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"People are way more hungry for news at their local level than even we imagined," said Brian Farnham, editor in chief of Patch. "There's a lot of good sources for news existing at the national level and beyond, but at the local level the cohesive experience is missing."

Top staffers get a salary of about $40,000 a year, and rookies get less, Tucker said. His wife, personal finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn, serves as editorial director and coaches journalists on writing skills and headline writing. Twenty newsroom employees produce content for the 10 sites. The stories focus on local people, and the company currently does not rely on user-generated content. "News gathering is a real profession," Tucker said. "Citizen journalism is a completely false rabbit. It's simply not going to succeed."

Patch, by contrast, solicits citizen contributions for news tips, feedback and announcements and calendars.

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at home is as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third of the population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

the overwhelming majority of people who have Internet access have broadband.

“Now we’re at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-Internet-users.”

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

anonymity has made comment streams “havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”

“But a lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher,” he said. “People who might have something useful to say are less willing to participate in boards where the tomatoes are being thrown.”

one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles.

it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

Every island in Maine is struggling to keep their schools vibrant and open. In the last 100 years, Maine went from supporting 300 year-round island communities to 15, according to Snyder.

The filmmaker splits her time between Washington, D.C. and the island. If it were up to her, she would be on Isle au Haut year-round, but her job requires her to sit in meetings with people to talk about her documentary projects. Despite this, Wurzburg said she can work remotely and does as often as possible.

The high-speed Internet that her island home is connected to helps a lot.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment,

Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters... they've become community organizers.

you have to have a community that supports you, if you want to make a living online.

your past earns you nothing online. Whatever audience you will have there, you must build yourself

The top editor of The Times, Russ Stanton, and several of his deputies vigorously opposed the ad before it was published, but they were overruled by the paper’s business executives, according to people with direct knowledge of the dispute,

Mr. Conroy noted that however unorthodox the ad may be for print, it mirrors a common practice online of having an ad cover part or all of a Web site’s home page for a few seconds.

“It’s taking a concept that we normally apply to new media and reimagining it to a concept in a newspaper,”

The New Hampshire school is one of a handful of universities looking at ways to encourage active living, health and wellness in rural places. Researchers say the work is important because people living in rural communities are at greater risk for obesity, and past research focused on cities and suburbs has often produced conclusions that are a poor fit for rural towns.

“To get kids more physically active, one of the options seems to be getting more kids participating in after-school programs, but the busing situation is such that the bus goes home at 3 o’clock, and if you want to stay later you have to get a ride,” he said. “If you’re from a low-income family, you may not be able to get a ride. Chances are, your parents are already working two jobs, and they just can’t help you out.”

researchers at Plymouth State worked with residents of three rural towns to create a Google-style “active living” map, with captions of certain features — a favorite bike route, for example — provided by residents.

our 'photo-op' culture, where much of everyday life seems picture driven and played out in front of the camera.

"As a professional practice, photojournalism has historically relied on two forms of scarcity. The first involved the scarcity of skills to make good images, and the second the scarcity of popular access to the dominant forms of print distribution, the newspapers and magazines. Both of these limits have now been fundamentally challenged.

"Amateurs are able to purchase and use the best camera technology to make striking photographs, and - although it is not solely responsible for the decline of newspapers - the transformative power of the Internet has reduced the cost of publication to near zero, thereby opening up new channels for the circulation of imagery. Together these transformations have produced a new era of abundant pictures.

Various studies have shown that the major reasons people do not have broadband are: the cost of Internet services and the cost of computers; not knowing how to use a computer; and not understanding why the Internet is relevant.

Last week, Mr. Genachowski outlined a plan to transform the $8 billion Universal Service Fund, most of which comes from consumers’ telephone bills nationwide, from subsidizing telephone service in underserved areas to expanding broadband access in those areas. He said Tuesday that some of the money from this fund could be used to help expand computer classes in libraries.