If Twitter (the biggest fad in journalism) can teach us one thing, it’s that the newer something is, the more valuable it is. And the best way to make a 140-word news blast even more valuable is to slap the word URGENT on it.

In some ways, the URGENT craze can be traced to cable news stations. A few years ago, CNN discovered the marketing power of the phrase BREAKING NEWS, and began applying it to every story, even ones that aren’t especially important. Digging deeper into mass communications history, Twitter honors the writing format pioneered by the Associated Press for the telegraph. Correspondents were trained send the most important stuff first, as concisely as possible, and to fill in detail later.

In the last few days, we’ve seen Twitter take this to a whole other level. The culprit: Swine flu. Every middling swine flu update rises to the level of URGENT. If this continues, people will become stressed by a constant stream of noise that sounds like bad news (think post-9/11). Either that or the word “URGENT” will lose its power.

There’s the risk that an URGENT story that’s totally false could gain a lot of traction very quickly on Twitter and cause a panic. So far this hasn’t happened in a bad way, but I see it happening on a small level with business gossip.

The worst offender is the Twitter service Breaking News Online. @BreakingNews has a small staff that monitors the newswires and sends out a Tweet every time something is happening. As of this morning, 290,253 people on Twitter are following the account. They have more subscribers than The Baltimore Sun. I follow it so I don’t miss something everybody else knows.

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All over my neighborhood, workers are tearing up streets to replace pipes and do work on other utilities. I have only a vague idea of what’s going on—they look like water pipes to me—but I take relief knowing there is some work going on to fix our infrastructure.

Infrastructure repair is a classic example of something important but not interesting.

You’ve heard politicians talk about it and you’ve read news stories about it. But are you really excited about infrastructure? Repairs are slow, expensive and often invisible. A project like the Hoover Dam and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge only comes along once in a while. Most such work is more like Water Tunnel 3—a $6 billion project you’ll never even notice. Yet the way we live demands electricity, running water, roads, data cables, and so on. These aren’t systems you can build once and let ride. You have to keep paying for them.

And if you don’t pay? Single failures can have an impact way out of proportion to the initial problem (like the 2003 blackout) or kill people (the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis). If you’ve ever traveled in a developing country, you know what a difference it makes when things don’t work. Here in the U.S., we’ve had it good for a long time. But too many of the systems on which we depend are old, stressed, patchwork, unfinished, or in need of repair. We have to spend the money.

The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced today at 3 p.m.

The Pulitzers are good fun, and when they’re announced, hysteria ensues at news publications. This happens even though the contest has some branding problems. The Pulitzers honor a broad range of categories including drama, literature and music—Did you know Bob Dylan won a Pulitzer last year?—but most people think them only as prizes for journalism. Even then, they’re hardly a reflection of the year’s best journalism. They’re limited to American newspapers and Web sites, and thus ignore great swaths of the journalism landscape (such as The New Yorker, 60 Minutes and Photo District News [kidding]). The prizes always tilt in favor of the old guard of East Coast-based national newspapers. But whoever said life was fair?

Of course we cover the photo categories at PDN. The game plan is easy: At 3 p.m., I open the Pulitzer web site and hit “reload” every few seconds. (I don’t bother riding uptown to the press conference.) I’ll also check Editor & Publisher, Yahoo! News and a few other sites. One way or another, I’ll have the winners list by 3:15. I’ll immediately copy and paste the photography winners onto the PDNOnline Twitter feed and I’ll post a story a few minutes later on the PDN site. I’ll have a shell story entered into our CMS in advance to save a few seconds of typing (“The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography went to TK….”). I have no clue who’s going to win and guessing would be unproductive, given that I’ve always guessed wrong in the past.

However, on this blog, I will venture a guess in the Feature Writing category. This story should win: A Butler Well Served by This Election by Wil Haygood of the Washington Post.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the Feature Writing category. However, I announced the two photo winners on Twitter at 3:00 and 3:01, and had a story live at 3:08 p.m. Not bad.

This is the front page of today’s Post, our city’s beloved Murdoch tabloid. The Post is sometimes way ahead of the curve; it was losing money years before losing money was cool. But it’s a little late to the pirate craze.

“In normal times, a company with its name on a baseball stadium would be flattered to have the chief executive take part in the opening-day festivities. But these are not normal times.”

— Ken Belson and Eric Dash, The New York Times, April 4, 2009.

“The century-old Russell Senate Office Building… is not ordinarily a spot for political rallies. But these are not ordinary times.”

— Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, April 2, 2009.

“If these were normal times, it would be ludicrous to issue a report card on the Obama administration’s economic policies. … But these aren’t normal times.”

— Paul Krugman, Rolling Stone, March 3, 2009.

“By any normal political standards, this week’s Congressional agreement on an economic stimulus package was a great victory for President Obama. … Break out the Champagne! Or maybe not. These aren’t normal times, so normal political standards don’t apply.”

— Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 12, 2009.

“Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times.”

— Martin Wolf, Financial Times, February 10, 2009.

