It's no secret that new media often relies upon old media to supplement its web pages with fresh content -- but just how heavily?

New media is "extremely dependent" upon its predecessors, according to the University of Illinois' coordinator of information technology and research Kalev Leetaru, who analyzed an astonishing 171,717 page updates from January 2002 to December 2008 on the Drudge Report.

Since its inception, the news aggregation website founded in the late 1990s by Matt Drudge has had a large impact on the media sphere -- Drudge himself was deemed one of Time magazine's most influential people in 2006. But in his report, published in the web journal First Monday, Leetaru says he was curious to find out how dependent a "'new media' aggregator [is] on the 'old media' it draws from."

His findings aren't entirely shocking: Drudge's bread and butter are the wire services and mainstream media outlets. The site has found success by discovering the odder, more obscure stories from these outlets that are sometimes overlooked and, in turn, propelling them into popular news stories.

In the timespan Drudge looked at, the site had linked to over 100,000 stories. Leetaru breaks those links down by country and domain, and finds that it's mostly "old media" who's getting the attention.

Here's the Top 10:

Breitbart most likely scores high because Andrew Breitbart used to work for Drudge and was linking to himself. The Washington Post banks nearly twice as many links as the New York Times, while newbie Politico ranked 16th -- even though it's only been in existence for two of the years Leetaru studied.

Leetaru also found that Drudge's daily and hourly update cycles match the cycles of the outlets he draws almost 90 percent of his coverage from.

As Gawker highlights, Leetaru's point was emphasized by the drop-off in updates on Drudge's site during the Iraq War in 2003, when news outlets devoted a majority of their coverage to Iraq.

"As newspapers focused their resources on Iraq and stopped writing about animal attacks, weather, and robot sex," the blog notes, "Drudge had less to work with."

Ah, there’s nothing like full disclosure.

Take this email, forwarded to us from an insider at Fox Business:

From: douglas mcintyre
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 7:07 AM
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Fox Business exclusive video provider to 24/7
 
C,
 
If Fox Business would be interested in being the
exclusive provider of video business news for
24/7 Wall St, we should talk this week.
 
Best
 
Doug

Well, so what, you say? Just a standard business proposal.

It was.

Until Monday morning, when financial blog 24/7 Wall Street had this post from Douglas McIntyre titled, “Fox Business Still Taking On Water.”

In a nutshell, McIntyre writes, "Fox Business is clearly in trouble.”

McIntyre’s main point: In the last 11 months, since published reports putting Fox Business at 6,000 average weekday viewers, the numbers have “hardly budged … Average hourly viewership runs between 2,000 and 8,000 during most hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The network’s most watched prime-time shows rarely pull more than 15,000 viewers per hour.”

Since the network’s ratings are too low to be covered by Nielsen -- a digital station, Fox Business is still only in 50 million households -- McIntyre claims to have gotten the information from, among others, a former executive with the network.

Fox Business, naturally, disputes the numbers -- a fact McIntyre did put in his blog. But an insider at the station (a real one, at least in this case) insisted to TheWrap that not only are the numbers wrong but that the company went through its HR files and found that: “There were absolutely no former executives that would have had access to this information.”

But it’s not really the pissing contest that concerns us. Indeed, McIntyre might even be right.

It just seems that when a writer makes a business proposal to a network, and that proposal is rejected – as this one was – it might be worth mentioning when the writer does a subsequent slam on that network.

And if Fox Business is in such trouble, why was McIntyre so anxious to align with it in the first place?
 

They paid $459 each to attend the dinner at New York’s Cipriani’s Wall Street – and they had already paid about half of that to even be considered for a nomination -- but the 500 or so nominees at the Webby Awards Monday night were not complaining.

The famous five-word acceptance speeches were mostly amusing. Dinner was served amid a loose, upbeat atmosphere, with attendees – a few in jeans -- table-hopping and congregating at the bar during breaks in the ceremony.

