On Thursday Gawker’s Nick Denton was on a Magazine Publishers of America Magazine Innovation Summit panel titled “The Decline and Rise of Magazine Journalism.” The moderator, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, asked how Denton monitors and fact-checks the content on Gawker sites: “We don’t,” Mr. Denton replied flatly. “We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it....

Business Week says Germany’s building the power grid of the future. One of humanity’s boldest visions: The electricity age is imminent in six German regions: The technology of the future for smart energy management is going to be developed and tested, under the label E-Energy, in several cities. A number of projects will kick into high gear this month. Tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of companies are expected to participate in the field tests. Testing ‘virtual power stations’...

Via Romenesko: “In an attempt to conceal my mistake, I submitted false images and deleted other images,” says the artist, who has been involved in countersuits with the AP. “I take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone.” NYTimes: Mr. Fairey told The A.P. — and his own lawyers — that he used a shot from an event about Darfur at the National Press Club in Washington event where Mr. Obama was seated next to George Clooney. Instead, the photograph he used...

Ted Turner regrets losing his job at Time Warner, his wife, Jane Fonda, and $7 billion of his fortune. In a Bloomberg interview out yesterday he also says we’ll get out of Afghanistan: “War is obsolete…The last time someone surrendered was Japan and that was 60 years ago. The Afghans will never surrender. We will just get tired and come home. We’ve already given up on Iraq and there’s oil in Iraq, there’s no oil in Afghanistan.” Always colorfully quotable, the man who pledged...

Google stock achieved some jaw-dropping numbers yesterday, up to $552 a share with profits 27 percent above this period last year. CEO Eric Schmidt crowed, “we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.” Today Chris Thompson brings us down to earth: [F]or all its staggering growth, Google isn’t as big as it seems. On the Fortune 500 list, the company occupies a lowly number 117. Who’s bigger than Google, you...

Just one of the heartbreaking details in this story is that it began on the boy’s 15th birthday. Terrified of going to school, his mother called and set an appointment with the safety officer. He never made it. Her tears lay bare the horror of it. I believe we all should share in that horror. We carry some blame. This kind of violence, like the recent Chicago beating death of a 16-year-old caught on cellphone video, is a side-effect of our punishing culture. Ours is the highest incarceration...

Jon Stewart’s piece on Sen. Al Franken’s first legislative amendment. Added to a defense bill passed last week, it prohibits giving defense contracts to any company that requires employees to sign a mandatory arbitration contract preventing them from taking the company to court if they’re raped by coworkers. Why was such a provision necessary? Last year a number of women came forward who were gang raped while working for various Haliburton subsidiaries but cannot take the company...

Zachary M. Seward explains Gawkers unruly new twist on traditional reader forums: Readers are now greeted with a text box as large as the blog’s logo, inviting them to share news, videos, links, and trivialities. Tagging a message with #tips on Gawker, for instance, automatically sends it to the “tips” tag page, where anyone can follow the stream of submissions and Gawker writers will keep an eye out for news to promote on the front page. Same for #mac on Gizmodo, #snapjudgment...

Their NFL sources say: Dave Checketts, chairman of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the point man in the Limbaugh group attempting to buy the Rams, realizes he must remove the controversial conservative radio host from his potential role as a minority member in the group in order to get approval from other NFL owners, the sources said. Apparently not unexpected: You could see this story coming like a boulder rolling down a very large hill… It was Tuesday when [N.F.L. Commissioner Roger]...

Romenesko notes that when the legendary White House reporter said it yesterday afternoon at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the crowd gasped: “I was the interviewer and it rocked me a little,” writes Phil Bronstein [link]. “In the same conversation Ms. Thomas said ‘Nancy Reagan was a heroine in my opinion,’ expressed tender sympathy for Lyndon Johnson and great respect for Gerald Ford.” John Aravosis adds that having such criticism come from the left “does...

AP reported this morning that a second Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe’s Maine colleague Susan Collins, has indicated that she’s open to voting for health care legislation this year. The opening lines of Collins’ statement could be read that way: “There simply is no question that our nation’s health care system requires substantial reform. The status quo of soaring health care costs, families struggling, millions uninsured, and health care provider shortages is unacceptable....

Filmed for a reported $11,000 over 7 days, Paranormal Activity broke box office records over the weekend. How? Social media: The film is about a young couple who become convinced that a demonic presence lurks in their bedroom at night, so they decide to set up a video camera to catch it. The movie…opened at the end of September with midnight screenings in just 13 small college towns. From there, it has become a Web sensation, with chatter about the movie bouncing from Twitter to Facebook,...

