News mix for a Monday. Includes a variety of stories that are popping up, or on the horizon. The law and bloggers and other website keepers is a simmering issue. A young Mac enthusiast published details of the new Mini Mac and is being sued by Apple for trade secret misappropriation. According to the NYTimes story,

The Think Secret case is the third intellectual-property lawsuit that Apple has filed recently. Apple also sued two men who allegedly distributed pre-released versions of its upcoming version of its Mac OS X software, as well as unnamed individuals for allegedly leaking details about a future and as yet-unannounced music product, code-named Asteroid. Read more (registration required.)

Student Seeks Legal Aid in Apple Case Media on the media was a big story over the weekend following on the heels of CBS News independent panel investigation. Todd Gitlin asks that if the media be pilloried, it be over whether they are doing good or bad journalism and notes that "...within their limited franchise, they honored the journalistic faith that more comprehensive reports are preferable to less comprehensive ones; skeptical scrutiny of sources to credulity; context to sound bites." Read Gitlin's story. Eric Boehlert from Salon notes in a CJR interview, takes MSM (mainstream media) to task for its pack mentality. Certain stories are covered without depth, but with mind-numbing repetition, while important and often pretty obvious questions don't get asked, and the stories that would result, don't get covered. He cites the connection between Bernard Kerik's ranting that a Kerry presidency would bring more terrorism during the run-up to the election and Kerik's subsequent, though spectacularly failed nomination as payback after the election.

"Truth is, in my nearly five years at Salon and a few hundred bylines, I've never once had to abandon a story I was working on because my editors and I thought that someone else had beaten us to it, or had explored the same angle, which is odd. The bad news is that's driven by an incredibly timid brand of journalism. The good news is that it provides Salon with all sorts of operating room."

The Year of Blog brings lots of attention on blogs, blogging, and bloggers, but here is an instantiation of the REAL story about blogs. They are a tool that facilitates communication. They will transform media operations because they break the "one to many" mold that pre-electronic media had to fit into. In this MSNBC story from its business section, Mark Tosczak details the overhaul of the News & Record of Greensboro, NC, noting

That breaks the traditional model where newspaper reporters and editors serve as gatekeepers, deciding what information actually makes news. In the virtually unlimited space on the Web, such constraints are no longer an issue. And with readers contributing content, the paper's Web content is no longer limited by the size of the staff.

The paper is going to use citizen journalist bloggers and blogs by its editors and reporters to try and transform itself and stay in business as it sees its newsprint version continue to lose readership. The hybrid model, where the electronic version and print version work together is one we will see more and more. It will be cheaper for news organizations to use citizen reports than to hire more reporters. I think there are two issues here that will make or break these hybrids. Can they gracefully relinquish their control on gatekeeping and framing the news in a collaborative way with their viewer/users (v/users) and can they maintain a level of quality and interest in citizen reporting? In following blogs for years, I have noted that the gossipy ones are interesting at first, but their interest palls in a way that traditional news with its flawed, but attempted objectivity does not. Poor CBS has gotten the bloggers het up again by making its independent panel's report unfriendy to the e-world

With the help of Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and fellow blogger (sethf.com/infothought/blog/), Mr. Miller found that the document's encryption settings had been changed and, as a result, the text could not be copied. Anyone who downloaded the panel's report from either the CBS News servers or those of the law firm would have to retype any passages they wished to include in, say, an e-mail message or a blog post.

But look to William Safire's column for a rundown on what ails journalism and how the remedies are in the works.