Hosting the evening for the second year in a row, Seth Meyers, head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” had some wickedly good lines, many making fun of the Webbys themselves. Kicking off the evening, he said, “If you like the Oscars but wish there were fewer celebrities and more awards, this is the night for you.”

At every turn, he mocked the tech world. Noting the importance of the Obama campaign’s tech savviness in texting the news of Obama’s vice presidential pick at 3 a.m.: “But really, if you are texting me at 3 a.m., you better be someone who wants to hook up.”

“Before the Internet,” Meyers concluded, “if you wanted to see Paris Hilton’s vagina, you had to buy her a drink.”

Winners were announced in May. Only a few dozen of the more than a hundred winners were chosen at random to present their five word speeches during the event Monday. The rest made speeches that were videotaped earlier, to be made available online at www.webbyawards.com.

Some winners who got to go on stage drew loud laughter, including the Onion: “Free all attractive political prisoners.”

Arianna Huffington, who had conducted a contest on the Huffington Post to choose her acceptance speech, went with "I didn't kill newspapers, OK?"

Cameron Diaz made a surprise appearance to present the special award for Webby Person of the Year to Jimmy Fallon. “I came in late -- can we swear?” Diaz asked. Told that she could, she said, “he’s just a funny mother f--- er isn’t he?”

Fallon bounded on stage to give his acceptance speech: “Thank God Conan got promoted.”

There were serious moments, too, including Charlie Rose introducing a lifetime achievement award to Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, recognized as artist of the year for web-friendly moves like giving away an album for free on the band’s web site, got applause for his speech: “Wait – we didn’t charge anything?”

While it’s not clear what effect, if any, a Webby award has on someone in Reznor’s realm of celebrity, some of the more obscure winners were pleasantly shocked by the power of a Webby nomination.

The winner for Best Blog, Culture/Personal, 1000awesomethings.com, belongs to a 29-year-old Canadian, Neil Pasricha, who said after the ceremony that he was “a boring guy with a 9 to 5 job.” He started the site because “there was no good news out there. It was ice caps melting, wars being fought—so I just wanted to make a place where for a few minutes a day, you could appreciate the feeling of underwear right out of the dryer.”

Within hours of his Webby nomination, Pasrischa said, he had been contacted by five literary agents. A week later, he had a deal with Putnam to write a book based on the site. His traffic, he said, “has doubled or tripled” since the award.

His acceptance speech: “Short acceptance speeches – awesome!”

Actress Lake Bell, who stars in Rob Corddry’s web series “Children’s Hospital,” which won for Best Comedy, Long Form or Series, was also enjoying herself. “I don't know if the award will help the show. But when you have a web series, any press is good press,” she said.

About the Webbys evening, Bell said, “They warned us it was going to be long, but it was actually fun. I enjoyed it.”

Overall, Meyers said after the ceremony as he lingered by the stage while the guests filed out for the afterparty, “It was really fun. It’s such an unpretentious awards show.”

His only problem, he said, was the difficulty of “not recycling all the best Internet jokes I did last year.”

As for the future of the Webbys: “It’s obviously a crazy transitional time,” Meyers said. “One hundred years from now, this might be the only awards show.”

Screenwriter John August has written eight feature films, including “Go,” “Big Fish” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” At the moment, he’s writing the screenplay for “Creature,” based on the graphic novel, for Sam Mendes. But his latest project is a short story called “The Variant,” a mini-thriller about a mysterious library cataloguer whose secret life is revealed when a woman falls through his bathroom ceiling. August decided to sell the story directly to readers by posting it on Amazon as a Kindle edition, with sample pages available on his blog. In lieu of an editor, August recruited 20 of his Twitter followers to give him feedback on the story before he published. August talked to Mondo Media about what he’s learned from this experiment.

So essentially, you got your Twitter followers to help you polish up "The Variant," instead of having a professional editor?
I think a great editor is a huge help to anything you write -- though lacking that, a bunch of disinterested eyes was a great second choice. I make movies for a living, so I recognize how important it is to have an editor who is giving your movie shape. But I also recognize how important it is to put your movie in front of an audience to see how it responds.

