So here’s a new deal I’m going to start trying. I find the headlines and I ask you to filter back to me the new facts, missing info and impact of the stories. If you read one of the stories that pass my filter, will kindly post one comment if you find anything interesting in the articles themselves?

Here’s what passed through my filter today:

Mashable.com and Poynter.org’s Romenesko dominated today’s Thornburg filter. Mashable had nine stories and Romenesko got eight through.

Twenty SXSW panels that journalists would find worthwhile. I SWEAR I’m going this year. Very interested in the proposals about using design thinking in newsrooms.

‘Murdoch has has never succeeded in any digital venture he’s managed’ Always love a contrarian POV. Especially when they may be right.

Primack quits Thomson Reuters to join Fortune.com An niche daily e-mail with 60,000 subscribers. As a journalist, I’ll take that. Getting that many subscribers is one problem, certainly. But once I do, what’s your suggested business plan for me?

Journalists in Mexico forced to practice ‘narco-censorship’ Amid all the fluff we get in daily news media, let’s not forget the journalists who truly risk their lives to shine light in dark places, hold powerful people accountable and explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

Washington Post Co. warns on Kaplan division Always worried about one of my favorite news (and education) companies. Kaplan’s been WaPoCo’s sugar daddy for a while. All newsrooms need a sugar daddy. Or a thin staff. And by thin, I mean they don’t eat.

Aspen Institute panel discusses health of nation’s media Durn. I was just in Breckenridge. How come I couldn’t find an excuse to stay in the Rockies an extra week?

Conservative columnist Kilpatrick dies at 89 For a new media guy, it surprises me how often I get nostalgic about an old media world I never really knew but that has shaped my ideas about what the American press can and should be.

The Future of Public Relations and Social Media Sometimes Mashable’s “tip” columns are useful and sometimes they are utter self-promotion. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to sort them out every day. So, please, Mashable, less chaff and more wheat.

Use Adobe Fonts in Your Own Web Designs Always interested in the ongoing battle between openness/interoperability and attractiveness/designer tyranny.

Jim Barnett on Texas Tribune via Nonprofit Road blog Barnett is a smart guy and was kind enough to let me pick his brain when I launched my failed N.C. political news service in 2001. So I hope he succeeds at Texas Tribune and continues to share the lessons he learns as an old-school entrepreneurial journalist.

Hulu Serving 3x as Many Video Ads as YouTube The two things I want to know after reading this headline: Why? and Is Hulu also doing 3x revenue as YouTube? Plus, I’m always cheering for UNC journalism alumni like Hulu CEO Jason Kilar.

Gawker boss says Web media need to be more like TV Nick Denton gets the Web, and I’m not just saying that because I too think that Web media has been slow to pick up on the “right” lessons from TV news. I wonder if Denton’s reason for saying Web media need to be more like TV are the same as mine.

5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media I’m only interested in this Mashable column if it has actual research and data. Anyone can do anecdotes and speculation. Even me.

iPhone App Makes Barcode Scanning a Social Experience Food pricing is an untapped social news product. You want to defend your local news market? Make grocery shopping part of your UGC strategy. (See, I told you even I could offer unsubstantiated speculation.)

How People Are Signing In Across the Web [STATS] Dear Mashable, if by “[STATS]” you mean actual research and information, then I’m all about this.

Slideshare Is Going Freemium I love and use Slideshare. And HootSuite, which is also “going freemium.” And I’m putting the word “freemium” as the center square on this month’s buzzword bingo sheet. (Also, I wonder if there’s a future revenue stream from turning your letters-to-the-editor and comments sections into “freemium” services.)

TV Guide Gets a Slick New iPad App OK, so it’s slick. But is it strategically interesting in any way? Is there any lessons to transfer to other news and information services looking to make the mobile leap?

USA Today launches multimedia special marking five years since Hurricane Katrina Need to take a look at this and look for applicable lessons and suggestions for other newsrooms.

Web Faceoff: Freemium vs. Ad Supported Mashable – You’ve sunk my battleship!

Nine Questions on Patch’s New Push: National Hyperlocal?, SEO Sauces, and the Case of the Besieged Florist One journalist per 10,000 to 80,000 people. Compare that ratio to the typical newspaper newsroom ratio of five years ago. ( I think it’s 1-per-1,000, but I need to check Phil Meyer’s book “The Vanishing Newspaper” to be sure.) Also wondering if it’s time to start creating two cleavages for “community” sites — geographic AND behavioral/psychographic. One alone will not do. But do two cut the slices too small?

