USA Today has compiled a round-up of reactions to his death. Among these are comments from Gannett CEO Gracia Martore, Tom Brokaw and Larry King.

Martore said, “This is a great loss for all of us. Al was many things — a journalist, a leader, a serial entrepreneur, and a pioneer in advancing opportunities for women and minorities. But above all, he was an innovator with a unique sense of the public taste. The single greatest marker of those qualities is USA TODAY — built, as he said, to be a reader’s newspaper. That principle continues to guide our journalism today. I will miss his counsel, and I will miss the man. But as with all great people, what Al built will live on.”

“To the end of his life, he was a contrarian in how he tweaked the journalistic establishment, dressed in his flamboyant wardrobe,” said Brokaw. “Al often said (his early failure with a South Dakota sports newspaper) was a humbling and instructive experience, which he didn’t forget as he moved up the executive chain at Gannett and became a newspaper baron. It was a wonderful American life, from a poor family on the Great Plains to the infantry in World War II to the heights of American journalism.”

Read the article for the rest.

Neuharth was from South Dakota, where he co-founded a local sports newspaper early in his career. The paper went bankrupt within a year, but after that, he went on to the Miami Herald, climbed the ranks, and eventually went to the Detroit Free Press before later buying Gannett. He founded USA Today in 1982.

Image: USA Today

For a better idea of what Medium itself is, read this.

Matter describes itself as a publication based around a new way to create really great long-form journalism about science, technology and the future. Apparently Williams himself was one of the earliest Kickstarter backers for the project.

Paid Content points to this blog post from Matter discussing the acquisition. In that, Matter says, “He [Williams] and his team want Medium to be the best place on the internet to read and create high-quality content, and they suggested that we become part of that project.”

“Working with the team at Medium gives Matter a greater chance of success,” the company says. “The biggest draw for us is that they believe in high-quality writing, just like us, and want to see the journalism we produce be as successful as possible.”

Of course it remains to be seen just how successful Medium itself will become. However, Williams has an indisputable track record so far.

According to an Associated Press report, Karnow died in his sleep on January 27 at his home in Potomac, Maryland. Karnow died of congestive heart failure.

Karnow served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II before beginning his career as a reporter. He soon after began reporting for Time, and briefly served as the magazine’s North African Bureau chief. Starting in 1959, Karnow became Time‘s Asia correspondent. He was present during the first American deaths in Vietnam that year.

Karnow covered the war until its end in 1974. His reports were eventually used to write his most famous book, Vietnam: A History. In addition to that definitive take on the Vietnam conflict, Karnow authored several other books such as In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines and Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution.

As recently as the year 2000, Karnow wrote a piece on the Vietnam War for Salon, calling the war ” a tragedy of epic dimensions for the United States as well as for Vietnam, where at least 3 million people, both soldiers and civilians, lost their lives.” Karnow was writing against modern arguments that sought to portray the Vietnam conflict as just and winnable.

You can see the Trends for all the different locations by simply clicking “Change” in the Trends section.

“People around the world turn to Twitter to talk about a range of topics – from football to giving thanks to sharing information and resources during natural disasters and emergencies,” says Twitter search and relevance engineer Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis. “This is why Twitter uniquely captures the pulse of the planet, and the pulse of your city: by surfacing the topics that people care about.”

Meanwhile, Google remains without a realtime search feature, forcing news-seekers looking for up-to-the-second updates to go elsewhere (like Twitter).

Twitter says it plans on adding more locations for Trends.

This was not until various publications picked up the story. In our version, we were careful to note that the only source of the “news” appeared to be a strangely vague press release on PRWeb that was not even acknowledged in Google’s own press center.

Finally, PRWeb released its own statement:

PRWeb transmitted a press release for ICOA that we have since learned was fraudulent. The release was not issued or authorized by ICOA. Vocus reviews all press releases and follows an internal process designed to maintain the integrity of the releases we send out every day. Even with reasonable safeguards identity theft occurs, on occasion, across all of the major wire services. We have removed the fraudulent release and turned the matter over to the proper authorities for further investigation.

It’s still unclear who issued the release to begin with.

Other recent author talks include: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Jose Garces, Cal Newport, and Andrew Blum. You can find them all here.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told Poynter on Monday that there were 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag #sandy. And that was just Instagram, and before much of the effects were really felt. There was a lot of talk that the “Frankenstorm” was Instagram’s “big citizen journalism moment”.

Sarah Lacy at Pando Daily wrote as much, saying, “The time when the seemingly frivolous app could get some Arab Spring-style gravitas. Just like the last three Presidential elections have been transformed by a new social media service — YouTube, Facebook and now Twitter — natural disasters and tragedies are emerging as a way for social media services to gain respect and legitimacy as world-changing agents as well.”

“In theory, Instagram has Twitter’s immediacy, and a broader reach, since it pushes notices out via Twitter, Facebook, Instgram’s own network, and email,” she said. “Clearly images are the best way to tell a story like this, and Instagram’s whole raison d’être is to make people better photographers. Add to that the storm’s target on urban, hipster, we’re-not-scared New Yorkers, and the time seems as good as any for the revolution to be Instagrammed.”

Among all of these amazing photos and revolutionary visual citizen journalism, however, are a whole bunch of fakes, for better or for worse. It’s nothing new for social media to spread misinformation (see the countless Twitter death hoaxes of the past), so it’s not surprising that photos from the storm are no different.

