Screenshot via Twitter.

The Daily Beast announced today that they were "have parted company" with media critic Howard Kurtz. The announcement came just a day after Mr. Kurtz came under fire for a blog post where he made the false claim that basketball player Jason Collins, who recently came out as gay in a Sports Illustrated cover story, failed to mention that he had been engaged. The Daily Beast retracted the post today.

“The Daily Beast and Howard Kurtz have parted company," The Daily Beast's editor Tina Brown said in a statement to Politico's Dylan Byers. "Under the direction of our newly named political director John Avlon we have added new momentum and authority to our Washington bureau with columnists such as Jon Favreau, Joshua Dubois and Stuart Stevens joining our outstanding DC team of Eleanor Clift, Daniel Klaidman, Michael Tomasky, Eli Lake, David Frum and Michelle Cottle - giving us one of the best politics teams in the business which was instrumental in this week’s Webby win for Best News site.”

After the news broke, Mr. Kurtz tweeted about it--adding that it "in the works for some time."

“I've enjoyed my time at the Daily Beast but as we began to move in different directions, both sides agreed it was best to part company,” Mr. Kurtz tweeted this afternoon.

“This was in the works for some time, but want to wish all my colleagues continued success with a terrific website,” he added on Twitter a moment later.

UPDATE: A CNN source tells TV Newser that Mr. Kurtz's "current deal with the cable channel will likely be his last."

The Daily Beast is coming up on its second anniversary tomorrow. Mr. Kurtz wrote about the site when it launched in 2008. "It is an intriguing experiment, and not just for the 54-year-old Brown," Mr. Kurtz wrote. "The Web is packed with liberal sites, conservative sites and destinations that link to every other site on the planet. Brown is promoting herself as a tastemaker-in-chief, serving up such features as 'Cheat Sheet,' touting must-reads, and 'Buzz Board,' in which famous people recommend everything from books to boots."

Mr. Kurtz will keep his CNN Sunday show Reliable Sources. Ms. Brown was a guest on the show last month to talk about Glenn Beck and how the media is covering President Obama.

To start the day, Ms. Sawyer looks like a "64-year-old housewife in need of a cup of coffee," wrote Mr. Kurtz.

Later Mr. Kurtz showed Ms. Sawyer ducking in here, tweaking a story there, running up those stairs, lifting that piano. "Nearly everyone has a story about her stamina," he wrote.  That is, Everyone knows she's a workhorse after 11 years on the early shift at Good Morning America.

There is one interesting, and timely, moment in the Mr. Kurtz's story. Ms. Sawyer interviews Michael Hastings about his Rolling Stone article and she mentions the fact that she used to date Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Mr. Hastings' piece, General McChrystal complains about emails from Mr. Holbrooke. 

Ms. Sawyer called Mr. Holbrooke "brave" and "inexhaustible." "I don't know how to explain to people how we can have a personal connection to someone and still be a reporter. They either think we're lying or we're automatons," she said.

It's an interesting quotation, considering that today Mr. Kurtz also wrote about the end of Dave Weigel's career at The Washington Post. The lesson there: Being a real person gets in the way of being a journalist, or at least keeping a job in journalism.

On Sunday, June 6, CNN aired an interview with James Fallows in which the writer talked on camera about his recent story in The Atlantic, which looked at Google's impact on the news business. Typically, such stories are full of gloom, but this one was hopeful. Having contributed to the many woes of the newspaper business, Mr. Fallows wrote, the engineers at Google were now working on ways to create a new business model to preserve serious journalism in the digital age, advocating "continuous experimentation-learning what does work by seeing all the things that don't."

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During the discussion with CNN's Howard Kurtz, Mr. Fallows mentioned the work of a media theorist whose maxim "nothing will work, but everything might" provided the theoretical framework embraced by the Google empiricists. Traditionally, there has been a place in American public life where you go to find visionaries happy to tout the social benefits of technological advances-namely, Silicon Valley. But Mr. Fallows was referring to the work of an N.Y.U. professor named Clay Shirky.

A few days earlier, Mr. Shirky sat in his office at N.Y.U.'s Interactive Telecommunications Program, on the fourth floor of a building overlooking Broadway, and acknowledged that people don't typically think of New York as a fountain of gushing techno-optimism-but that, perhaps, they should. "I've always been in communities of cultures that make things-artists, theater people, Internet entrepreneurs," said Mr. Shirky, a boyish, bald 46. "No matter now jaded or cynical someone's external demeanor, if you're in a group of people who make things, you're in a group of optimists."

