Here are some media stories of note for Friday, February 22, 2013:

Given that Google's large search engine is in turn an engine for news site traffic, an understanding of its algorithm to rate content is essential to a site's success. Computerworld has examined Google's latest patent application that reveals the elements of what it gauges in ranking site content. There are no particular surprises, as it might be expected: the site's productivity, article length, deemed importance, speed, staff size, circulation, originality, style, diversity and breadth of coverage all factor in the ranking, among other things.

Magazine editor Ann Friedman, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, argues it's time to stop pronouncing the death of print. Many print outlets continue to thrive, she notes. Rather, it's time to simply recognize the end of the primacy of print.

Tom Rosenstiel, the veteran news executive and head of the American Press Institute, writes regularly for Poynter Online. His latest involves what he describes as the twin delusions of the White House and the press corps. The latter has complained that the Obama Administration has managed to avoid major newspaper interviews and focused instead on local and digital sessions. Rosenstiel, who interviews extensively for the column, concludes it is wrong for the White House to think it can bypass major media and wrong for the press corps to believe it is somehow the lone gatekeeper.

Countless initiatives have set out to deal the newspaper industry a digital body blow with a personalized online publication.

The latest to try is Hawthorne Labs, a nest of former Google and Bing engineers who have produced Apollo, a publication that draws upon user patterns to choose what might be preferred from various categories. Apollo helps the user discover content.

It uses an algorithm to hunt blogs, social media and traditional sources to cluster content of interest to someone on the basis of her online roaming. It's an interesting project worth noting. An iPad application is out and an iPhone app is coming.

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.