Embedding links in stories is a years-old practice for many news media, but the problem is that it usually takes a user off the site to never return. It's as if someone reading the sidebar to a main story in the newspaper put the paper down and left the rest of it unread.
The Washington Post is starting to tinker with that. It'll put links on its stories that can display whatever is at the destination when the cursor rolls over the link, and inside or adjacent to that preview box will be a paid ad.
The Post is introducing this through two of its blogs, The Fix and Celebritology, and is using Apture as the technical supplier. But it's an experiment many will watch.

Even relative geezers like me understand there is something afoot in the way media are being dissembled and reconstructed by consumers --- find a piece here, get a search result there, a send-to-a-friend, get-from-a-friend couple of clicks, and you've got an adequate fill of information to form a view.
The U.S. presidential race is the best petri dish to study for any such new pattern of consumption, so today's New York Times story is welcome information on how younger voters are replacing conventional filters (CNN, Washington Post, even itself) with social media. They're sharing content like never before.
It's clear that the enthusiasts of social media have new ways to distribute content among themselves. Some see this as one more sign that the traditional media are on borrowed time, but it's also clear that someone has to generate and edit content. How that content is distributed and shared might decide how well it is financed, but the challenge for conventional media is to determine how to (not if it should) participate.

Newspapers are now newsrooms and in some cases newscentres. Their steady momentum to the end of the day and the print deadline has been replaced by an incessant humming of the 24/7 digital priority.
It is a news manager's challenge to help reshape the culture, and one of those cultures is the layered editing that often improves and occasionally blandizes the reporter's copy.
The Washington Post has done as much as any North American media to operate across platforms in the last decade. Its washingtonpost.com functions separately from the newspaper, in a different state, and while the two complement each other, they have distinctive qualities that make for a slightly different content organization and hierarchy --- and thus a different consumer experience.
In recent days the Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie, has outlined changes to the production of the newspaper to put it on a more aggressive footing in the new environment. His memo  (available through Slate.com) is an insightful elegy to different days and a clear signal that times have forever changed. In particular it is instructive to read how some non-local desks are being merged, how the rhythm of the newsroom will change to adapt to earlier consumer expectations in the day, and how the newsroom will reduce the number of "touches" on a story (they found as many as 12 editors --- yikes --- had handled a story in one instance).