“The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)”

“Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. It provides a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at, one that anyone who’s ever designed a magazine will recognize.”

“If you are like I, you are pretty sick of reading articles about how the financially-troubled newspaper industry is making desperation budget cutting moves: Downsizing its products, laying off staff, buying prostitutes for advertisers, and so forth. But believe me, you’d be even sicker of it if you were INSIDE a typical American newsroom these days, where it’s sometimes hard to hear over the 200 decibel background drone of human whining.

One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It’s true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.”

Famed newspaper (re)designer Mario García launched a blog last month: “A blog about storytelling, design, the projects we work on, the things we learn along the way.”

Derek Powazek: “For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine — real, live printed magazine — with no giant pile.”

“A moment of unexpected whimsy in the Wall Street Journal.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“Information visualization for lay users seems to be a pervasive theme at the InfoVis conference this year. Matthew Ericson, Deputy Graphics Director at The New York Times, gave a keynote entitled: ‘Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times‘.

He explained how a 30-person team creates the impressive infographics and visualizations we see on the newspaper every week. Matt emphasized their role as journalists (instead of illustrators) and explained how they get from raw data to finished graphical pieces that make information understandable for more than a million readers.”

“I’m a Photography Director based in New York City. While I don’t care if you know who I am or what magazine I work for, I would like to remain anonymous so I can keep my job and blog.”

“The above image tracks the front page of latimes.com from 2002 through 2006, illustrating how quickly online presence can evolve. Note how the page structure and hierarchy have changed as images (yellow) and advertising (orange) have gradually become integrated with editorial content (blue). However, the manner in which information and links are collaged across a page (or interconnected through a database) is emblematic of a deeper organizational problem with the way that newspapers have dealt with digital content.”

“Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998. Her work is smart, finely detailed, elegant, witty, inventive, informative. A fierce researcher and reporter, she writes gracefully and precisely. Megan has the soul of a news reporter, who happens to use graphs, tables, and illustrations–as well as words–to explain the news. Her best work is the best work in news graphics.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“On real journalism vs. opinion: ‘There’s a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers — I don’t exempt myself — who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.’”

“A short guide to what works and what doesn’t when talking to reporters.”

Matt: “This is wicked cool: Someone from the big state newspaper The Oregonian is posting all the photos that go with stories in the paper to Flickr…”

Derek: “Yah! If only it wasn’t a violation of Flickr’s TOS.”

Videos of Ira Glass, the host of NPR’s “This American Life” radio show, talking about storytelling.

“Long before the term design was ever associated with newspapers, there was Ed Arnold. Long before there were Macs, or QuarkXPress, or SND, there was Ed Arnold. In the book of newspaper design, Ed Arnold is the Genesis — the prologue to a rich story of how our craft developed. And the trailblazer — a lone, but resounding, and articulate, voice. I can’t think of anyone else who could sit with a non-believing publisher and editor and convince them that packaging the news attractively was the key to getting readers to pay attention.”