What’s the benefit of using Twitter followers, as opposed to any other 20 random people you could get?
At 7:43 on a Tuesday night I would tweet to ask for eight people to read it, and within a minute I would have eight people tweeting their 'yes,' and I would direct a message to them with their link to the file. I’ve run a blog for five years, and I love the interaction with my readers, but it’s so delayed on a blog. The immediacy of Twitter makes different kinds of collaboration possible.

I signed on to Twitter first when I was at Sundance with "The Nines," and at that point I was literally just tweeting where I was so people could find me. And it was fascinating to see how it’s grown. Now I definitely see my Twitter feed as being my public persona -- Facebook is people I actually know in real life.

How long have you been reading on Kindle?
I love my Kindle, and I would prefer to read any book on a Kindle now -- probably after the third book I read on Kindle, it felt just really natural, and you love the freedom of having your book with you wherever you are …. I read a lot on my iPhone. Honestly part of my motivation for putting the story on the Kindle was seeing how easy it would be for anybody to get through it on their iPhone. The challenge was that it was only going to be available in the US. So I had to let people in say Micronesia have the pdf version too.

Which has sold more?
I’ve sold three times as many Kindle version as pdfs. Which is fine.

You’ve said you settled on the 99 cent price for the story because that’s what a single song costs on iTunes.
I don’t read a lot of short stories, yet I really like short stories! It’s just, they were never around, never handy. So it seemed like a single was the equivalent -- and 99 cents is also the price for most of the games at the app store. It seems like a nice price for one unit of culture.

Did you have experience with the New York publishing world before this?
Despite the seeming synergies between Hollywood and N.Y. publishing, I really don’t know that world at all. I don’t know a single editor or publisher. I know a handful of authors. Early on, just to see if he was interested in it as a model, I sent the story to Michael Chabon, who’s a friend of a friend. He gave me a great quote and a few suggestions. A lot of authors make their money on long books. Yet a lot of them also write short stories. But right now there’s no market for them except a few magazines -- but no one is making money off of their short stories. I did this partly to see, could there be a market for short stories?

What effect do you think Kindle self-publishing like “The Variant” will have on the publishing industry? 
I don’t see self-publishing greatly impacting publishing, the same way indy film has not greatly impacted Hollywood film. But this is a case of a story that would otherwise not have a market without self publishing.

How has Hollywood reacted?
Because I did this on my own, all the people who usually read me in Hollywood are figuring out that I have this story so I’m starting to get the phone calls about the movie rights, through the website and a New York Times article.

It's interesting -- I was experimenting with: What’s the future of publishing? And the response is, where are the movie rights? But I am not talking to anyone about them at this point. I’ll do other stuff in the universe of this story, but I’m not thinking about a movie right now.
 

“Excessive texting” is the latest alarming teenage trend that the New York Times is onto. Readers have kept a story headlined “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” high on the Times' Most Read list for three days now.

If you’re looking for the kind of story newspaper editors love, you can never fail with the “crazy things the kids are up to now” genre. (Thursday’s “Hugging is out of control among teens” story makes this a banner week.) But they go even more nuts for a “technology is dangerous and threatens our very humanity” story -- and so the text-menace story is a double whammy.

Kids are sending a mind-boggling 80 text messages a day, a survey found. And it’s really bad for them and for society!

The texting story claims that doctors and psychologists worry that excessive texting is leading teens to anxiety, bad grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation. Also, it turns out, they’re texting their parents, of all people, and that’s hampering their development into autonomous adults.

Serious damage may be happening to their thumbs, too. At least the hugging story only has worried school administrators talking about clogging school hallways and an “unserious” academic atmosphere.

