Jeremy W Peters, The New York Times

Editors at The Wall Street Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.

At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom.

A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.

Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.

“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”

He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.

At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.

The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”

Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.

As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.

At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.

“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.

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By Robert Reich, The New York Times

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

It’s no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns — sometimes that’s here, but often it’s the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result…

In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.

By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity.

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By Shashi Tharoor, The Deccan Chronicle

The recent controversy over China’s provocative denial of a visa to an Indian general and New Delhi’s measured but firm response to the snub is one more pointer to the unsettled nature of political relations between the two countries.

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By Isaac Stone Fish and Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek

In Xinhua’s world, the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened, Falun Gong is an evil cult, and the Dalai Lama is the Guy Fawkes of Tibet.

Nevertheless, Xinhua may be the future of news for one big reason: cost. A subscription to all Xinhua stories costs in the low five figures, compared with at least six figures for comparable access to the Associated Press, Reuters, or AFP. For customers who still can’t afford the fees, a Xinhua aid program offers everything—content, equipment, and technical support—for free.

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By Chandak Sengoopta, The Independent

“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Winston Churchill famously declared in 1942. That passion for empire did not, however, entail the duty of protecting the lives of the King’s distant subjects, especially Indians, “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” In 1943, as millions were dying of starvation in 1943 in Bengal, the birthplace of the Raj, Churchill not only refused to help but prevented others from doing so, commenting that Indians “bred like rabbits.”

Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War establishes how Churchill and his associates could easily have stopped the Bengal famine with a few shipments of foodgrains but refused, in spite of repeated appeals from two successive Viceroys, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the United States.

Famines, never unknown in India, became increasingly lethal during the Raj because of the export of foodgrains and the replacement of food crops with indigo or jute. The Second World War made things worse, especially after Japanese forces occupied Burma in 1942, cutting off Indian rice imports. Then a destructive cyclone hit the Bengal coast just when the crucial winter crop was maturing and the surviving rice was damaged by disease.

Government stocks were released but only to feed the people of Calcutta, especially British businesspeople and their employees, railway and port workers and government staff. Controlled shops were opened for less important Calcuttans and the urban population never suffered too greatly. The rural masses, however, were left to the wolves. This was when Churchill could have made a difference by sending wheat or rice to Bengal.

Churchill and his war cabinet, however, decided to reserve available shipping to take food to Italy in case it fell to the Allies.

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By Sean Randolph, Yale Global Online

As the US tech industry saw rapid growth during the 1990s, immigrating students and workers from Asia heeded innovation’s call. Engineers and programmers from India settled in Silicon Valley and enjoyed immediate success. About one out of six tech startups was launched by immigrants from India. Now a new migration is underway, which promises to jumpstart innovation in India.

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By Fan Gang, Project Syndicate

It is my hope that China’s comparative advantage as a low-wage producer does disappear – the sooner the better. But why should I, a Chinese economist, wish to see China’s competitiveness reduced through rising labour costs? After all, when a country still lacks real advantages, such as higher education, efficient markets and enterprises, and a capacity for innovation, it needs something like low wages to maintain growth.

While cheap labour has been a key factor in generating high growth over the past three decades, it has also contributed to profound income disparities, especially in recent years.

Agriculture remains the main source of income for more than 30% of China’s labour force, compared to less than 2% in the United States or 6% in South Korea. Another 30% of the labour force comprises migrant workers, who have doubled their incomes by moving from agriculture to the industrial and service sectors.

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By Anna Mundow, Salon

Almost 30 years ago, in his novel Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith introduced us to Arkady Renko, the Moscow homicide investigator who arrived on the page almost fully alienated — from his past, from his profession and from the Soviet system. In Polar Star, the man apart became the man adrift, working on the “slime line” of a Russian factory ship. Each Renko novel seemed to propel its hero further to the margins; the newest, Three Stations,finds the investigator shocked by his own irrelevance and advancing age. “Who was this graying stranger,” Renko wonders, “who rose from his bed, usurped his clothes and occupied his chair at the prosecutor’s office?”

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Editorial, The Guardian

The response to a call for funds to restore dresses worn by Vivien Leigh show that fans of the film still give more than a damn.

The true origin of the celebrated phrase “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”, which Clark Gable so savagely directs at Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, lies in the Indian subcontinent. There it was apparently customary to express indifference by saying that an object, an idea, or a person was not worth a “dam” – a “dam” being a small, almost valueless coin. The Hays Office, which policed American cinema in the era in which the film of Margaret Mitchell’s novel was made, was obviously unaware of this etymology, or it would not have agonised over whether it should permit the use of what it believed to be a swearword. The line, the film, the film’s cast, the book and its author all went on to become aspects of what has proved to be an enduring cultural monument. Like it or not, Gone With the Wind is for many people the main way in which the American civil war is remembered, as well as a window on Hollywood and its stars in the years before another conflict, that against Hitler, underlined Sherman’s famous observation that war is hell. Atlanta today houses several shrines to the book and the film. But the appeal of both remains powerful across America and the world, as has just been shown by the response to a call for funds to restore dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in the film. It was oversubscribed within three weeks. Lovers of Gone With the Wind are obviously ready not only to give a dam, but to give quite a lot of dollars to keep the myth and all its accoutrements alive.

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By Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair

At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning.

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