“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.

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Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scotswoman who became a worldwide singing sensation last month, may wind up as the winner this week of “Britain’s Got Talent,” the hit ITV show.

After a six-week absence, she returned on Sunday night to sing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” wowing the crowd and advancing to Saturday’s finale.

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What if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million–a cracked-out number floated last year–or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil?

This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm. The timing was particularly amazing, given that the lefty uber-blog’s traffic has lately been plummeting–a possibility my colleague Nat Ives examined way back in October. At the time Arianna Huffington insisted to Nat that the “Huffington Post is no longer as dependent on politics,” and so she wasn’t particularly worried about the usual post-election readership swoon of politically-focused publications.

That $200 million figure first appeared in a Brian Stelter piece in the New York Times last spring. “According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution,” Stelter wrote, “the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used.”

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Brandon Dilbeck, 20, a student at the University of Washington, was complaining recently on his blog, Brandon Notices, about Comcast’s practice of posting ads in its on-screen programming guide.

He assumed he was writing for his own benefit. “It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog,” he said. “Nobody has left a comment in months.”

Shortly afterward, he received an e-mail message from Comcast, thanking him for the feedback and adding that it was working on a new interactive guide that might “illuminate the issues that you are currently experiencing.”

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Last November, Mark Penn, then the chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton, derisively said Barack Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook.”

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment.

Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Senator Obama’s new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Mr. Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

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This week, the television upfronts–in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers–will open with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers? That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings.

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