Not surprisingly, the story has inspired loud snickers across the web. Gawker responded with, “Wait, aren't our opposable thumbs what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? In that case, could the text messaging/thumb destruction epidemic currently sweeping the nation eventually lead to the complete breakdown of all human society?”

The MentalFloss blog posted, “OMG, teenagers are overdoing something?! They’re getting cramped thumbs from too much technological twiddling? Say it ain’t so! (We used to call this Nintendo Thumb back in the day.)" The post turned off the sarcasm to point out wisely that “teens eventually learn to moderate their own behavior, and most come through it without impaired thumbs.”

The parenting blogs didn’t like the piece any better:  “News flash, it’s not good for teens to text all the time,” one post began.  Another had the headline, “Teens are texting maniacs -- Duh!”

Science blogs seem equally puzzled that the New York Times would trumpet this news: One asked, “Do people remember stuff about how widespread usage of telephones were going to cause problems too?”

Maybe it’s a good thing that the most eloquent rebuttal of this article has been on the New York Times website itself, in a post by Lisa Belkin on the Motherlode blog. “Like everything else in parenting and in life, we should aim to mitigate the abuse of a technology, not mourn its very existence,” Belkin says.

That nails the problem of not just this article but an entire outdated strain of mournful, fearful thinking about technology that is still alive and well at newspapers like the Times. And of course, it’s hard not to detect fear and mourning under the surface, too: Technology is taking away the job security of the very people who write and edit these articles.

But the purveyors of this stuff might feel better if they checked in with the latest brain research. UCLA’s Dr. Gary Small, for example, has a cool book called "iBrain" that explains that yes, using new technology is altering the structure of our brains -- just as it did when, say, we first started eating with forks.

There are good and bad things about this -- face-to-face social skills, for example, erode when a majority of social interactions happen virtually. But just as human beings were intelligent enough to develop these technologies, we’re also intelligent enough to come up with solutions to our problems.

Is Twitter turning on the very celebrities that have made the little, revenue-free web company into an outsized cultural and business-world presence?

It sure seemed that way, after Variety reported Monday that Twitter has partnered with Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment to "develop an unscripted TV series described as putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."

Except that, first of all, Twitter claims it has not “partnered” with anyone in Hollywood.

As The Twitter blog clarified Tuesday:

“Some Hollywood folks are developing something that leverages Twitter and they are extremely enthusiastic as evidenced by all the media hubbub yesterday and today. We have little to do with their efforts but we wish them success.”

Still: What does it mean that the show being developed “leverages Twitter” to help people in some competitive hunt for celebrities? That is still far from clear.

Twitter’s attempt at damage control was too little, too late. Somehow, that ambiguously worded Variety report led a blogger named Liz Barrett to speculate --quite reasonably, given the story --  that the show might involve “ordinary people” using Twitter to hunt down celebrities. Her post was called “Look Out Ashton Kutcher, Twitter Wants to Track Celebrities on New Reality TV Show.”

That did not sit so well with celebrity alpha-Twitterers Kutcher and Demi Moore. Kutcher tweeted:

“Wow I hope this isn't true. I really don't like being sold out. May have to take a twitter hiatus.”

He then tweeted, in reponse to someone who apparently asked him what his beef was: “Um how about... I don't want to be stalked!!! RT @madbrendan: sounds like a crap show anyway! cant imagine it getting many viewers lol”

Liz Barrett saw what was happening and tried to calm the seas, explaining that the celeb-stalking scenario she laid out was strictly hypothetical in a post called "Anatomy of an Unintentional Twitstorm." In other words: She was just kidding!

But by then CNN was reporting the very ominous news, Kutcher Threatens to Stop Twittering. Moore, Alyssa Milano and other celebrities jumped in too, saying they’d get off the Twitter train if such a show were made.

Variety still has not corrected the original story, which named novelist/screenwriter Amy Ephron as creator and executive producer, with Kevin Foxe and Steve Latham, Reveille's Mark Koops and Howard T. Owens, Brillstein's Jon Liebman and Lee Kernis.

