Eric Ulken, the visiting Canwest Global scholar at the University of British Columbia's graduate school of journalism (where I teach part-time), led a session Sunday on new tools and techniques for the digital journalist.

Ulken, most recently the interactive digital editor at the Los Angeles Times, scripted a clear presentation on the particular necessity now of involvement in social media and data visualization.

He steered through filter-strengthening, search engine-optimizing, Twitter-seizing and such platforms as Google Docs and Manyeyes in presenting information in a new, visually literate way.

His workshop presentations is laid out here. In the days ahead a video podcast of the three-hour seminar will be up at www.journalism.ubc.ca.

An interesting skirmish broke out this weekend on the issue of whether anonymous comments online are good or bad for the platform.

Their defender was interesting: Matthew Ingram of GigaOm, recently the communities editor of The Globe and Mail. He was largely fending off attacks from Howard Owens of The Batavian, the former digital chief for the Gatehouse Media group, and others.

Ingram's view, shared by some in the comments, is that permitting anonymity opens the discussion to people who would otherwise not feel free to be frank. Overall he feels that it encourages a better debate.

Owens thinks that people need to stand and be counted and too bad if they don't feel like doing so. He thinks people online have a right to know who is saying what about them.

Of course, that's a simplification of their amplification.

Mostly the craft sides with Owens. It believes the public needs to know who is saying what, that the value of transparency often means some comments do not get published, and that there is an abiding interest in ensuring all criticism is attributed to permit the accused to know who are the accusers.

But anyone can tell you these days that the hard-earned privilege of comment has been discounted online as organizations permit people to create pseudonyms to wage their arguments. News companies often feature two sets of standards for their newspapers and Web sites and are in a quandary on how to contend with the thousands of comments penned without a sense of who said what.

The principles of transparency, accountability, fairness, accuracy and minimizing harm always seemed to me the most important elements of the craft. Not one of them is helped by anonymity, except in an unusual circumstance --- the whistleblower, or the person who justifiably fears retribution for challenging someone or an institution.

Unquestionably journalism has to be open to that person, but the privilege should be conferred and not inferred. Even in permitting the challenge, journalism need not furnish a pedestal for anonymous criticism --- and certainly need not give everyone else that permission when they have less significant matters to discuss.

It is interesting to me that, in an era of rampant sharing of information and less privacy than ever, we'd be arguing for the right to shout loudly while wearing a mask.

The best practices and how-to guides comprise an extensive first look from the Society of Professional Journalists on digital media.

The SPJ has commissioned a series of essays from strong practitioners on social media, search engine optimization, working with PDFs, such software as Dipity and Google Wave, slideshows and live streaming.

It is a very useful document for newsrooms looking to take their game to another level in digital media. The Scribd version of the document is below.

The former head of the World Editors Forum, now the head of the journalism department at the City University in London, delivered a speech this week identifying eras done and challenges ahead.

George Brock points to three developments central to recent media change: the quantity of information available to a wider audience, the swift process by which that information is reshaped, and the decentralization of news into the hands of many. He asks: Is news over?

He sees a clash emerging between news organizations and the new providers for public trust, and he believes journalists have four traits they need to secure to defend their craft: the discipline of verification, the sense-making of contextualization of content, the professional eyewitnessing of events, and the robust investigation of ideas.

While it will take time for a new business model to emerge to sustain high-quality work, Brock believes the organization with the greatest propensity to experiment will be the winner. He thinks philanthropy will play a role in sustaining quality. But he also believes journalists have to strengthen their position with firmer standards.

The relationship between a news organization and the community is what advertisers bank on when they place their notices. It's what special interests bank on when they provide information to get their messages out.

It should be no surprise, then, that the consummation of deals as a broker might seem attractive in the time ahead. Michael Skoler, writing for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at University of Missouri, posts on exactly that.

He's noticing the rise of firms like Groupon and  Living Social  as services offering audiences deals through newsletters. In exchange for establishing newsletters to communicate deals, the news organizations get a piece of the transaction.

Skolar believes that, if news organizations asked audiences what they want, they could then broker deals.

