The conventional wisdom is that digital journalism doesn't linger; it delivers data swiftly, starts a conversation, invites interaction, but gets out of the way of the busily-clicking audience. Other conventional wisdom: People won't spend time online to read long-form journalism. Maybe they'll print it out, but you're better to reserve the depth for the newspaper or magazine.

Along has come Slate.com to prove the pack wrong. Nieman Journalism Lab profiles its success in commissioning long-form pieces that have proven highly successful in securing readership.

Not just any readership, of course. A long-form journalism readership is --- conventional wisdom you can more readily bank on --- a smart readership. With that smart readership comes higher-end advertising support. In other words, it's just the sort of model one needs upon which to build a business.

Slate hasn't spent a lot of money on the pieces, but it has afforded them time. It has each of its staff writers identify a theme about which he/she is passionate and encourages four to six weeks of research and writing. Not many newsrooms can afford that luxury in one bite, but for Slate, it is yielding very strong stories that differ from its daily digest of reporting and commentary.

Two Canadian television networks have appointed female anchors in recent days. Today Global announced Dawna Friesen would return to Canada from London, where she has been NBC's European correspondent, to replace founding anchor Kevin Newman on Global National, who earlier this year announced he was stepping down. Last week CTV announced Lisa LaFlamme as the replacement for Lloyd Robertson, who is stepping aside gradually over the next year (he'll have 35 years in the chair once he shifts into semi-retirement to host special events).

Both terms for the anchors have been extraordinary. Newman essentially built the infrastructure for Global National and made it the largest overall national newscast. Robertson essentially defined anchoring in Canada over a 50-year career and made CTV's the largest late-night newscast through a longer-term creation of infrastructure. Each changed the operating culture of his news division and both redefined the newscasts under them, just as competitor Peter Mansbridge has in winning the most industry awards at CBC.

(My statements of several conflicts in this post: Newman is a longtime friend and colleague, I have worked at CBC and been part of Mansbridge's newscast political panel at times, and I was Robertson's boss for two years at CTV News. I appointed LaFlamme to be host of Canada AM, and on her second day, 9/11 happened. She and co-appointee Rod Black handled the challenge very well (they won a Gemini for it) until Robertson arrived and anchored for most of the next day and beyond. While these comments seem tepid, I happen to think we're served exceptionally by our national newscasts for a country our size. Their perspectives are ambitious and their storytelling distinct from each other to create good consumer choice. End of conflict statement.)

The Canadian television newscasts are not unlike the Canadian newspapers, in that they haven't been battered by audience departures the way their counterparts below the border have been. If you include the digital audiences, more people consume the content now than any time in the last decade and a half. Still, they recognize the need for constant change, accelerated in the digital era.

What will be interesting in the time ahead under these three anchors will be the evolution of the dinner-hour and late-night newscasts. Some commentators suggest the day is past for the evening newscast, but the audience indicates otherwise. A large contingent still makes an appointment to be in front of the television set at a particular hour, just as they set aside time for the paper.

As many media find themselves increasingly focusing on their local relevance in an age of choice for non-local media, though, how will national/international newscasts create an event worthy of making an appointment? The same challenge exists for newspapers. Canadians have so far been highly tolerant and supportive as they redefine themselves.

What is also interesting is that the networks continue to lean heavily toward journalists and not news readers. Friesen is an accomplished reporter, as is LaFlamme. Mansbridge, Newman and Robertson all have been involved extensively in field reporting and long-form anchoring of specials, election coverage and events. All three anchors --- one in the supper hour, when there are more viewers, and two at night when there are fewer --- possess a strong grasp of the always-on digital imperatives for their operations. What is in store should be exciting.

The lead item in this edition of the Columbia Journalism Review examines the opportunities mobile and e-reading provide the business of journalism. Essentially author Curtis Brainard argues that, done right, mobile gives journalism a second chance to find a business model.

But there are big if's in the journey: The content needs to be different to reclaim the added-value nature of what used to be, the advertising needs to find an easy way to campaign across various platforms, the industry needs to create partnerships to stay ahead of the technology curve, and there is that most tricky question of whether consumers will shell out for subscriptions and services in an era of abundance.

Still: "The circulation levels and ad dollars of yesterday may be gone for good, but there are real opportunities to reclaim control of journalism’s financial future. Second chances are rare, and if we miss this opportunity to capitalize on digital content, we may not get a third."

It is difficult to call the different approaches between Google and Apple a war. After all, Google pays Apple to put its search technology on the iPhone.

But there are signs of clear rivalry, some brinksmanship, even something akin to corporate war.

On Monday, for instance, Google introduced a do-it-yourself application builder, based on tests involving nurses, grade schoolers, high schoolers and undergraduates with no computer pursuits. The aim is to make it relatively simple to create an application that will work in the open-source sphere of the Google Android smartphone.

By comparison, Apple is betting on proprietary applications it will vet and possibly veto. Google has no such filter; if it works, it works, and clearly Google is betting that its approach will win the war (skirmish, rivalry, contest) in due course.

The implications for newsrooms: It'll be important to create apps for both major forms of smartphones. On Monday that got easier.

Foursquare, the location-based information service, surpassed two million users today.

It still isn't as large as some other location-based services but appears to have the sharpest growth pattern (it only surpassed one million users three months ago). Its flexibility as a tool and its system of recognition and rewards appears to have struck a chord.

