Editor’s Note: Last week, I read The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History, the second NBA book produced by the people behind the NBA blog FreeDarko. (The first, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, was really good too.) If you’re not familiar with FreeDarko, Deadspin founder Will Leitch described its writers as like “overcaffeinated, overeducated philosophy grad students who decided they could learn a lot more from NBA LeaguePass than from their professors. They saw Nietzsche in Zach Randolph, John Coltrane in the triangle offense, Moses in Moses Malone.”

It was the book’s final chapter that got me thinking beyond basketball and to more Lab-like matters. In it, writer Pasha Malla describes how YouTube’s endless seas of NBA clips, old and new, allow fans to recontextualize basketball history, challenging established narratives and creating a space for fans to push their own impressions of events and personalities. That sort of democratizing force has impacts across all media, including for news organizations.

I’m very pleased that the folks behind FreeDarko and the book’s publisher, Bloomsbury USA, have let me reprint that final chapter here. —Josh

As its name suggests, the Shot — Michael Jordan’s series-winning buzzer-beater against the Cavs during the 1989 playoffs — is iconic: “As the ball nestled through the net,” confirms NBA.com, describing an image we all can easily visualize, “Jordan pumped his fists in jubilation, completing a video highlight for the ages.” In time, the endlessly replayed Shot became representative of MJ’s transformation from showman to champion and a metonym for the very idea of legacy — it’s not just how dominantly you play the game, but how you’re remembered.

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This morning, “the biggest event in Gawker Media history” took place: Gawker’s sites have officially launched their redesigns. Go to gawker.com — or jezebel.com or deadspin.com or lifehacker.com or the other sites that make up Gawker Media at the moment — and you’ll see the new page layout that’s been on display in beta-dot form for the past couple of months, brought to life on the properties’ home URLs.

The new look, with its emphasis on images and its de-emphasis of the reverse-chronological format, moves Gawker beyond its blog-formatted past — a shift most aptly described, in a November Lifehacker post, by Nick Denton himself. And, in true blog style, the post-blogization of Gawker is something that’s been described and discussed in the blogosphere long before today’s official drop date. The utter unsurprisingness of Gawker’s new look is probably a good thing for a web property, given how indignantly resistant to design change we web users tend to be.

“It just feels inevitable,” Denton says. “We have a crying need to showcase both exclusives and visual posts. The visual posts are now at least half of our top-performing stories. And audience growth on sites like Deadspin and Gawker has been driven by our most sensational scoops.”

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Mark noted in today’s This Week in Review that ”the organization that has shined the brightest over the past 10 days is unquestionably Al Jazeera.” Most viewers in the US, though, have had to watch the news network’s coverage of the uprisings in Egypt on their computers rather than their televisions: Al Jazeera isn’t part of most U.S. cable packages.

So, hoping to cement an “I want my MTV” moment, Al Jazeera is taking to Twitter to find its way onto TVs in the US. The network is using a promoted trend on Twitter, #DemandAlJazeera, to make the case that it’s time for the Qatar-based broadcast to debut on TVs here in America.

In using Twitter, Al Jazeera is tapping a network that has been particularly beneficial to it as events have unfolded in Egypt. If you’ve been online in the past two weeks, it’s almost hard to escape Al Jazeera’s coverage of the demonstrations and political turmoil around Cairo, whether in the channel’s breathless reporting on its site or its updates on Twitter. But it has largely been the channel’s online livestream that has caught the attention of many in the US, and the result has been big traffic.

“We’ve had a lot of people writing about ‘Why do we have to watch this online, why can’t we get (Al Jazeera) in the US,’” Riyaad Minty, head of social media for Al Jazeera, told me. “Almost 50 percent of traffic to our livestream is coming from the US.”

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Al Jazeera, the network, and social activism: For the last week, the eyes of the world have been riveted on the ongoing protests in Egypt, and not surprisingly, the news media themselves have been a big part of that story, too. Many of them have been attacked by President Hosni Mubarak’s lackeys, but the crisis has also been a breeding ground for innovative journalism techniques. Mashable put together a roundup of the ways journalists have used Twitter, Facebook, streaming video, Tumblr, and Audioboo, and the Lab highlighted reporting efforts on Facebook, curation by Sulia, and explainers by Mother Jones. Google and Twitter also created Speak to Tweet to allow Egyptians cut off from the Internet to communicate.

But the organization that has shined the brightest over the past 10 days is unquestionably Al Jazeera. The Qatar-based TV network has dominated web viewing, and has used web audio updates and Creative Commons to get information out quickly to as many people as possible.

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In 2009, while announcing that year’s Knight News Challenge winners at a conference at MIT, Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen mentioned the foundation’s desire to launch “test kitchens” for journalistic tools: laboratories where innovative ideas for news production, distribution, and financial sustenance might be devised, improved, and put to use.

This afternoon, Knight is taking a definitive step in the test-kitchen direction. It’s announcing a grant — $4.2 million over four years — to Northwestern University to establish the Knight News Innovation Laboratory. The Knight Lab will be a joint initiative of the Medill School of Journalism and the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern — at its core, a partnership between journalism and computer science. It’ll be populated by Northwestern faculty and students, as well as, possibly, technologists and members of the media at large. And it will aim to help build and bolster the digital infrastructure that will guide journalism into its next phase.

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