Clearly there are some ethical issues in trading audiences for access, but the newsletter concept is a way of putting sufficient distance and respect into the mix. As organizations look for new streams of revenue, Skolar expects this will be one way forward.

The emerging convention is that social media --- and in particular, Twitter --- will help deliver the news as a distribution channel. New data indicates it's a work in progress.

Hitwise, the online marketing measurement firm, has examined the path of referring sites to news and media spots on the Web. It has determined that Facebook and Google News rank ahead of Twitter in the mix.

Twitter has tripled the upstream referrals in a year, but they still only amount to .014 per cent of visits to news and media sites. Facebook's amount to 3.64 per cent, while Google News' were 1.27 per cent.

Where are the Twitter users going? To entertainment sites primarily.

The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles recently delivered a speech in Singapore on the modern newsroom's challenges.

He advocates using technological understanding to build a social network to drive audience and revenue --- a basic view of almost every news manager these days --- but provides a good guide on how to get there.

Some of his ideas:

1. Get to know major bloggers in the community.
2. Get to know those blogging on your major beats.
3. Keep a list of Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers.
4. Use mathematicians to understand who in your community is most influential.

On those four points, our newsroom scores four for four. We have connections with the bloggers, the specialists, the big Tweeters and with NowPublic.com to create an annual influencers list.

The annual Canadian newspaper readership study was released today and indicates a stable condition for newspapers and their Web sites.

The Newspaper Advertising Data Bank (NADBank) report suggests 77 per cent of Canadian adults read either the print or online edition in the week before. The printed paper remained the prime resource, with 73 per cent reading it the week before. Some 22 per cent read the Web site, which means a large overlap in the readership between both platforms. Only four per cent read only the Web site.

The numbers haven't shifted much in the year. Web site readership moved from 20 to 22 per cent, giving the overall readership a lift of about one point.

Local news was considered the most popular element of readership, with 73 per cent saying they consumed it.

The survey reviewed the consumption of 81 daily newspapers in Canada (and two Detroit papers with wide distribution in Windsor, Ontario, across the border) in 53 markets. The Canadian Newspaper Association said the results validate the importance of the newspaper as relevant sources of information

Martin Moore, writing in the IdeaLab for Mediashift, identifies and explains the value of linked data for a newsroom.

Linked data isn't necessarily well-defined generally. Moore clears it up: " Linked data is a way of publishing information so that it can easily -- and automatically -- be linked to other, similar data on the web."  Thus, a reference to Paris is linked in such a way as to make clear it's Paris, France, and not Paris, Texas or Paris Hilton.

The benefits Moore sees are significant: better SEO recognition, better site location, more opportunity for you and others to build services around links, bait for the firewall, and so on.

But the overall point Moore is making is the importance of layering content and making the journalism newsrooms produce more valuable as a resource. It's another initiative newsrooms will need to take to play in the sphere.

The routinely strong Seeking Alpha site features a somewhat conciliatory post from media corporate financial advisor on the impending coexistence of the Apple iPad and the newspaper industry.

Dan Ramsden has some tough words for Google. He sees its recent encouragement of the newspaper industry to experiment as self-serving --- the more papers try to do things online, the more Google's search engine technology benefits.

But he makes an interesting choice in where to place the technological bet. While recent media coverage has suggested Google's open-source design of its Android smartphone offers the greatest opportunity for old media to succeed, Ramsden begs to differ.

He is firmly in the Apple camp. It's the technology of choice by consumers, it's the technology company that has figured out (through iTunes and the iPhone) how to exact a premium for content, so it's the technology the newspaper business should focus on serving.

"Newspaper and magazine owners, who are struggling to redefine their business models for a new online and mobile environment, would probably be well served to align themselves with the platform that can offer a revenue model, and a mobile marketplace, and leave the experimentation and iteration stuff to young entrepreneurs and startups that do not yet have a franchise to protect," he writes.

He suggests: "Style, design, quality control, are all characteristics that will do much more to facilitate the popularity of paid content than one more colorful website that may or may not show up at the top of Google’s search results."