“The economic case against protectionism is that it distorts incentives: each country produces goods in which it has a comparative disadvantage, and consumes too little of imported goods. And under normal conditions that’s the end of the story. But these are not normal conditions.”

— Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 1, 2009.

(P.S.: Snap out of it, Krugman, you’re better than this!)

People are bemoaning the loss of investigative journalism. Really?

Do you really miss those seven-part series that ran on newspaper front pages during slow news weeks in August? Did you really enjoy reading 50,000 words on defense spending, or an unsolved crime from 30 years ago, or sewage easements?

Truth is, maybe 1 newspaper investigation in 10 was worth reading. The rest were dry thesis papers aimed at contest judges and ignored by everyone else. You never read them, I never read them. (I even wrote a few nobody read.)

Some time (I think in the 1990s) the word “investigation” became code for “Pulitzer,” and ambitious metro papers set up long-term project desks where they relegated two or three of their top (and slowest) writers. No longer can newspapers afford to waste such resources. And honestly, the concept of a separate investigative desk was a poor idea. A good beat journalist is always in investigative mode. The reporter keeps notes and reports and contacts that may come in useful in future stories, and is ready to deploy them to devastating effect when necessary. A newsroom should be one big investigative engine, a huge, fast intelligence network assembling years of collective memory and experience. Anyone who can write a deadline story can write an investigation.

Here’s what I’ll really miss about newspapers: The next-day, on-deadline package bringing sense and order to something confusing that happened mere hours ago. The A1 sports photo of an amazing game the night before. The columnist who builds on years of history to call B.S. on some policy fad. The culture writer who deftly throws two extra background sentences into the middle of a review to teach the reader about art. And mostly, that feeling that you were reading a product prepared by smart experts who were more interested in sorting out facts than in reinforcing an agenda or protecting sacred cows.

It used to be that the definitive first accounts always came from local newspapers, due to their authority and gravitas (and, when appropriate, swagger). The whole enterprise was supposed to be investigative. This is one of the nuances that’s getting lost as newspapers die and here-today, gone-tomorrow Web sites fill the gaps in our information diet.

Everyone’s favorite feature story right now is Meadowlands Xanadu.

Here’s the outline: During the worst economic environment in half a century, a developer is about to open a $2.2 billion shopping mall in northern New Jersey. Insert quotes from area residents who think the building looks silly and retail economists who are sure it will be a business failure. For color, mention the chocolate waterfall, ferris wheel, indoor ski slope and proximity to the New Jersey Turnpike.

For examples, see Time, Business Week, The New York Times, etc.

I agree with the conventional wisdom on this: Wrong idea, wrong location, wrong year. Even if they finish the rail link connecting Xanadu to Manhattan, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which New Yorkers would flock to a shopping mall. That leaves people from Jersey, who already have more malls than they need, or tourists, who will gaze down on Xanadu as their planes land at Newark Airport, and then go somewhere cooler.

This place does hold promise for one group of people, however: Urban explorers, who some day in the future may delight in traipsing across the ruins of this abandoned complex.

A year ago, we were obsessed with politics. Remember that? Each day all of us news geeks would check the poll numbers and try to figure out who was going to win which primaries. That storyline is over, and something else had to fill the void

Luckly, just in time, something did: The stock market.

We know there are plenty of investment professionals who reading the stock market for a living. They develop sophisticated algorithms about how markets perform and bet on their computer models, hoping to yield a high return. We also know that these people have no idea what they’re doing. If they did, couldn’t at least one of them have predicted the market would fall 45% in a year?

For us amateurs, following the market* is a lot like politics, with each company being a character with a different storyline. For example, I love checking the chart for AutoZone – up 34% over the last year! Google is fascinating: Will its next earnings report be a total flop? How about banks? Wow! And there’s so much information available about all of these companies. I can imagine how fidgety I’d be if I had a TV at my desk where I could watch CNBC. It’s probably best that I don’t.

* – Note that following the market is not the same as investing. This is edutainment. I never actually buy or sell individual stocks.

Virgin Megastore is closing its locations in Times Square, Union Square and San Francisco.

I have spent many hours in the Virgin Megastore, because it’s near my office and it’s a reliable place near a big subway stop to meet up with friends. With all those movies and CDs and listening stations, it’s a fabulous store for wasting time. However, I can’t remember the last time I actually bought something there. So now we know you can’t run a store on the free-content model, either.

Easily the best press release I have ever seen put out by the city government: MAYOR BLOOMBERG REVEALS SOURCES OF MYSTERIOUS BUT HARMLESS MAPLE SYRUP ODORS.

You may remember (or if you live here, you may have smelled) the delicious syrup smell that wafted over the city a few years ago, and a few times since. The city used weather data and the location of 311 calls reporting the smell to figure out where it came from. Answer? Jersey.

“City officials have identified a facility in Hudson County that has processed foenugreek seeds to produce flavors and fragrances that resulted in esters being formed in the air on dates when 311 has received a high number of sweet-smelling odor complaints in the City… ‘Given the evidence, I think it’s safe to say that the Great Maple Syrup Mystery has finally been solved,’ said Mayor Bloomberg.”

Gothamist has the map!