Media stories of note for Tuesday, May 14, 2013:

The Associated Press revealed Monday that the U.S. Department of Justice had secretly obtained two months of telephone records for its journalists at several of its operations. AP decried the move as an unprecedented intrusion into the rights of a free press. Details of the probe are not known, but it was believed to be in connection with AP's reporting on a foiled terrorist plot. The New Yorker's John Cassidy looks at the wider political implications of the issue for the Obama Administration.

The Bloomberg terminal controversy continues to draw commentary. It was revealed that reporters were able to advance stories on the basis of their monitoring of login activity of clients on the Bloomberg data terminals. Gawker notes that the monitoring was supposed to stop, but didn't. And the Guardian suggests the matter is not a big deal. That said, the Wall Street Journal reports Bloomberg and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are cooperating on examining the issue.

Joel Smith, writing for the Pacific Standard, explores an innovative effort in sociology and journalism in Alhambra, California, to study the news consumption of residents and marry them to a grassroots organization that would use a range of contributors to produce community journalism. He writes that the effort has promise in linking expertise in consumerism to a market's need for content.

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.