Some media stories of note for Friday, May 5, 2013:

Today is World Press Freedom Day, and the Editors Weblog notes how the recent passage of the South African secrecy bill poses a new threat to expression by journalists of uncomfortable ideas. Critics express concern that journalists and whistleblowers will not be protected when they expose corruption.
 
Our perceptions of the strength and reach of particular social media might not be accurate. BuzzFeed has assembled the official data to demonstrate what people are actually using. For instance, SnapChat is more popular than Instagram, Yahoo Mail is more popular than Twitter, and MySpace is about as popular as Spotify.

Mathew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, takes on the idea that Twitter should have some sort of correction mechanism. The idea surfaces every time there is a large, complex event that spurs a fair amount of bad information. Ingram says correcting would ruin the vibe of Twitter, which is an iterative stream of real-time content. Much as he regrets making an errant Tweet, he thinks the wider crowd will eventually help fix the mistake.

Peter Verweij, writing for Memeburn, tracks the development of data-driven journalism and its importance in modern story-telling. He notes the emergence of visualized data, programmable pages, maps and geographic information systems. While typical editors may lack the skills, there appears to be a need for developers in newsrooms to master the new opportunities.

There are some interesting discussion seeds in a post on TechPresident reflecting a recent session on journalism in a time of increasingly open government data.

Some thought-leaders (Jeff Jarvis, Tim O'Reilly, for instance) suggest the "let's get them" era is subsiding and that journalism will have to be more collaborative with government to distribute data. At the very least, some different thinking needs to emerge.

It won't be a matter of pulling punches but having more than punches in the arsenal, they suggest.

"I think we're at an inflection point where we're moving away from this model of advocacy which is about making people wrong and catching people out and moving to a model of advocacy that's about what we want to build together," O'Reilly told writer Nick Judd.

"Figuring out how to change that dynamic, but retain credibility and usefulness as government watchdogs, may be the first step towards changing this system," Judd writes. If mainstream media are part of the problem, then they are obviously in this case part of the solution.

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.