In the hallway outside Mr. Shirky's office, a group of students were assembling a tent. A futuristic light projection that looked like a centipede danced across the floor. On the wall, there was a poster for a student project involving a "sound-walk" across the Brooklyn Bridge that would include video from the perspective of the student's feet.

"During the '90s, I spent countless hours trekking down to Wall Street because the bankers wanted to have a meeting about how do we make New York more like Silicon Valley," Mr. Shirky said. "My answer was always the same. You don't. What you could do is make New York a good place to start a business. The people who move here-they are some driven motherfuckers. They will figure it out."

Some 25 years after first moving to New York himself with an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Yale University and the hope of making it in theater design, Mr. Shirky has emerged, somewhat improbably, as the leading voice of New York's new school of technological pragmatism.

On June 10, Penguin Press will publish his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. It's a wide-ranging essay about how the emerging forms of the Internet will ultimately provide a net benefit for society, in part by helping to free us all from our decades-long habit of over-medicating with television.

People have described Mr. Shirky as a cyber-utopian, but he rejects the term. He said that his greatest philosophical influence is the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. "It's not that the technology is natively good," Mr. Shirky said. "But rather that it gives society the raw material we need to do new, interesting things."

IN THE EARLY '90s, Mr. Shirky made good use of his own cognitive surplus. At the time, he was running an experimental theater group in New York, which staged nonfiction documents (the conversation among air traffic controllers during a plane crash; Ed Meese's pornography report, etc.). One day, Mr. Shirky's mom, a research librarian in Columbia, Mo., where Mr. Shirky grew up, told him about something she was learning about in her library class. It was called the Internet. Mr. Shirky was hooked. Instead of returning to Yale, where he had been accepted into the graduate drama school to study lighting design, he studied programming at night at home online with "a bunch of cranky Unix systems administers who worked at banks."

"I would get home from the theater at 11 p.m. and stay on the Internet until 4," he said. "I thought either I could call myself an addict and get myself to quit. Or I could try and make it my job."

Eventually, Mr. Shirky entered New York's emerging world of interactive design.  "A lot of the people who started the interactive industry in New York came from theater, in part because you have a lot of time on your hands between jobs and, in part, because things you don't understand don't scare you," said Mr. Shirky. "Theater just gets you used to the idea that I have no idea how this is going to go, but let's try it and see what happens."

On the side, Mr. Shirky wrote for various publications about the emerging culture of the Internet, plus a series of technical books for hobbyist publisher Ziff Davis (sample title: The Internet by E-mail). He said he has always been a Web optimist; until recently, he added, this was like being a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. The opposition showed up, but it was mostly an exhibition game. "They weren't really theorists," said Mr. Shirky. "The entire argument was really between people who loved the Internet and people who didn't understand it."

These days, there's much more competition from the naysayers. "What's happened in the last five years is that people who use the Internet and understand it quite well on some axis, whether engineering or social, are nevertheless operating as pessimists," said Mr. Shirky.

In particular, Mr. Shirky has recently found himself mulling over the computer scientist Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget, in which Mr. Lanier criticizes the Internet's propensity for groupthink, shoddy group collaboration and "digital Maoism"; and technology journalist Nicholas Carr's just-published book The Shallows, which argues that as the Internet replaces print, the new medium is rewiring our brains and wrecking our ability to focus deeply.

"What's interesting to me is that I'm reading those books and nodding my head right up until the moment comes for the authors to say, 'Here's what we ought to do about it,'" said Mr. Shirky. "The stuff that Nick says is wrong with the Internet is wrong with the Internet. The distraction is, I think, the biggest problem. But what's interesting about The Shallows is that it doesn't actually propose what to do about it." ("My interest is description, not prescription," retorted Mr. Carr in an email.)

Part of the problem, said Mr. Shirky, is that Mr. Carr is comparing the 500-year-old print culture with an Internet culture that has existed for less than a quarter-century. "The old system has all these robust, well-worked-out institutions," said Mr. Shirky. "The new system, we just got here. He assumes that the new system won't improve."

Mr. Shirky thinks it will. The key, he believes, is to diagnose problems as they arise, and then use trial-and-error experimentation to build up a new set of institutions and cultural habits that will address the Internet's deficiencies while maximizing its freedoms. Even the rise of the insightful Internet pessimists, in Mr. Shirky's eyes, is a good thing, because they are increasingly skilled at calling attention to the most pressing problems with digital culture. "Funnily enough, it may be the pessimists who help us make more progress on the big issues, like anonymity and distractedness," he said. "In part because they have rhetorical clarity."

