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"Journalists and news organizations are all atwitter these days, but they are seeing different returns on investment from their uses of Twitter," Poynter's Patrick Thornton writes. He notes that the New York Times' main Twitter account features very little interaction, which many deem a death knell in social media. But the feed is wildly popular: it has more than 1.6 million followers, and is the 18th most popular account on Twitter. "There is a market for interactive and non-interactive accounts," Times social media editor Jennifer Preston says. "Like most media organizations, we recognize that Twitter is about conversations, not broadcasting. That said, some people do like their headlines." Thornton also holds up the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Tribune account as a model of a curatorial Twitter presence. "The Colonel's Twitter account links to interesting Tribune content, content from around the web and spurs discussions," he writes. "The Colonel doesn't just grab headlines, but rather finds interesting parts of stories and points them out to users."

Forbes' Elisabeth Eaves recently looked at efforts by national and global brands to market themselves as local businesses, and concluded that whether or not such tactics deserved to be decried as local washing "depends on your definition of local." Jackson Free Press publisher Todd Stauffer singles out Eaves and her argument in a column this week. "Actually, the definition of local isn't up for grabs, and it isn't just marketing," he writes. "The entire concept of 'local' is fundamental both to America's economic recovery and to the potential for progress and self-sufficiency for our local communities." Stauffer goes on to explain that what Eaves and other local-washing defenders are "are doing is purposely conflating the concepts 'local' and 'locale.'"

The advertising broker and technology firm Pontiflex says in a recently released report that marketers will pay publishers an average price of $2.27 for each reader that fills out a form with their name, email address and other bits of personal information. "That hefty price suggests publishers should consider abandoning cheap ads sold for guaranteed prices and should instead try to use space on their web pages to convince readers to turn over their personal information," Forbes' Evan Hessel writes.