Please do share your thoughts.

Good advice for future journalists from Alan Murray, the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Web site, who gave the Park Lecture at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday night. His approach to online journalism certainly sounded right to me, but what I didn’t hear was any hard evidence that would help support my gut instinct.

The biggest question I still have: Is there any business model for high quality local public affairs journalism?

Murray nicely laid out an argument for the kind of “do what you do best, and link to the rest” journalism that makes sense on the Web. He wasn’t sanctimonious about do-gooder journalism and gave well-deserved props to Matt Drudge for being a great editor who creates value not by creating content, but by being incredibly in tune with what his audience wants. Nor did Murray take the self-loathing approach that’s increasingly common in the MSM; he said that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that Drudge so doggedly promoted was the low point of his career.

The Journal is often cited as being in the fortunate position of being able to get people to pay for its product. It’s a niche product that serves an affluent audience with information its readers use to make money for themselves. So Murray had some ideas for local papers: The Houston Chronicle, he said, should be the go-to source for information about the oil industry, and the San Jose Mercury-News should be all over Silicon Valley.

That all makes pretty good sense to me, and I still have no idea why papers aren’t pursuing those strategies more vigorously. But here’s an important question for which I still don’t have an answer — do those business models scale down?

The Houston Chronicle may be able to make money by assigning three people to cover the oil industry and charging $1,500 a year for a subscription to a Web site featuring their work. They could probably even make good money by selling ads on that content for a free site with a national audience. But would that niche strategy work, too, if the Houston Chronicle’s niche were the Houston Independent School District? Are there as many people who care about Houston’s schools as care about Houston’s oil? Are both groups of readers as valuable to advertisers? And — this is the biggest question — are both groups willing to pay the same amount to subscribe to their niche of interest?

Let’s take a look at Chapel Hill. It has one of the best public school systems in the country and easily the best in the state. Parents are wealthy, highly education and, I’d imagine, have high expectations and high levels of involvement. It serves 11,000 students. According to the Census Bureau, there are 5,386 families in Chapel Hill with kids under 18 — and, presumably, in public or private school. About 5,000 people voted in the 2007 school board elections.

So let’s hire 1 FTE to cover education in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We’re going to hire someone right out of college and pay her the national average for new journalism grads working at daily newspapers — $28,000. Just so nobody accuses us of being a pajama-wearing blogger, we’ll go ahead and hire a 0.5 FTE to edit the education stories, and we’ll pay the editor half of her $40,000 annual salary.

And, just make everything neat and tidy, let’s publish on the Web only and not charge any of the overhead utilities, legal or equipment costs to this beat. But let’s say you need to pay 16 percent in Social Security taxes and benefits and would like to have a very conservative 5 percent profit margin. So, let’s say the education beat needs to earn you a little under $60,000.

$60,000 divided among 5,000 subscribers is $12.00. How many of those 5,000 potential subscribers would pay the 12 bucks to subscribe to a Web site about the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools? Let’s say we could only get 3,000 subscribers. Would they pay $20 just for that one beat?

Well that’s exactly how much one of my fellow professors said he would pay when we were discussing this scenario after Murray’s speech. But he said he’d pay it only if he received a very selective and relevant report. He’d be willing to pay more money for less content, as long as that content was hyper-relevant, he said.

That leads to some other interesting questions — what would be the public affairs journalism consumption budget for the average Chapel Hillian? How many beats would she buy? About 6,000 people voted in town council elections. Would half of them pay another $20 a year for coverage of town government? Or, could you still do a decent report with a 0.5 FTE for each beat?

Dunno. But this is really the business model we’re talking about when we talk about niche publishing. The newspaper has been disaggregated by the Web. News companies can add little value to their reporting with packaging and no value to their reporting with doorstep delivery. Readers already pay Dell, Microsoft and Verizon for those additional services. This is what we’re talking about when Web metrics allow us to see ROI at the story level.

This model may not save local public affairs reporting, but I doubt it’s going to make it worse. I’m pretty sure there’s nobody covering Chapel Hill schools even half time right now.

(My live tweets of the speech are here. I will post video and the text of his remarks when they are available.)