The idea that Twitter is behind this show, and that it involves some kind of hunt for celebrities, is still spreading over the web, gaining legitimacy: late Tuesday, The New York Times posted a story citing the Variety report and repeating the line about the show featuring “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities.”

If this show is not going to use Twitter to stalk celebrities, and if Twitter really is only casually connected to it in the first place, there’s some serious explaining to do.
 

It’s becoming almost poignant, the dance between slick, friendly, but withholding Google and those slightly shabby, lovelorn newspapers, who want so badly for this relationship to work out.

We’d be so good together, the newspapers say. With your money and our incredible journalistic brains … who knows how far we could go!

We do like you an awful lot, replies Google -- you’re our partners! It’s just we don’t see it really as an owner-type relationship.

But we do have some advice for you -- which we tell you only because we like you so much. Those … articles you publish? We need to talk about those. You really should do something about them.

Maybe we can help you make them better -- more like the kinds of articles people want to read. That way, you’ll get more ads, and then we’ll have even more money.

To help you with, of course.

(sigh.)

Newspaper people have been reporting for months that Google maybe, possibly, at some point, might have, but not really, but could have, and still even might, buy a newspaper. Or maybe it'll help a newspaper (or maybe all newspapers!) survive by becoming nonprofit.

And Google, for its part, has been just vague enough to keep this speculation alive.

The headline in a Financial Times article posted Wednesday seemed to be confirming that, in fact, they'd thought seriously about a relationship but have decided to remain single: “Google Drops Idea to Buy Newspaper.”

The article, which accompanied a videotaped interview with CEO Eric Schmidt, said, “Google has considered buying a newspaper or using its charitable arm to support news businesses seeking nonprofit status, but is now unlikely to pursue either option, Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive, told the Financial Times.”

Here was, apparently, confirmation that Google had considered taking things to another level.

But as Silicon Alley Insider points out, Schmidt didn’t really say that. Watching the 10-minute video, SAI is right.

What Schmidt told the FT: “We’ve actually looked at this, and we’re trying to avoid crossing the line,” he said.

That’s it. It sounds like it did not go anywhere near tire-kicking. Let alone ring-shopping.

Listening to him, the idea that Google would ever own an individual newspaper -- given what their business is -- seems ludicrous. And the idea that Google would facilitate some transition for newspapers, as an industry or individually, into nonprofit status also seems far-fetched.

It's not so much that Schmidt is a tease (though he is a little) but that newspapers are so willing to take crumbs of his attention, put them on a tray and call them cookies.

What Schmidt says Google wants: “We are very interested in trying to develop online news versions that somehow address the immediate needs of people and for which advertising works better.”

How would those two things happen? “Newspapers that I read online should remember what I read and allow me to go deeper in to the story.”

If Google could figure out a way to do that, he continued, they would use it to benefit all  newspapers:

“We typically don’t do exclusives because everybody benefits from innovation ... If we come up with a great product in this area, we’ll make it available to everybody ... It’s too important to our users. How do you make something which is so infinitely satisfying that people cannot put it down, in the new form?”

Ah, that old question. If some newspaper could do that, I bet Google might even rethink their business enough to look seriously at the idea of buying it. Even Warren Beatty got married eventually.

Then again, there’s George Clooney.

So what about the question of Google helping newspapers make the transition to nonprofit status? As the FT points out, that would be a good job for the Google Foundation.

Schmidt’s answer to that was brusque: “The Google Foundation is busy doing other things.”

Newspapers, you need to understand that all this constitutes rejection. But there are things you can learn from every rejection! Listen to Schmidt’s advice. (He means well.) Allow people to “go deeper” into the story.

While you’re at it, work on making it all “infinitely satisfying.” That should do the trick.

Sunday night, a 4.7 earthquake here in L.A. Then Monday morning, a shaken-up news landscape.