In the end, however, it will be the pragmatic optimists, Mr. Shirky believes, who will end up fixing those problems, most likely through a gradual and prolonged accumulation of small breakthroughs, solutions and optimizations.

SINCE THE FALL of 2001, Mr. Shirky has worked as an associate teacher at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), part of the school's Tisch School of the Arts. Founded in the 1970s, the program has grown into a lab of digital experimentation where teams of students endlessly tinker with new combinations of art and programming and social interactivity.

Over the years, Mr. Shirky has developed a seminar called Social Facts, whose syllabus progresses from sociological dilemmas facing groups irrespective of technology (tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, etc.) to the specific challenges facing groups online. By the end of the class, students are asked to think like designers-if you wanted to change an existing space, or create a new space, what would you do? Mr. Shirky also teaches a production class in which students develop technology projects in partnership with UNICEF. "If you could get into his class, you took it," said Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare, who graduated from ITP in 2004. "You sit in his class for an hour, and you feel like a superstar, like you can understand things in a much clearer way."

Mr. Crowley described Mr. Shirky as the program's in-house theorist-the guy who students turn to in order to get a broader perspective on what they're doing and why it's important. In the fall of 2003, Mr. Shirky served as the informal adviser for an independent study taken by Mr. Crowley and one of his fellow students, Alex Rainert, who two years later sold their social networking software company, Dodgeball, to Google. In a program like ITP, said Mr. Crowley, you spend a lot of time engrossed in the minutiae of projects-learning how to write code, how to solder. "He's very good at widening the scope," said Mr. Crowley.

"I don't think we're throwing off the old print culture, and now we'll live in some kind of pure, sacred fusing with human nature as it always really was," said Mr. Shirky. "The source of my optimism is really that young people will find things to do with the medium that will create the kinds of institutions we need around something like the Web, rather than around something like print."

In March of 2009, Mr. Shirky wrote an essay on his personal blog about the root causes that are currently ravaging the newspaper business; it quickly became a must-read among journalists throughout the city. Unlike most pro-Internet media theorists, Mr. Shirky can talk extensively about the problems facing professional journalism without sounding like a scold. It's also possible to listen to him without that nagging suspicion that his real motivation is to selfishly milk old-media companies with a bunch of vapid ideas that will only make things worse.

On May 26, Mr. Shirky spoke at a private event for staff members of The New York Times, hosted by the paper's in-house R&D chief, Michael Zimbalist.

David Carr, the paper's media columnist, was impressed with Mr. Shirky's narrative synthesis. "He storytells in ways that people who are listening to him don't notice that the story ends with their obsolescence," said Mr. Carr. "They're sort of lulled to sleep by the music of his voice and his presentation. He just sort of gently mentions at the end the part about, 'And then you'll all be turned to red mist.'"

Mr. Carr said that these days if he had a half-hour or so to listen to anybody talk about the media business, Mr. Shirky would be at the top of the list. "He's an academic in the clinical sense," said Mr. Carr. "You just can't get to the end of what he knows or what he's interested in."

For the past decade, Mr. Shirky has been in a program for artists and techies, not for journalists. That may soon change. In the fall, he will delve into the journalism-business-model quandary as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "The thing that I'm interested in is the ways in which journalism can function more like an ecosystem," said Mr. Shirky. "Which is to say that instead of having a whole bunch of institutions that are doing the full end-to-end production of news, that we end up with a bunch of shared resources, the way ProPublica works."

And when he returns to New York in 2011, for the first time, Mr. Shirky will begin working with N.Y.U.'s journalism department (the details of the arrangement have yet to be finalized).

"My interest in the last couple of years has turned especially to the production of nonfiction media, whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism," Mr. Shirky said. "It's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem."

fgillette@observer.com

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Over the weekend, on CNN's Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz got in on the craze, fact checking the Sunday public affairs shows at ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and CNN. Along the way, he caught everyone from Senator John McCain to Bill Clinton making factually iffy statements.

"This sort of fact checking takes time and sometimes gets bogged down in details," said Mr. Kurtz. "I bet this isn't the most exciting television segment you've ever watched. But we all ought to do more of it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRKBQRO8gCs

During the interview, Ms. Sawyer revealed that ABC News had tried to set up a similar type style forum during the Bush administration, but was turned down by the former President's staff.

