Matt Waite on the trouble with finding budding journalist-developers: "I think the problem with finding these students starts with reward structures. Students are told from even before they walk on campus that being a journalist means Being a Good Writer, Being a Good Editor, Being a Good Photographer. No one is telling them they could be an application developer, or a data journalist, or a media entrepreneur. Or if they have heard it, that voice is getting drowned out by traditionalists. A disturbing amount of time, the traditionalists drowning those students out are other students. Until we can attach a reward to this — until it cracks the consciousness of students that there are jobs in this path — I think we’ll continue to struggle."

"Google has announced that it will penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads ... The change — called the “page layout algorithm” — takes direct aim at any site with pages where content is buried under tons of ads."

Steve Yelvington: "So Kodak, the company that invented amateur photography in the 19th century and invented digital photography in the 20th, is on the ropes. There are obvious lessons for newspapers and newsrooms. Here are a few of them...."

Ken Doctor: on digitally disrupted companies' "long goodbye": "data shows 44 percent less newsprint usage (and about 75-80 percent of all newsprint usage is attributed to newspapers) over the past four years, according to The Reel Time Report. ... I’m tracking revenues from Kodak, Sears, and all U.S. dailies through 2010 ... U.S. newspapers’ ad revenue decline is worse, percentage wise, than either Kodak’s or Sears’. Yes, although Kodak and Sears are now poster children of legacy businesses gone wrong, newspapers — as counted through their main revenue source — are doing worse."

"The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) lodged an official complaint about the ABC's website, Coal Seam Gas: By The Numbers. Following is the ABC's public response to that complaint. ..."

Pollster Mark Textor: "Too often, data journalists suddenly pretend to be experts. But a journalist is a not a mathematician or statistician. With data journalism that is exactly what they pretend to be. They imagine they are something way beyond the pay grade of the average journalist with a graduate degree. Also there is a subtle but significant change in roles that is a dangerous precedent. Rather than independently comparing different data sets, they become advocates for their own information."

Philip Meyer: "After personal computers with user-friendly software became common, using a computer wasn't such a big deal. But the term CAR, for computer-assisted reporting, is still used today to describe what I prefer to think of as the application of scientific method to reporting."

Felix Salmon: "[Vogues'] archive will cost you $1,575 per year, but the price point makes sense to me. The value here is in the index: even if you had a full archive of Vogue back-issues sitting on your bookshelf (something many fashion-industry professionals spend much more than $1,575 to obtain), you still wouldn’t be able to find what you were looking for without great difficulty. ... Vogue is really two magazines in one: it’s a mass-market book for sale at supermarket checkout counters across the country, and at the same time it’s a very fashion-insidery bible which has featured every major designer, photographer, model, and ad campaign in the industry for longer than anyone can remember. The Vogue Archive is a way of monetizing the trade-mag part of Vogue’s identity without alienating any of the readers in flyover country."

"Vogue's much-hyped archive website goes live today, and as promised, it contains every single page from every issue dating back to the magazine's American debut in 1892. According to Vogue's press release, the site is searchable by decade, brand, designer, and photographer; you can also sort results by articles, images, covers, or ads. ... However, accessing the archive is not quite so simple: For now, it's only available via subscription through WGSN, a trend forecasting company that partnered with Vogue to build the site, and an individual subscription costs a whopping $1,575 per year."

"The [European Commission's Open Data Strategy for Europe is] to lift performance EU-wide is three-fold: firstly the Commission will lead by example, opening its vaults of information to the public for free through a new data portal. Secondly, a level playing field for open data across the EU will be established. Finally, these new measures are backed by the €100 million which will be granted in 2011-2013 to fund research into improved data-handling technologies."

"Ministers, officials and journalists need to be on their guard when misusing statistics after [Andrew Dilnot,] the new chairman of the UK Statistics Authority warned he would name and shame offenders. ... Speaking to MPs on Tuesday, he cited a calculation error on a front-page news story which suggested public service pensions cost every family in Britain £4,000 a year, when the real number was £360. When asked by the FT why he had not been willing to identify the miscreant – the Daily Telegraph – in his evidence session in parliament, Mr Dilnot insisted this was the last time he would be so reticent."

"The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications is starting a lab to educate students on what it sees as one of the new frontiers for newsgathering and reporting: drone journalism. The lab will look at the ethical, legal, and privacy concerns surrounding the collection of video and photographs from small, unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as provide hands-on experience: students will be building their own drone platforms to collect data in the field."

Jens Finnäs: "Every year in the beginning of [November] the [Finnish] tax records from last year are published. In other words: you get to know who made the most money. Every year the Finnish media outlets do a very conventional presentation of this material. Page after page of lists of top-earners. Rarely does anyone do anything more creative with the data. ... This is my first visualization in Raphael.js. Previously I have been working with D3 and Protovis, but the weak browser support of these two libraries is becoming a growing concern."

"Facebook’s research tells us about the links between a large sub-group of humanity – but it doesn’t say anything about what these connections mean."