Technology writer Nicholas Carr once was a big believer in the hyperlink. It was the heart of the media ecosystem --- a "hypermedia system" all its own, he believed --- and he jammed them into his posts as one would punctuation.

He was not alone, of course. The technical tools to hyperlink have made publishing three-dimensional in nature, layering content upon content to serve needs well beyond the text on the screen.

But Carr, the author of a new book on the Internet, now holds a different view: The link is a distraction, a footnote that takes the attention away from the reading task at hand, a cognitive penalty that makes comprehension more difficult.

He has started to place links at the bottom of his posts. He asserts this makes for "more concentrated, calmer, and more enjoyable reading."

In honour of his post and its argument, here is the link to it.

Imagine clicking through a story and entering a simulated environment involving it. It's rather like a primitive version of the Holodeck on Star Trek: Next Generation.

In broad outline it's "immersive journalism" and documentarist/scholar Nonny de la Pena posts on the process at Online Journalism Review. She identifies the best practices in the emerging field that aims "to afford the participant unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly, the feelings and emotions that accompany the news."

It's a fascinating new area (examples here), clearly resource-intensive but very different from news gaming in that it doesn't amount to a contest that accumulates points and plays within a protocol. Rather, it's an experience that responds to events and doesn't affect an outcome.

It's not for every newsroom, but the technique offers a distinct way to tell stories.

The Canadian Association of Journalists held its annual conference this week in Montreal.

In recent weeks the CAJ president has made clear that the association is in the fight of its life. Membership is down to less than 1,000 from much higher historic levels. In keeping with the times, corporate support is down.
 
But the most stark sign of challenge was the conference itself, with only about 65 registrants and fewer in attendance. (Self-promotional moment: I was one and contributed to three panels here and here and here.) The annual dinner was downgraded to a cocktail party with a cash bar. The awards evening itself attracted more, but some of those hadn't gone to the conference itself.

Organizationally you cannot criticize the event. The panels had focus, plenty of content, and have made the step into a much better discussion of the digital age than last year. (Rob Curley of the Las Vegas Sun breathed great life into the event from the outset and Calgary Herald editor in chief Lorne Motley presented a very moving story of the loss in Afghanistan of journalist Michelle Lang.)

As the CAJ holds its annual general meeting today, it has to wonder what it can do to revitalize the organization. In discussing this over the weekend with colleagues, they seemed to point to a need for the association to put even more between-conferences emphasis on skills training through workshops, seminars, webinars and resources. There seemed little appetite for the CAJ to spend time on advocacy, except for its fight against institutional secrecy.

But these training initiatives don't come without a cost and it would be interesting to see if the craft responds, given there are other free or near-free resources emerging for the journalist in transition. Given its diminished numbers, it'll also be interesting to see if the association can rally corporate media support.

About all everyone (even those with historic grievances with the association) could agree on at the conference was that something needed to be done to ensure the organization endures and sustains.

Leading U.S. communications scholars have published an assessment of the capabilities of citizen journalism as newspaper resources decline. Their conclusion: the paper's journalism can't be replaced.

Authors Stephen Lacy, Margaret Duffy, Daniel Riffe, Esther Thorson and Ken Fleming have examined 86 citizen blog sites, 53 citizen news sites and 63 daily newspaper sites. On the basis of what newspapers produce, the academics determined the bloggers and citizen sites could not be substituted.

Somewhat surprisingly, the study found the citizen sites weren't timely. The structure of content was different. The volunteer nature of the creation hampered timeliness.

But the authors found these sites can be effective complements to newspapers.

A new study from the social media/creation site Gather.com identifies some trends in the way people collect and share information online.

There are demographic differences in the methods, but the nature of the practice is basically the same: People not only consume, but comment and share.

Steve Smith writes about the study at minOnline and suggests there isn't the same brand loyalty for online publishing --- 80% of those surveyed who consume news online will click into unknown sites.

Older people tend to email stories, middle-aged people tend to put them on Facebook, while younger people will use Twitter or Facebook. And a surprising number (80%) say they comment on stories.

Nearly two-thirds of online news readers focus on topics specifically suited to their interests, while more than one-third will go to search engines for multiple sources on the same matter.

Regina McCombs, in a post on the Poynter Online site, identifies some critical questions and supplies a few answers in a newsroom's quest for a mobile media strategy.

Among her queries: Who is your audience? What does it want? What will you provide?

Then there are the economic questions. Mainly: How will you make money? And: What timelines are you creating to assess success or failure?

There are the technical and resource questions: Who will help develop the strategy? What technology will be employed? How will it all be marketed?

They are all sensible questions, and McCombs largely encourages experimentation on a small scale with quick decisions to either bail or redouble the commitment.

In recent weeks Facebook has been facing criticism about privacy settings that have grown so complex many users can't fathom the degree of protection their information retains.

Earlier this week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged they'd gone too far, missed the mark, and had to perform a do-over.

That's what happened today. At the heart of the change: Significantly reduced information readily available to everyone, the sign most privacy advocates were seeking. Its long list of settings has been grouped and redesigned to present themselves more easily on the page, meaning a more legible experience.

"Now we'll be giving you the ability to control who can see your friends and pages. These fields will no longer have to be public," Zuckerberg blogs.

It has established a new privacy page to outline the impending changes, and it promises to stop making change upon change if users generally support where it is planting the flag.
 

Robert Andrews, writing for paidContentUK, surmises that the venerable Financial Times is preparing to ease out of its printing plant starting in about five years.

He quotes the Times' parent company's director of global content standards as suggesting the pull-back is already under way and that efforts are accelerating to become a digital operation.

The period of sunset, he tells Andrews, is about five years away. That doesn't mean the end, just the beginning of the end, for the printing plant.

Now, this is much sooner than almost anyone else is predicting, but Andrews proceeds to note some Web-first projects as evidence that the walls are closing in on the printed edition.  It's really unclear from the story if FT would cease printed editions or just shift the emphasis away from them.

Apple's iPad arrives internationally this Friday. Peter Preston does the math in the United Kingdom for The Observer in the Guardian and calculates its impact will be a pittance in the pot of newspaper financial needs.

It is more than a news device, and that's part of the problem, Preston concludes.

Considering how many newspapers are sold nationally, how many iPads will be sold nationally, and how many users will employ the iPad to consume news, it's a matter "of bits and bobs, not salvation," he writes.

"The iPad – plus heirs and successors, perhaps – isn't some surrogate digital newspaper waiting to rescue Fleet Street. It's different, with a different appeal. It will surely a find a money-coining slot in the digital spectrum. But salvation? That's something else (even before your wife goes upstairs to bed)," Preston argues.

In his latest MediaWatch post, Tom Foremski cites media watcher Sam Whitmore on the changed journalistic approach online --- as in, only traffic-driving stories are created.

"It's now a luxury for a reporter to write a story about an obscure but important topic. That used to be a job requirement. Now it's a career risk," Whitmore wrote in ITMemos.

Whitmore believes that startup companies aren't being profiled as much because journalists need to ensure their stories catch Googlejuice and have tags like Facebook, iPad and other notable tech-related brands (as I just did) to maximize traffic.

"Page view journalism will make our society poorer because less popular but important topics will be crowded out," Foremski notes, adding that page-view journalism is becoming less effective because of the competition for views.