• The memo was not intended as a ‘wake-up call’ or received as such by the President’s national security team. Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process.
• Defense Secretary Robert Gates • In an attempt to defuse the controversy that blew up around a New York Times article regarding his department’s Iran policy. The article, which suggested that the Obama administration didn’t have a long-term plan to deal with Iran, was rooted in a memo written by Gates. The Times’ anonymous sources said the memo shook up the entire department; The Washington Post’s anonymous sources say it wasn’t that big a deal. We trust anonymous. source

• 18% of Americans support
  the bizarro hippies source

• one Bizarro hippies are largely older, white, male and wealthier than your average Americans.
• two They largely describe themselves as “very conservative” and think Obama is “very liberal.”
• three They by and large feel that Obama’s policies favor the poor more than anyone else. source

• Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.
• New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt • Regarding Google’s China example for free speech and what that means for the Times and its Singapore interests. The company is considering leaving Singapore, where its International Herald Tribune has a major foothold, due to the government clamping down on their free speech. Why? The IHT dared call the current government a “dynasty.” Twelve years ago, the IHT agreed not to do that anymore, but broke their promise when they noted former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong in an article about dynasties. The Times won’t work that way anymore, kids – some are surprised the free-speech defenders did in the first place. source

• Our take? It depends on the app. Right now, the iPad does three things really well. It allows you to surf the Web at nearly the same clip as a laptop, it rules at non-Flash video playback, and it allows you to read the news better than either a newspaper or Web browser. For a 1.0 product, this is polished. But we’re journalism nerds that read a lot of links, so let’s focus our appeal. How is reading and curating news on this thing, anyway? (Hint: Pretty good.)

First: What a good news app needs

• one A simple format that makes it easier, not harder, to read the news. It’s not a newspaper or a Web site; it’s a little of both
• two An easy way to share content – you should be able to copy quotes, tweet links, and e-mail articles to a friend (or yourself)
• three A solid offline reading mode – these apps need to be able to work without a wi-fi connection nearby; all of the apps had this

Second: The best news apps

• best The Reuters app is
  super-readable,
  easy to scan, and
  best-formatted for
  the iPad. It’s also
  the one that tried to
  look least like a
  newspaper.
• great The USA Today
  app has a mix of
  strong readability,
  easy organization,
  and smart uses of
  swiping. It’s nearly
  as good as the
  Reuters app.
• eh The New York
  Times app isn’t
  bad, but its body
  type isn’t on the grid. The Wall Street Journal app tends to overreact
  to tiny movements.
• wtf The Associated
  Press app went all
  scrapbook with
  their format, which
  is OK – for a
  scrapbook. For
  reading hard news,
  it’s very annoying.

Third: Twitter on the iPad

• 
  Best balance Twitterrific was designed for the iPad the way that one would expect someone to use an iPad Twitter app. The use of Twitter lists, for example, makes for great news-reading. Less is more in this case.
• 
  Most complex TweetDeck could stand to be a little less complicated right now. It loads too many windows at once and comes across as a bit bloated and overwhelming. A bit more interface furniture to clean up the look would help this greatly.
• 
  Best mashup As many people know, the EchoFon/Firefox setup is hard to top for reading linked tweets, and TweetBrowser goes a long way to replicate that on the iPad. Only issue: We wish we could hide the feed in the horizontal format.

• » One side note: Webkit’s skills at rendering the Twitter web apps are mostly pretty good. The web version of Hootsuite is actually better than the iPad-native version of TweetDeck on the iPad. Threadsy also works great, as does the Web version of Seesmic. You’ll have to use a two-finger swipe to navigate, though, which can be cumbersome.

Overall: What did we think?

• » What we like: It’s a good reading format, and Safari could handle nearly everything we threw at it (except the TinyMCE rich-text editor, which means it sucks for blogging because WordPress uses that). The format is awesome for video and music. Once Hulu and Spotify get apps on here, it’s seriously a one-stop shop. Also, being able to load articles on the device and take it on the wi-fi-less D.C. Metro was downright perfect.
• » What we don’t like: It can be hard to hold the device upright, especially if you’re not sitting at a table. It’s strange that Apple didn’t consider putting a kickstand on the back. The keyboard is usable but not heavy-duty. Apple should consider putting in (or allowing) additional keyboard setups that make it more usable for typing in HTML. Right now, it’s a serious chore.
• » What we want to see: Surprisingly, we don’t miss multitasking on the iPad – it actually wasn’t noticeable for most apps. But we think someone needs to create a single app that mixes social media, web browsing and blogging/word processing. TweetBrowser gets the first two down, but WordPress‘ app isn’t designed for this at all. We smell opportunity (eh, Tumblr?).

• techies It’s just a giant iPod Touch, and
  it doesn’t do any of the technical
  stuff you’d expect a computer to
  do. The keyboard is hard to use.
  Oh, and it doesn’t run Flash.
• non-techies It’s just a giant iPod Touch, but it’s also loaded with possibilities thanks to the new format, and is fairly foolproof. It’s fast and loaded with battery life. Oh, and apps! source

• See that face right there in the middle? That’s unmistakably the face of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger. In a story about feminine-looking male faces. In the Wall Street Journal. Did Rupert Murdoch just lay a personal attack on his competition? We think he did. source

• 14.1% the amount of interest on Carlos Slim’s $250 million loan, at a time when there was no inflation whatsoever
• 15.9M number of warrants of stock the Times gave Slim; thanks to a rally, Slim has made $77 million on stock alone
• $112M amount Carlos Slim
  has already made back on his journalistic investment in just a year; holy crap source