Newsrooms need to consider it seriously, without a doubt. Even if it requires a fair amount of management to keep your location updated, and even if it raises some questions about privacy and security, there are ways to implement Foursquare without running risk.

Zombie Journalism has assembled eight basic ways in which Foursquare can be used:

1. Finding a source with a specific tie to a location.
2. Finding a source on the scene.
3. Finding out where your contacts are.
4. Alerting audiences to the location of news.
5. Providing tips on locations.
6. Learn about a place.
7. See where people are.
8. Say where you are.

It is only the last point that concerns some news managers, who aren't sure disclosing location is safe for journalists and who also wonder if their competitive advantage might be surrendered by alerting people where certain information resides.

That said, if we are into an era increasingly of location-based media, the media will increasingly have to understand the location-based entities.

In a post on his TechCrunch site, Michael Arrington asserts that we need to know the opinions of journalists on the subjects they cover, and that once we do, we ought to consider their expressions healthy because they are transparent.

"I'm dismayed to see journalists continue to be punished, even fired, for expressing their opinions on the things they cover," he starts.

Objectivity is just a lie, Arrington argues. Journalists use the pretext of objectivity to build credibility and the public shouldn't buy it. Rather, he says, understanding bias permits an understanding of content in context.

"We need more opinion in news, not less," he suggests.

Arrington makes an age-old assertion: Every choice a journalist makes is a subjective one. But he places his argument in the context of a changed media broadened immensely by access to tht technology of production and distribution.

The conventional wisdom today is that the line between opinion and reportage has blurred, in part because of a widening of the supply of content and creators, and in part because commentary is an effective form of communication that draws an audience.

He would rather we know what people think, not just think about what they say.

The Oriella public relations network has released results (available by PDF here) of its annual international survey --- this year's is larger, of 770 journalists in 15 countries --- and found journalists' confidence is returning but uncertainty lingers about their work.

Year to year, fewer (44% vs. 60%) believe the print media sphere will shrink, 40% believe newer forms will furnish a good media landscape, and while more than 40% still believe online media could harm standards, the tone of the report is acceptance (nearly half believe their newspapers will eventually be digital only) and adaptation (9% expect advertising revenue will continue to decline).

Indeed, nearly half noted their roles are busier because of new media demands, 30% say they are working longer hours and 28% said they had less time to research stories. But only one-fifth believe standards have declined and only one-sixth liked their jobs less as a result.

Interestingly, as the effort to create mobile content has grown, the effort at such initiatives as blogs and videos has started to taper --- an indication of trade-offs in the growth of digital.

Nearly one-quarter of those surveyed had adopted or were considering paywalls or subscription models to strengthen revenue.

Today Yahoo unveiled its latest approach to journalism, a blog featuring writers who are partly directed by the most popular search queries.

The Upshot was released from beta today (it had been called The Newsroom for some months) and its team of eight (six reporters, two editors) appear, for the time being (in their photos, anyway), like they aren't being run off their feet. Chronicling all they seemingly intend to should be a draining process, though. It's early days but you can already see the demands are enormous.

They'll break news, blog, add analysis, dig through documents, keep on top of stories and presumably cover enough of the landscape to make readers feel that the right notes have been struck. Eight people always on.

Apart from the metaphysical challenge, the interesting part of the operation is how they'll be directed. As the blog says today, "our responsiblity is to you." But it's also a matter of its direction coming from you, in how you determine what you want to read through search. That'll help them gauge what to pursue.

Although The New York Times yesterday suggested it's a pure play of algorithm-leading-the-journalist, the blog for The Upshot today doesn't convey that. There appears to be much more human initiative in the mix.

"Our goal is to be blunt narrators of the day's news, to cut through the noise and misinformation and get to the heart of what's important and why. We'll be fast, getting information to you as a story breaks and then sticking with it until the end," it says.

The Journal Register Company declared its own Independence Day Sunday, freeing itself fromo proprietary publishing tools and distributing content with freely available tools.

(Let me declare the conflict up front: the Journal Register CEO, John Paton, is joining the board of our newly reconfigured company, now to be known as the Postmedia Network Inc. But before he joined forces with Paul Godfrey to assemble the bid to take over our newspaper chain, he was generating the Ben Franklin Project for his newsrooms.)

The challenge was simple: Use what's out there to publish, in the process shedding enormous financial obligations to processes that don't add value but add cost. It wasn't a matter of thinking outside the box but in not acknowledging a box existed.

Newsrooms in the 18-paper Journal Register group found some very innovative ways to reach the audience, and while no one can necessarily say those tools offer the sustainable practice, Paton is saying that innovation itself is the sustainable practice --- what guarantees the company's future.

John Markoff of The New York Times asks of the Internet: "Can privacy be preserved while bringing a semblance of safety and security to a world that seems increasingly lawless?"

His story Sunday identifies efforts under way in the United States and elsewhere to deliver a form of ultra-net, a way of communicating electronically with sufficient visibility to secure trust.

The efforts flow from controversial concerns that anonymity somehow confers a recklessness. In this particular case, though, it also involves technological concerns that insufficient trust among the Internet's engineers lead to breaches in security that undermine the faith in the system necessary for it to operate.

The big question is whether we're moving toward the equivalent of a driver-licence mentality for the Internet in which only those deemed capable are permitted to play in certain quarters. It's true that the efforts have a walled garden effect, even if that isn't the full intent.