Not everybody sees this as such a bad thing though.

“For the most part, however, these fake shots seem to be coming from East Coasters like me who are so tired of stressing out over this that we’ve turned to the best coping mechanism of all, making fun of stuff,” writes Helen A.S. Popkin in a Today Show blog post.

Hoaxes and fakes do have a way of working themselves out in social media. John Herman at BuzzFeed actually wrote an interesting article about the natur of Twitter when it comes to dispelling false information. In fact, that article talks about false tweets about flooding at the New York Stock Exchange.

“Twitter’s capacity to spread false information is more than cancelled out by its savage self-correction. In response to thousands of retweets of erroneous Weather Channel and CNN reports that the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded with ‘three feet’ of water, Twitter users, some reporters and many not, were relentless: Photos of the outside of the building, flood-free, were posted. Knowledgeable parties weighed in.”

While the piece is mostly about Twitter, you might say this kind of scenario can easily play out across social media channels. Herman even notes that the “micro-controversy drew to a close” when someone posted a pic of the dry building on Instagram (which was of course tweeted).

[Lead image via BuzzFeed]

“There are now 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag #sandy — most are images of people prepping for the storm and images of scenes outdoors.”

All you have to do is look at the hashtag, and you can see the tremendous amount of contributions. While the number will obviously be higher by the time you see this article, there are 226,019 photos for #sandy as of the time of this writing. There are 132,349 photos for #hurricanesandy. There are 26,612 for #frankenstorm.

Here are a few examples (from users omyfabulouslife, jmmantel, and gpeck1 respectively):

Instagram highlights some good ones on its blog.

Of course Instagram isn’t the only place people are posting photos. You can easily go to Twitter or Facebook and find plenty. Here’s one of the crane dangling from a building that Donald Trump posted to Facebook.

It’s nothing new for news to visually unfold on social media, but these numbers from Instagram seem to suggest a trend we might see escalate going forward – instagram as a major force in citizen journalism. Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily has already discussed the topic today.

“Hurricane Sandy — or Frankenstorm Apocalpyse as it’s being called on Foursquare — could be Instagram’s big citizen journalism moment,” she writes. “The time when the seemingly frivolous app could get some Arab Spring-style gravitas. Just like the last three Presidential elections have been transformed by a new social media service — YouTube, Facebook and now Twitter — natural disasters and tragedies are emerging as a way for social media services to gain respect and legitimacy as world-changing agents as well.”

“In theory, Instagram has Twitter’s immediacy, and a broader reach, since it pushes notices out via Twitter, Facebook, Instgram’s own network, and email,” she adds. “Clearly images are the best way to tell a story like this, and Instagram’s whole raison d’être is to make people better photographers. Add to that the storm’s target on urban, hipster, we’re-not-scared New Yorkers, and the time seems as good as any for the revolution to be Instagrammed.”

I imagine we’ll be seeing quite a few Instagram pics from a certain election before long.

Instagram was probably not a bad acquisition on Facebook’s part. It even turned out to be millions of dollars less than the originally-reported $1 billion.

Follow @JenAbel17

Jen Abel
@JenAbel17

Love how #CNN#FoxNews#AP are asking users for image rights on #INSTAGRAM via comment section… #Sandy

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
1 hour ago via web · powered by @socialditto

I suppose this is Bing’s response to Google’s authorship (which Google is indicating will become a more powerful signal in the future). Instead of integrating the results into the central search experience, however, Bing has elected to showcase authors to the side.

“Bing’s sidebar helps connect you to these types of people; people who are knowledgeable on the topic you’re searching for including friends you know and experts and enthusiasts you may or may not be familiar with,” says Nathan Penner, Senior Program Manager for the Bing News Team. “Now, when you search for a topic, authors who frequently write articles related to your query will appear alongside other experts and enthusiasts in the sidebar. Hover over the person’s name to learn more about them, see their top articles related to your query, or link to their Twitter page.”

“While the sidebar provides a summary for some authors, you’ll see a link to “See all articles” which takes you to that author’s articles related to your query right in Bing. We’re just beginning to surface the countless number of authors out there to build this feature, so while we won’t have author pages for everyone, we’re hard at work to grow our coverage so stay tuned.”

Bing doesn’t mention any markup for authors to implement the way Google does. It does appear to be relying primarily on Twitter for its author info. The bios (at least for the ones I looked at) are drawn from Twitter, and a lot of them include recent tweets. Some also include Klout scores.

Speaking of which, Bing and Klout just announced a partnership last week. Clearly, Bing is looking to make as much use of it as possible.

According to Google, Google News is now available in 72 editions in 30 languages, and counts 50,000 publications among its news sources. Along with Google News search, Google says Google News connects a billion unique users a week to news content.

“Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them,” writes Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder of Google News, in a blog post. “Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.”

“As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline),” says Bharat. “In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.”

Last week, Google announced a new ranking signal for Google News in a news keyword meta tag, encouraging publishers to associate various keywords with their stories, in an effort to help Google better understand the content of an article without having to sacrifice the quality of the content itself in order to help Google. More on that here.

In honor of Google News’ tenth anniversary, Google put together the following graphic, looking at the top news stories for each year of the past decade, as well as some noteworthy changes to Google News:

Bharat wraps up Google’s announcement by saying, “Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.”

Might I recommend getting realtime search back?