Each Friday, New York Times General Manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on webby advances at the paper. This week, reporters file stories from these things called BlackBerries! "Ben Shpigel made the best out of a ridiculous situation. While staking out the Yankees complex in Tampa, Ben sent short updates from the scene on his Blackberry as he and dozens of other reporters and photographers waited for a glimpse of Yankees executives (any Yankees executive) there to discuss Joe Torre's future.... In truth, there wasn't much news. And Ben was without a functioning
Internet connection. But he still kept readers informed and entertained." Blog blog bloggety blog!

Listen, Kelefa Sanneh and Ben Sisario and Jon Pareles are out at CMJ shows every night and blogging about it for the New York Times and none of you care! There's not a comment on the Arts Beat blog. Go on over! Today they taught me that I had to go buy both the new Dragons of Zynth ("frenetic"!) and the new White Williams (hello, "like a color Xerox of an old Tom Tom Club song"), and that was useful. Although: When you compare Idolator's coverage with theirs, where's the famous Times innovation web crew influence? Where's the videos—heck, where's the photography? [NYT]

Each Friday, New York Times General Manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write a letter on webby advances at the paper. From today's: "Web readers are different from newspaper readers. For one thing, they don't really organize their browsing along sectional lines." Thank you. Item! It's your paper now: "User. Generated. Content. Write it 100 times on the blackboard. Last week City Room featured an item about fishing in New York City... A couple of hours later, a reader submitted a video he shot of fishermen on a pier in Bay Ridge using this form we set up for that purpose. We have talented users. Let's use them." Hey, you're a user, reader!

Each Friday, deputy managing editor Jon Landman and NYT.com general manager Vivian Schiller send out an email to New York Times staffers on the subject of innovation of a digital nature. We read it to take the temperature inside the paper. Some notable moments from this week's installment: "We are way past the point of arguing (aren't we?) about whether blogs or articles make better journalism. The answer, of course, is 'Both.'" And: "Webbies like to say, 'Iterate.' It gets worse! They love to say 'Iterative.' Horrible words. Great ideas. The point is, you can start something on the web that isn't perfect. While it sits there, you make it better. (Try that in the newspaper—by the time you iterate, it's fish wrap.)"