It’s another (long!) weekend, which means another weekend reading list from the Digital Edge! Use these as a distraction when you’ve had (more than) enough quality family time this weekend.

And if this isn’t enough, brainstorm some New Year’s resolutions for the digital media and newspaper industries, and post them to yesterday’s blog entry or e-mail them to me at beth.lawton@naa.org Happy holidays!

Here's your list:

Reporting's Mass Appeal: Amateurs working as journalists are giving rise to a new wave of 'citizen newspapers.' Results are mixed (L.A. Times): “Across the country "citizen newspapers" are springing up, full of promise, energy and atrocious spelling errors. They're largely written by unpaid, untrained and unedited citizen reporters, who say they "commit acts of journalism" more for kicks than out of a sense of civic calling,” the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

WSJ Gets Comfortable with Blogs, Wants to Boost Community (MediaShift): In the past year, The Wall Street Journal’s Web site has incorporated a slew of multimedia and Web 2.0 features. “We’ve all come around to seeing how powerful blogs can be and how they generate their own momentum,” WSJ.com Managing Editor Bill Grueskin told Mark Glaser. Grueskin and Glaser talked about “balancing the desire to do innovation online but still serve the print side,” how free and paid content has changed at WSJ.com and the goals for WSJ.com podcasts and videos.

Corralling Comments (Recovering Journalist): The Arizona Daily Star has been struggling in the past few months with inappropriate reader comments. Recovering Journalist blogger Mark Potts wrote earlier this week, “This isn’t brain surgery. There are well-established ways to enable user comments and put some safeguards in place to keep them civil and interesting.” In the blog post, Potts gives four ways to ensure reader comments work the way they’re supposed to work, including programming a profanity filter and requiring registration.

Media Mensch ‘06: (New York Observer): The New York Observer named former Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet the 'Media Mensch of the Year' with a thoughtfully written article about Banquet’s resignation and the effects of cost-cutting. “But in the greater struggle over the purpose and value of newspapering, Mr. Baquet made his point. The danger facing the news industry is not defeat. The danger facing the news industry is surrender,” according to the article.

Person of the Year: You (TIME Magazine): TIME’s recent announcement that the magazine's ‘Person of the Year’ honor went to the collective, Internet-using, social media driving “you” sparked some debate in the blogosphere. BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis wasn't too impressed, and he certainly wasn't the only media blogger who voiced an opinion (see this MediaShift post on how Time can be more "you"-friendly). It’s worth reading the full TIME article, however, as well as this NewAssignment.net interview with TIME Deputy Managing Editor --- about the choice. (If you’re lucky, you may see the advertisement from ‘Person of the Year’ sponsor Chrysler. Unfortunately for Chrysler, the ad’s text is “You may not be ‘Person of the Year’… but you can drive like you are.”)