Sergey Brin has an OpEd in the NYTimes today on Google Books, A Library to Last Forever: There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing...

Peeved about Obama’s Peace Prize? Need to vent about Russert’s veneration? Then you should visit VentNation: You can choose to do so in a variety of categories, either anonymously or using your own name, and you can even rate other users’ vents by using a slider placed next to each entry. Once you’ve published your rant, you can push it out to a range of other social networks with just a couple of clicks, allowing you to easily share your frustrations with as many friends and family...

So long as we’re questioning awards, what do we think of NBC News donating the furniture from Tim Russert’s Washington office to be reassembled for a Newseum exhibit? TVSquad plays it right down the middle: The fact that Russert was on the Newseum’s board of directors might have something to do with this honor, but you can’t argue with the fact that for Meet the Press alone, Russert earned the recognition. Jack Shafer can: Not to take anything away from Russert, but neither...

Reporters gasped when it was announced. Coverage: New York Times Washington Post Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Reuters BBC Matt Lauer, “So in some ways he wins this for not being George W. Bush…” Twitter’s going crazy. The Nobel website is dying under the sudden traffic surge. UPDATE: My favorite #ReasonsBHOwonNPP: “Because the Nobel committee was pissed about last week’s SNL skit.”

Cory Doctorow’s headline, Olympic Committee claims that photographing exterior of venues violates copyrights: I hope that the IOC is aware that it’s about to show up in one of the most media-savvy towns in the world, and that trying to stop private citizens from posting “unauthorized” photos will be nothing short of a fool’s errand. This sort of hostility towards Olympic fans is both wasteful and pointless. Does the IOC not understand why people go to the Olympic Games?...

At Saturday morning breakfast for the Cherokee County GOP, Georgia Congressman and republican gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal was explaining his insistence in a legislative provision demanding proof of citizenship for federal or state health care benefits. opposition campaign video cameras rolling when he said: We got all the complaints of the ghetto grandmothers who didn’t have birth certificates and all that. We wrote some very liberal language as to how you can verify it. My mother was...

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely got a golf company to send out e-mails surveys to their users. 17,000 people to responded. On Marketplace yesterday he discussed his findings: First of all, it turns out that people in the pharmaceutical industry cheated a lot, but they also said their industry is the most honest that there is. There are some other interesting comparisons. For example, if you look at law enforcement, education and government, people in those three industries basically cheat on average,...

Following up on On Racism: Unconscious & Reverse, last night Larry Wilmore, The Daily Show’s Senior Black Correspondent, had segment showing white people his trick for how to play the race card. Apparently white people are doing OK without instruction. Fox News dominated the cable 3Q ratings: Fox News has pulled off another dominant quarter, claiming the top 10 cable news programs in 3Q 2009 and growing against 3Q 2008, while CNN and MSNBC lost substantial portions of their election-boom...

SearchEngineLand, Mashable & TechCrunch note Google’s celebration of today’s 57th anniversary of the first patent (No. 2,612,994) on the barcode. Meanwhile Stan Schroeder wonders, does anyone even go to Google.com anymore? I’m not asking whether you’re using Google; I’m asking whether you actually open the Google homepage, and search from there. Because I don’t. Until a while ago, occasionally – perhaps out of habit – I’d open it and search...

Lady Gaga, “…Hello SNL…” Madonna showed up for a surprise visit to ‘Deep House Dish‘ on SNL. To mixed reviews. But Lady GaGa, dressed as a sexy gyroscope in the video medley above, stole the show. After being signed to and quickly dropped from Def Jam Records at age 19, she began performing in the rock music scene of New York City’s Lower East Side. During this time, she was also working at Interscope Records as a songwriter for several established acts, including...

Mashable: The TED 5000 from Energy Inc. is a real-time electricity usage monitor that you can purchase and install yourself, with packages starting around $200. It can run the free Google PowerMeter tool, allowing you to check on your personal home energy data from any device that can access the web. The TED 5000 is Google’s first official device partner for PowerMeter, but the company indicates they plan to work with more providers who make energy monitors to get PowerMeter support built-in....

Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, walks us through the definitions of several of the more commonly cited types of racism and offers his opinion as to whether they deserve the label. I picked two to quote: Unconscious racismHarvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji has developed a test designed to smoke out unconscious racial bias. The test requires the subject, under intensive time pressure, to...

The FTC published final guidelines governing endorsements, and testimonials today: The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify...