Soon after, the media critic and Arizona State University professor Dan Gillmor proclaimed that the New York Times should start a secondary blog, hosted on a different server, for emergencies such as this.

Which... the Times did.

Since the newspaper's website started to 404 this morning, it has posted stories -- full news stories, bylined by some of the paper's most recognizable journalists -- on Facebook. As "Facebook Notes." Where they will be seen, and where they will even the populate the News Feed, of some of the paper's 3.3 million Facebook followers.

the ordinariness of the bespoke New Face Times allows us to notice the extraordinariness -- or, perhaps, the 2013-ness -- of the infrastructure which it inhabits. The paper lost its most prominent platform on the web, so it turned to its second most prominent -- which happens to be hosted by another publicly-owned company which makes most of its money off advertising. (A probably-unrelated-but-nevertheless-curious fact to hold in apposition: Facebook's market capitalization is more than sixty times that of the NYT's.) Even as the site went down, the paper's word factory churned on, and its captains found a place where those words could be read.

But right now, let’s give credit where it is due. The Times proved itself worthy of its reputation as journalism’s gold standard and served its readers well by staying away from unconfirmed reports. Its reporting from Boston all week was fast, deep and accurate.

Aesthetically, there’s a lot from the past that resonates, but I actually am really happy to be alive now. I think TV is better than it’s ever been—maybe not teen shows, but I think it’s easier for teens now to watch whatever they want. All of my friends watch Girls or Downton Abbey or The Wire, and they’re ages 15 to 50. I guess a lot of my tastes and Rookie’s are based in nostalgia for things that I’ve never actually experienced, but the good thing about nostalgia is that you can take the parts you like but not necessarily mimic it in every other way.

I mean, I really like Jane, so I don’t mean for this to be in contrast to what she said, but first of all, you don’t go to college for fashion blogging, and second of all, there are too many things I’m curious abut, too many things I want to learn.

But here we were, saying Google wasn't our friend and that we needed to keep the Googlebot out. And, thankfully, our bosses listened to our argument. They too didn't want to be the first result in Google for someone.

We couldn't stop people from sharing links on social media—and indeed probably didn't want to stop them from doing it. Heck, we did it while we were building it. We kept IMing URLs to each other. And that’s how we realized we had a problem. All our work to minimize the impact on someone wrongly accused of a crime could be damaged by someone sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter.

What I want you to think about, before you write a line of code, is what does it mean to put your data on the internet? What could happen, good and bad? What should you do to be responsible about it?

The challenges of crafting multimedia to complement a text-based story were the same challenges faced in any storytelling endeavor. We focused on the pacing, narrative tension and story arc—all while ensuring that each element gave the user a different experience of the story. The moving images provided a much-needed pause at critical moments in the text, adding a subtle atmospheric quality. The team often asked whether a video or piece of audio was adding value to the project, and we edited elements out that felt duplicative. Having a tight edit that slowly built the tension of the narrative was the overall goal.

The pacing of the animations was driven by many factors. The small airbag animation needed to be quick—a little thing to give the reader an understanding of what an airbag was without making too much of a fuss. The pacing of the avalanche simulation was driven by data. It is a real-time experience of the avalanche as it occurred. The rendering of the paths down the mountain was driven by the user’s scrolling motion, connected directly to the pace that they read through the story. The Cascades flyover, in the beginning was given a nice slow movement. Readers were just becoming familiar with the story at that point, and it allowed them to absorb the topography of the setting.

We do not control the distribution of our work. Period. It's horrible and bizarre and it is also the way that the media world works now. You can't push; the content has to pull. (Especially if we are talking numbers in the millions.)

Less obviously: how would anyone build an audience growth strategy without relying on huge social hits and a distinctive voice? How many content sites or apps have you visited as a result of marketing? Then how many did you go back to?

Rather than say, "Well, long, narrative pieces of writing suck for us," we changed the ordering of our narratives. We get the stakes up very, very high. I'm talking within the first 100 or 200 words, even if the story is two or three or four thousand words. And if we want to keep that narrative lede and we know we have nuggets down low, we drop in a tl;dr box to capture the kind of reader who wants to know what the point is exactly. (If you're a regular reader, you will start to notice this pattern.)

Looking across the industry gives the impression of herd movement — Crazy new ad formats! Daily deals! Metered paywalls! — without the experimentation and evolution that we’ve seen in news.

“If the two sides of a news-providing organization are really working at cross purposes,” Kovach and Rosenstiel write, “the journalism tends to be on the side that is corrupted.”

If you run a small local news site, chances are this is exactly your situation: You’re the publisher *and* the editor. But you also have no insulation or distance from your community, so your ethical values and instincts are all-important.

Explain your ethical decisions in a blog, social media or other forum. A decision you can’t explain is a decision you should reconsider.

Disclose any personal interests, relationships, affiliations or experiences that might influence your journalism — or give the appearance of influence — on a particular story or in your general performance.

Our principle of transparency and attribution is an obligation to our readers and viewers, not to sources.

Journalists should consider whether transparency about opinions will build credibility better than a stance of neutrality. Opinions are acceptable in some journalism contexts and not in others.

As entrepreneurial journalists and innovative organizations seek new business models for news, journalists should discuss ways to protect the integrity of editorial content and should be transparent about revenue streams and relationships with revenue sources.

Journalists should strive to go beyond “he-said-she-said” stories that present conflicting accounts of an event or issue. The journalist’s job is to learn and report the truth in these cases.

Journalists should closely and skeptically examine the motives of sources asking to speak confidentially. Even if the motives are legitimate, journalists should keep in mind that confidentiality prevents accountability.

If your organization has a policy not to identify survivors of sexual abuse, you should make exceptions for survivors who wish to speak on the record. (Incredibly, I once worked for a newsroom that made no exceptions, a hurtful position that treated sexual assault survivors as though they had some cause for shame.)

Journalists and news organizations should not remove content from digital archives except in extreme cases, such as for legal reasons. When people who were acquitted of criminal charges (or convicted many years ago) request removal of embarrassing but true stories, a better solution is to code those stories so they will not show to external search engines. Archives should be updated to reflect the outcomes of criminal cases or other charges of wrongdoing.

There is another barrier to my online news consumption habit: my own OCD. When I am reading a newspaper, I know approximately how much is left unread at any time, and I know when I have finished a section. I can say to myself, “Self, you have now caught up on the news.”

Steve Krug touches on this problem in his book “Don’t Make Me Think.” He likens navigating a website to navigating a store. In both instances, you’re looking for something, but online there are no visual markers to tell you what’s around you. My old boss, Brian Boyer, once told me that he thought about websites in the terms of Frank Lloyd Wright’s interior design: At every point, you should allow for “a peek around the corner,” a glimpse of what surrounds where you are.

Yet by and large, news websites overestimate my grasp of whatever they’re writing about. If we’re several days into a story, I have no hope of finding the backstory on a newspaper’s site. This makes me sad, because newspapers certainly have done a more trustworthy job compiling the information than anyone else.

Topic pages address this issue to some degree, but they are, for the most part, not very well done. For one, they tend to be in reverse chronological order (which makes great sense if you’re already familiar with the topic). I would love to see tag pages used to this end. An editor could specify which article (or articles) are the definitive ones. In lengthy, developing stories (like Arab Spring), these definitive stories would be numerous. Secondary to that, a reverse chronological river of posts about the subject could update savvy readers with the latest happenings.

When I was learning Python, my mentor Mark Ng gave me a helpful piece of troubleshooting advice. He told me to delete code — not add patches — until something worked. I feel this is where the news industry must go. Services like Instapaper are popular for exactly this reason, and newspaper websites are going to have to follow suit. There’s no reason Instapaper couldn’t have been developed by a newspaper, much like there’s no reason Craigslist couldn’t have been developed by a newspaper.

As Lichfield correctly notes, so-called “wicked problems” “often cut across beat boundaries, taking in politics, economics, technology, and other issues.” You can’t understand climate change, or help point toward solutions to climate change, just by covering the EPA.

In other words, Quartz is arguing that a well-educated audience is capable of understanding the world as a whole and acting upon that knowledge. What this audience needs is not the “monitoring of beats” but help in “making sense of the world.” Public accountability comes not from staking out a beat, but from helping members of the public understand how complex things fit together. Because they understand how the world works, citizens will be able to act democratically in new ways. And when the important issues in the world change, than the focus of coverage will likewise shift.

What’s more, even in those halcyon days when investigative reporters could spend years on an investigation, the number of readers that investigation reached was tiny: you needed to fortuitously be a reader of the right newspaper on the right day when it appeared, and you needed to be interested in the subject. Today, investigations are much more likely to reach a broad and influential audience, because they are easily available, in perpetuity, no matter where you are in the world.

Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you.

One of the best new media properties to come along in recent years is the Atlantic Wire. It’s run on a shoestring budget, and staffed by young, smart, hardworking kids with fantastic reading skills. Many of them can write, too — but they write short and punchy. Which is something else Old Media needs to learn how to do: it’s always much more fun reading a Gawker pickup of a Washington Post story than reading the original piece.

The biggest shortage in journalism right now isn’t good writers, or even enlightened proprietors willing to fund investigations. It’s critical readers – journalists who can see when they’re being snowed, who can read between the lines, who can pick up information from across the blogosphere and the twittersphere and be able to judge it on its own merits rather than simply trusting the publisher.

So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena—the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. “The environment” is a beat, but “climate change” is a phenomenon. “Energy” is a beat, but “the global surge of energy abundance” is a phenomenon. “China” is a beat, but “Chinese investment in Africa” is a phenomenon. We call these phenomena our “obsessions”. These are the kinds of topics Quartz will put in its navigation bar, and as the world changes, so will they.

And philosophical, because it means changing what might (a little pretentiously) be called the phenomenology of journalism. Phenomenology is about how we structure our experience of the world. Beats provide an institutional structure. Obsessions are a more human one.

What I mean by this is that when people notice a change in the world around them—a phenomenon—they don’t care what beat it belongs to; they just want to know what caused it. The institutional framework answers the question like the blind men in the Indian parable who are brought an elephant and asked to say what it is. The one who touches the elephant’s leg says it is a pillar or tree trunk, the one who feels the tail declares it to be a rope, and so on. But to unpack something like the financial crisis you can’t simply talk about securities, interest rates and banking regulation; to understand China’s activities in other parts of the world you need to be more than just a China specialist; to comprehend climate change you need science, economics, domestic and international politics, and more besides. To explain the world’s big phenomena you need to see (or feel) the whole elephant.

Even once you’ve identified a phenomenon worth covering, how do you make it manageable? How do you decide where it starts and ends? How do you follow it as an incrementally evolving news story while also helping your audience grasp the bigger picture?

I can’t say that I immediately saw the value that I certainly see now. It took me a month to see what it actually could do and how it could be an incredibly good and useful means of us communicating with our audience, broadening our audience, which I think is a really critical point. And listening to our audience. One of the things that I like — I often keep an open feed of @NYTimes mentions, just so that I can see what our readers are talking about. I think that’s a really, really valuable piece of real-time feedback. There are quite often things I see in there where people are either praising, or, you know, in some cases, criticizing our work that I think is very valuable for me to know as an editor.

And I remember re-tweeting someone, and then that person sending me massages or at-replies, saying, “Why is the Times not covering this?” And as it turned out, I think we had been covering it. But it was not prominent on our home page. And so through the course of the weekend, I was able to communicate with editors who were back in New York to give the story more prominence, or the prominence that it deserved. So that was a really interesting example. And this was really before Occupy became truly a national story.

I think social media is a good thing for journalists because I think it makes us all more aware, it’s just that simple. I think more information is better, and better than less, certainly. And I think it actually diversifies the streams of information.

Just then, the no-hitter is broken up. Someone from another pod applauds. DeCorte jumps up. “Who’s clapping? You never root against a story.”

The problem with reading the New York Times is that the Times is all about tempered and metered interpretations of what’s going on. Meanwhile, TV news is all about total extremism. It’s about facial expressions, and performance over content. Watching Fox, I can understand the appeal of Santorum. It doesn’t make me like him anymore, but I can at least get it.

My network is not talking positively about Santorum in any way. It’s not even talking positively about Romney. They’re both lunatics. But I know better than to think that’s how they’re actually being discussed beyond my network. I want a tool that gives me what’s outside of my perspective on these issues — because otherwise I have to do a lot of really difficult and exhausting work to find it.

With young people, the thing that gets them fastest and easiest is the thing that can spread the most easily. They access news through the ether. It’s pretty crazy — it’s not active consumption. I interviewed a whole group of kids 24 hours after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. I asked them — “How did you hear about the shootings?” The answers were all random. “My grandmother called me. She called me to talk about how dangerous colleges are.” “My parents saw it on the news and they asked me about it.” “‘Love and Support for Virginia Tech’ went through my Facebook because this one girl I met three years ago went to Virginia Tech.” It was very ambient.

I’m definitely optimistic. I roll my eyes when journalists say, “oh my god, kids these days, they’re not into news, when I was that age, blah blah blah.” I’m like — you were a nerd! There have always been geeky youth who were always into news. But the vast majority of young people have never been into news. Maybe kids ended up getting ambient news through newspaper routes. But then again, because of how the internet is structured, maybe they’re getting ambient news in new ways.

The Times’s “believability rating” had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?

I even encourage engaging readers whose criticism is hostile or disrespectful. Some of them may think you’re not listening, and you change their view by answering respectfully. On more than one occasion, I have responded helpfully to a snarky tweet that had a valid issue at its root, and I turned that snarky tweet into a friendly conversation that ended with an apology or a tweet of thanks.

I’m not arguing that every news organization should get into the business of monitoring the state of public knowledge. This is only one of many possible ways to define impact; it might only make sense for certain stories, and to do it routinely we’d need good and cheap substitutes for large public surveys. But I find it instructive to work through what would be required. The point is to define journalistic success based on what the user does, not the publisher.