some developments of interest from around the Web in the past week:

Non-profit journalism isn’t the answer to bailing out money-losing newspapers, writes NewWest.net founder Jonathan Weber in The Trouble With Non-Profit Journalism.

Michelle Nicolosi, assistant managing editor of the Seattle PI website and an ex-colleague of mine from OC Register days, launched a blog to teach old reporters new media tricks called Print to Online.

The same folks behind the @mediaisdying, a popular Twitter feed on media closures, picked something decidedly more upbeat for their next venture. The @mediaishirin feed is a running list of available journalists and jobs. Looking for work? Ask them to add you to their list.

CBS Interactive is getting ready to launch a new personal finance website called MoneyWatch.com in March.

BeatBlogging.org compiled a list of journalists who use Twitter to report stories. Feel free to add how you use Twitter to the list.

HR consultant, professor and blogger Steve Boese compiled a list of 100 HR industry people to follow on Twitter, including yours truly. Follow Steve at @sbjet.

Speaking of Twitter, if you’re finding it hard to tweet and get work done, check out Celine Roque’s story on Web Worker Daily, How to turn productivity into a habit which includes helpful suggestions on time boxing, taking advantage of your body’s natural peak time and rewarding yourself for meeting goals.

This one’s not new, but it was new to me – a list of 100 killer WordPress resources on blog posts, pages, comments, categories, themes and a lot more.

More and more these days, good writing is all about context. When news cycles are measured in minutes or hours rather than days, unless you’re the one doing those news stories, your work as a writer is putting what’s happening into context. That’s especially the case for many bloggers, whose raison d’etre is commenting on events in the political, business or pop culture landscape.

This hit home with me a few months back in when I was working on a pro bono project I do every year, a catalog for a local high school auction. When donations come in, it’s up to me to make them sound so appealing people will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy them. Some items have instant appeal: who wouldn’t want court-side seats to an NBA game, or a week’s stay at a private villa on the beach in Cabo San Lucas? Other donations take more finesse. For instance, why would someone pay $2,000 for a single bottle of old wine when they could go to Trader Joe’s and pick up a bottle of Two Buck Chuck for, well, $2? Maybe they would if they knew that “old wine” was a rare ‘67 Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes from a vineyard in southern Bordeaux in business since 1711 that had been frequented by Thomas Jefferson and in 2006 sold a 135-year vertical of every vintage from 1860 to 2003 for $1.5 million. See? That’s context.

Explaining “why” is what separates good writing from not so good writing. You’ve got people’s attention for the minute that it takes them to read a headline, deck and lead. But to get them to go any further, you’ve got to give them a reason to keep reading. That reason is why – as in, why is this important? Why should I care? Why does it affect me?

Sometimes you can build the answer to “why” into a nut graph, a paragraph that succinctly summarizes the ramifications of the issue you intend to address in the piece. If you’re doing a short piece, you need a short nut graph. If the article you’re writing is longer, giving readers that perspective could take a couple paragraphs. Since they’re some of the most important paragraphs of the story don’t bury them – they should be positioned fairly high in the piece. But don’t ignore them. if you do, it’ll be the first thing your editor points out when he or she emails your story back to you for revisions.

Over my career I’ve had a few extremely good editors drill this into me either consciously or subconsciously – thanks Mike Hewitt, Jonathan Weber and Robin Doussard – but I still have to make a concerted effort to write the “why” into the stories I do.

But if I can get someone to pay $2,000 for a bottle of wine on the strength of a 200-word catalog description, I figure I can explain just about anything.

With talk of a recession and a generally dismal outlook for print media, is it a good time to launch a magazine? Apparently so. At least three major U.S. publishers are working on titles set to debut in 2008 or 2009: the Wall Street Journal, Mansueto Ventures LLC, publisher of Inc. and Fast Company, and IDG, the tech trade heavyweight. In a novel twist, a fourth company, the Rocky Mountain region daily news Website NewWest.Net has announced plans for a print spin off.

According to published reports like this one, the Wall Street Journal’s new luxury glossy – the working title is Pursuits – has already lined up advertisers and a tentative 2009 launch date. Mansueto Ventures originally set a May 2008 launch date for Upstart, a quarterly for startups,though according to this Mediaweek report, the date is now “undetermined.”

If the economy’s still OK, I predict they’ll get the advertising base they need to greenlight their respective ventures. But if we’re in a recession, don’t be surprised if these companies hold off a while longer, or scrap plans altogether.

More details:

• The Wall Street Journal’s new venture will be a high-end glossy quarterly for the super rich. The editor is Tina Gaudoin, a lifestyle editor and columnist for the Times of London who became editor of that paper’s high-end glossy, Luxx, last June. Gaudoin came under fire this week after a Columbia Journalism Review story questioned her journalistic ethics for quoting a business partner in a Times column and failing to disclose the relationship.
• In addition to UpStart, Mansueto is starting FastCompany.tv, an online TV network covering the tech scene with interviews, reviews and news on “the latest technology products, and lifestyle programming.”
• IDG, publisher of PC World, Computerworld, CIO and other tech titles, is preparing to relaunch The Industry Standard, the former Internet trade that died along with the rest of the dot-com business back in 2001. IDG was a majority stakeholder of The Standard and acquired the magazine’s remaining assets after it went bankrupt. Now IDG plans to relaunch The Standard as an online-only publication and is searching for an editor in chief. The company’s posted the position on an IDG careers page that’s accessible only to people who register at the site.
• Meanwhile, The Industry Standard’s former editor in chief Jonathan Weber is busy with his own plans to spin off a print magazine from NewWest.net, the regional daily news site he started after leaving Silicon Valley for Missoula, Montana. Weber weighed in on the print v. online media debate earlier this month in this guest editorial in the Times of London’s TimesOnline.com.