Today the world gets to see the first issue of a new Newsweek -- revamped by editor John Meacham and his team to try to be less of a populist sprawl over the week’s news, more in tune with a smaller, more educated, upscale audience. The goal is to be choosier, tighter, smarter and celebrity-free.

He thinks the weekly schedule is ideal for a mag to go after the choicest fish in the news pond, and he has a point. As Meacham puts it in his introductory note:

“Counterintuitively, perhaps, the weekly cycle is a promising one in a world running at a digital pace. The Internet does a good job of playing the role long filled by newspapers, delivering headlines, opinions and instant analysis. Many newspapers have long been forced into a traditional newsmagazine model, with longer-form reporting and more big-picture thinking, but they still have to do it every day, and there is only so much wisdom one can summon in a few hours.”

If you ask an average educated-upscale reader what magazines they still bother to read in print every week, you’ll most likely get some combination of three weeklies: the New Yorker, the Economist, and the Week. They've become a kind of entree to the educated professional class and its thinking.

Is there room for another? Well, all three of those publications have a formula that works, but that -- being a formula -- can seem rigid and unsurprising.

I take it as a good sign that this first issue of Newsweek is long on both Barack Obama and American Idol.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, superstar op-ed columnist, has been caught lifting a paragraph from Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall in Sunday's column about torture. It's now corrected so that the paragraph starts, "As Josh Marshall said in his blog."

As she explained to both the Huffington Post and the Nytpicker blog, she was “talking” to a friend who expressed this thought, which she admired, and she wanted to “weave it in” to her column.

Given that the paragraph in question is exactly the same down to the commas (the only subsitution she made was “the Bush crowd” for “we”), it seems likely that by “talking” she means “emailing, then copying and pasting."

Dowd’s woes are just another reminder that newspapers, and the people who work for them, just can’t catch a break in the Internet era. Not that they're victims: It’s hard not to see newspaper people’s own bullheadedness and strange lack of pragmatism as the cause.

There’s no reason the fundamental shift in sensibility and mission that Meacham is outlining for Newsweek -- with the aim of being in tune with the reality of how the Internet and the economic crisis has changed things for both readers and advertisers -- can’t be done at, say, the New York Times, or any other newspaper.

Another sign that the future belongs to news organizations that are nimble, that take into account what readers can and can't get on the web, and that are willing to try new ingredients and flavors for the fundamental stew of news, analysis and opinion that readers expect everywhere now: AOL’s new PoliticsDaily site, up just a month, has hired a correspondent to go to Afghanistan, David Wood, formerly of the Baltimore Sun.

The site’s editor, Melinda Henneberger, told me in an email that Wood does not represent “a Kabul bureau or anything,” since he’ll be in and out, but that he’d be filing “a combination of New Yorker-style essays and on-the-ground reports.”

In the battle for mindshare that all these publications are in, it doesn’t seem to matter much any more whether a news-oriented publication is defining itself as a weekly or a web magazine or a newspaper -- they all are hunting after the same basic animal, reporting enlivened and grounded by point of view. As Henneberger described to me why she hired Wood, it’s hard not to see the similarity between what PoliticsDaily is doing and what Newsweek is doing.

“I think his stories will mesh perfectly with what we already do at Politics Daily because we have the freedom to express our opinions, but our one shared bias is in favor of reporting; there's never any substitute for that.”

And here’s Meacham’s description of the goal for Newsweek:

“There will, for the most part, be two kinds of stories in the new Newsweek. The first is the reported narrative -- a piece, grounded in original observation and freshly discovered fact, that illuminates the important and the interesting. The second is the argued essay -- a piece, grounded in reason and supported by evidence, that makes the case for something.”

If only newspapers could find a way to convey the kind of fresh-start idea to readers that these publications are managing -- both of them, it must be said, saddled with brand names that scream, your great-aunt at the dentist office (or in her sewing room with a dial-up connection).

Whether PoliticsDaily or Newsweek will be able to deliver on the promise is another story. But Henneberger told me the site had made its first month numbers in the first six days.