Our sister site SocialTimes recently spoke to Vadim Lavrusik, manager of Facebook’s journalism program. Lavrusik talked about why Facebook is the Rolodex of today’s journalists and how they can use the social network to report. Some of the takeaways:

Finding Sources
For finding people, journalists can type in phrases like ”College students in New York, NY” and “People who work at Facebook and like the New York Times“ to target a group of people if they don’t have a specific person in mind. From there, examining a person’s profile information such as a friends list or relationship status can be a starting point for verifying his or her identity…

Discovering Content
Facebook is also a good source of eye-witness videos and photos that journalists can discover and request to use in their stories, said Lavrusik. For example, a search for “photos taken in Breezy Point” conjures more 1,000 images of the New York City neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012… Read more

Baratunde Thurston and the rest of the crew at Cultivated Wit are teaming up with AOL Studios to produce a show called FUNDED. It’ll feature crowdfunded projects from around the country and talk to the entrepreneurs about why they chose such a path. In a blog post announcing the project, Thurston implored anyone who knows of cool, under-the-radar projects to share.

What are your favorite crowdfunded journalism projects?

The Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism announced a new program today aimed at measuring media impact. With $3.25 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lear Center Media Impact Project hopes to help news outlets and journos understand engagement on a deeper level. Sure, journalists can measure engagement by number of retweets or Facebook ‘Likes.’ But just because many people retweeted a headline doesn’t mean that the story will promote change. (Especially if they haven’t even read it.)

“The metrics that have been used for this have been astonishingly primitive,” Martin Kaplan, director of the Lear Center, told The New York Times. The center is in the process of assembling a team of journos, analytics experts and social scientists to figure out how media affects the behavior of consumers. According to a post on the Knight Blog, the project aims to: Read more

In the same year that music mags Blender and Giant folded, Vibe shuttered, as well. But, luckily for the iconic mag, it was snapped up by a private equity firm, and editor-in-chief Jermaine Hall was brought on to resurrect the pub. And resurrect it, he did.

In the latest installment of Mediabistro’s So What Do You Do?, Hall explains how the mag is winning again and explains why editors-in-chief need to be more than just good writers.

“A lot of things that come with being editor-in-chief aren’t necessarily drilled down into the day-to-day tasks. It’s a lot of schmoozing; it’s a lot of fixing relationships; it’s a lot of bartering; it’s a lot of people skills,” he said. “It’s really going out there to be the ambassador of the brand on all levels. And that doesn’t necessarily come from being the strongest writer, it just really comes from people skills and the contacts and the relationships there that you’ve been able to build over your career. So, I think it’s knowing that it’s more than just writing and more than just editing at this level.”

For more, read So What Do You Do, Jermaine Hall, Editor-in-Chief of Vibe?

After an attempt in September of last year to stay relevant in the changing media landscape, The Boston Phoenix is shuttering for good. Executive editor Peter Kadzis, who has been with the pub for 25 years, said in a press release, “It was the decline of national advertising dollars over the years that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable.”

The alt-weekly’s publisher, Phoenix Media, will continue to publish Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix, as those publications do not rely on national advertising to stay afloat. “The local advertising market is sufficient to support those publications. You can see why Warren Buffett favors small market papers over their big city brothers and sisters,” said Kadzis.

Publisher Stephen Mindich announced the news in a staff memo – read it at Romenesko.