"This is not theater," said Ms. Sawyer.  "This is too important.  And we have to bring the issues and the questions, the strongest questions we can. And ABC has done town hall forums before.  We did one on guns with Bill Clinton and then came back a year later and did another one.  And they were extremely vital and robust debates about an important issue in the country.

"And we had talked to the Bush administration, which didn't feel I think in many ways that it was a forum they felt was best for them," she added. "But we also had, since Ted Koppel, felt that the town hall forum, bringing people in who are not on all of our Sunday shows and all of our cable shows all the time, on our morning shows and our evening shows all the time, bringing people in who can bring firsthand experience to bear sometimes creates the most effective and educational forum of all."

On May 27, the company launched their new Google Web Elements, which work a lot like widgets and allow users to embed the most popular Google products—Calendars, Maps, Google News, YouTube Video News, Presentations, Spreadsheets and Google Conversations—directly into their Web pages. They simply add a code and a window featuring Google News' top stories or the latest Associated Press videos are refreshed directly to their site. It's as easy as copying and pasting the YouTube video code and getting brand new articles, videos and maps as they are updated. 

Google presented their new Web Elements feature in San Francisco at Google I/O, the company's biggest event of the year for developers to showcase new projects and host breakout sessions and tutorials. The new feature is an example of the things Google geeks can do with their APIs.

But what does this mean for publishers? Perhaps more prominently branded content. For example, on the Web Elements page, users will note that The New York Times' content is featured in both the News and YouTube News examples. For the video feed, users can choose from one of 13 news sources, from Al-Jazeera to Fox News to the New York Post. The New York Times is the primary example on the first embed page in the drop-down menu. And when a user embeds the box onto their site, they can click through to several different videos in the box (one currently features a video about the Google Maps' Street View car in New York). A border around the feature prominently displays the Times' "T" symbol and a headline: "News Videos From the New York Times," as well as a "Google Web Elements" nod along the bottom of the feature. This is much better branding for The Times' video content than, say, a regular YouTube video embedded in a site that has no indication of its original source before the clip is played.

For now, there's no advertising embedded in the Web Elements features, but who knows what tweaks Google will make in the future?

So perhaps Google is playing nice with newspapers after the reported talks they've had with The Washington Post, along with The Times, to improve "ways of creating and presenting news online," according to The Post's media columnist Howard Kurtz. In March, The Times' David Carr wrote that newspapers needed to rally against aggregators like Google. "Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends," he wrote. "Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place." Are features like Web Elements' News Videos a kind of Internet-based alimony, just enough to placate newspapers? Or, you know, maybe they're just nifty little things for people's Web pages.

And while we're sure they don't like to be referred to as "slow bloggers," they probably have a fan in... Dana Perino?

Ms. Perino, still-President Bush's Press Secretary, was profiled by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz this weekend as well. Mr. Kurtz writes:

This time, we're meant to look at the deeper meaning of a new technology that's bringing people closer together, changing the face of advertising and marketing, and even helping make the world a better, safer place.

Per The New York Times:

So wrote William Safire about CB Radio on June 17, 1976. (Fun fact: That editorial ran about a month shy of John McCain's 40th birthday!) But who doesn't catch the whiff of sure-to-date badly exuberance when reading contemporary journalists falling all over themselves to breathlessly report on Twitter?

If it seems like every week there's a new story on how great Twitter is, that's because every week there is a new story about how great Twitter is. Seriously, isn't it time we declare Twitter fatigue ('fatwigue') and put this new toy in the same cupboard as Usenet, (Blue-) "Toothing," and Friedster?

Yesterday The New York Times Magazine's Clive Thompson offered "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," in which he reads the tweets in the coal mine (and looks deep into the face of Facebook's News Feed feature) and sees:

Yes, they are. They are helping companies better serve you—and sell you—according to BusinessWeek's Rachel King, who reported "How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands" from September 6th.

Twitter's not just changing advertising and serving business interests, it's changing democracy and the way we're electing this year's president according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz who filed "Political Coverage That's All a-Twitter" on August 26th, in which he claimed "Tweets may be particularly well suited for highly scripted political conventions, where what passes for news is anecdotal and can evaporate within minutes."

But you already knew technology was changing elections, right? As The Times' Mr. Safire wrote in 32 years ago:

Or he could just Tweet it.

Mr. Kurtz called twittering "the digital equivalent of a sound bite, a throat-clearing, a terse observation or two for a cloistered community online."

If you're hoping to hear Fox News' Greta Van Susteren clear her throat online, you're out of luck: The On the Record host tells The Huffington Post's Danny Shea that Twittering may not be for her: