Stanford has used data from the Library of Congress to illustrate the spread of all kinds of newspapers across the U.S. from 1690 to 2011. Users can see which cities had multiple papers and click on them to learn more about them.

The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan-as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media

In the process of adding friends, following people and retweeting things, we have created a mosaic of what we like, which can be used to train Web services. We don't think about it, but it's there. And it's all out there. What you're seeing in these services and many more are early stages of a new layer spreading across the Web - the social layer. It's becoming key to how online content companies deliver information that increasingly flows through Twitter and Facebook. The social layer of the Web is the next phase. It uses our data and social graphs as machinery to power new services that have nothing to do with updating your status, "liking" or retweeting. It's just the Web, transformed into your Web.If you haven't already, take a couple of minutes to try out Intel's Museum of Me. When you log in with Facebook, it creates a stunning video tour of a futuristic museum about your life and friends.

It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like "The Daily Show." But that is only the beginning of how they process information. According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.

News comments are broken. It was a popular topic of last night's Hacks/Hackers Seattle meetup and the driving notion behind one of the Knight-Mozilla News Challenge, which asks, "How can we reinvent online news discussions?". Alex Schmidt, a freelance reporter and producer working for NPR, Spot.Us and other outlets, has dealt with broken commenting first-hand, in a way that has negatively impacted her chances at future reporting for certain communities. This guest piece from her outlines some of those experiences and how they've affected the work she does.

As part of a "social media summit" this week, the BBC posted an overview of how its user-generated content desk handles reports from the field - verifying and curating them in much the same way that Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing for the past few months during the upheaval in the Middle East. As I've written before, there is a growing need for this kind of curation, but there is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product.

News sites are primarily dependent on casual users, most of whom enter from Google. That said, Facebook is one of the fastest growing traffic sources, while Twitter barely registers. These are some of the findings in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducted an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company. The study examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites; how long they stay during each visit; how deep they go into a site; and where they go when they leave.

Jonathan Stray has opened a new conversation about measuring accuracy in news reports. Stray, who works at the Associated Press and blogs on the side, comes at the issue with a refreshingly analytical, data-driven perspective. His in-depth post, which I urge you to read, does a couple of things. It summarizes important research: There seems to be no escaping the conclusion that, according to the newsmakers, about half of all American newspaper stories contained a simple factual error in 2005. And this rate has held about steady since we started measuring it seven decades ago. And it offers some useful ideas: We could continuously sample a news source's output to produce ongoing accuracy estimates, and build social software to help the audience report and filter errors.

Tumblr's "media evangelist" Mark Coatney recently announced the arrival of big names in the industry that have launched their own tumblelogs, including The Los Angeles Times, Al-Jazeera English and The Guardian. In the past year, more than 160 media organizations, as well as individual journalists, have started using Tumblr. So why has the media become so enamored with the micro-blogging platform?

If traditional media was all about broadcasting - distributing a one-size-fits-all message to a wide audience, usually via a platform controlled by the media - new media is more about personalization and customization. In other words, the quest for a "Daily Me." But it's still unclear how exactly we're going to get there. Two new entrants - a service called Trove and an iPad app called News.me - have joined the horde of players who are trying to answer that question, and they have taken very different approaches.

Saying that journalism is at a crossroads is a great understatement and certainly no secret to RTDNA members. For the pessimist, dwindling newspaper circulations, smaller TV audiences and thousands of lost jobs reinforce the idea that the traditional American media may be dying. But to the optimist, new media platforms and fresh developments in technology present boundless opportunities for growth with virtually endless chances to reach a growing, more demanding news audience. A common theme among all RTDNA members is that we want to know where journalism is going and, more importantly, we want to know how to get there. Archived webinar available here.

Trove harnesses smart, flexible technology that learns from the choices you make. Some have called it "Pandora for news," and the serendipity in its suggestions, pulled from around 10,000 sources, makes Trove a powerful tool for information discovery.   But it's not just algorithms that drive Trove. Our editors are constantly working to inject the latest news onto the site's home page and into channels of information that users can choose to follow. Meanwhile, our crew of engineers keeps Trove in a state of perpetual evolution.   As a Trove user, you'll have the power to create your own channels, which you can use to follow the people, places, things, and information sources that catch your eye. Starting up your Trove experience is easy; the site uses Facebook Connect to deliver to many users a slate of channels based on their already defined interests

Over the coming days, we will be talking to publishers, editors and entrepreneurs about the myriad challenges facing the industry and focus on solutions that can point the way to a revitalized, sustainable model for journalism in the 21st century.

This is an example of how one organization in reaching out to readers to become a network of sources for stories.

In online polling about story selection, editors at the Wisconsin State Journal learn that 'the readers who vote consistently do choose weighty stories.'

FirstPerson is MSNBC's citizen Journalism outlet. 

The Courier-News' Citizen Journalism venture

OJR interviews Calvin Tang, co-founder of Newsvine, about the status of "Daily Me" applications and how his site is using technology to involve readers more intimately with the news.

Google has been experimenting with personalizing Google News, and MediaPost got a look at the proposed layout Friday. The Mountain View, Calif. search engine has been running tests on the design of Google News for the past several months.