GOLDENDALE, Wash. — Here in the high desert east of the Cascades, where towering windmills quietly whir overhead, skaters hurtle downhill along a ribbon of blacktop six at a time wearing helmets and motorcycle leathers, hay bales stacked along switchbacks for the inevitable wipeouts.

But in the garment district in Manhattan, it is a slightly tamer story. One day in the spring, Todd Brunengraber stepped from his office on West 39th Street. Hearing a distinct hum from newly repaved Seventh Avenue, he turned and watched a commuter on a supersize skateboard whiz by.

The board was similar to the type he built in woodshop while growing up, but with big, candy-colored wheels. Soon, Brunengraber, a 62-year-old grandfather who had not set foot on a board in more than 25 years, spent $50 for a lesson and joined a growing legion of longboarders.

This summer, he has been pushing to and from Penn Station, and each night after work cruising a hill on his Bay Shore, N.Y., street.

“It’s a rush to get on it,” he said.

Whether on a hair-raising rural road in the Pacific Northwest or in teeming Midtown traffic, longboards have become the fastest-growing segment in an otherwise sluggish skateboard market. In recent years, they have lured new participants to a pastime traditionally dominated by teenage boys and young men performing perilous stunts.

“There’s a real neo-hippie, everybody-welcome kind of vibe to longboarding,” said Adam Goldstein, 43, who skates with his 10-year-old son around Manhattan.

Goldstein, who directs commercials, says he takes a longboard to commute while working in Los Angeles or Toronto. “You can just go anywhere,” he said.

With decks usually 34 inches or longer; trucks (axles) adapted for easier turning; and big, soft wheels, longboards provide a smoother skating experience than boards designed for performing tricks. Their size and stability make longboards well suited for cruising streets and college campuses. The price of a good longboard starts at about $150.

“There’s no stigma,” said Larry Peterson, who made 2,500 boards in a dairy barn in Salem, Ore., last year under the brand Longboard Larry. “It’s one of the sports where someone who’s 40 can go skate with someone who’s 13 and nobody thinks it’s weird.”

With an inclusive, do-it-yourself ethic, longboarding has grown as a grass-roots movement mostly outside the established skateboard industry and spread from Southern California to places like Brooklyn and Bend, Ore.

Begun in a San Diego backyard in 1993 by a group of surfers, the longboard maker Sector 9 has led the way. In 2008, the surf apparel maker Billabong bought Sector 9. Sector 9 is part of an increasingly crowded market that 10 years ago was not much more than a scattered collection of small entrepreneurs.

While working at a skate shop in the 1990s, Brian Petrie began making longboards from broken snowboards out of his Brooklyn apartment. The result: Earthwing Skateboards. In 2002 a group of friends in Hagerstown, Md., began building longboards for themselves. By 2004, they moved to New York and settled in Brooklyn as Bustin Boards.

Zak Maytum, 19, a champion downhill and slalom skater on his longboard, began a business making wheels and bushings from his parents’ garage in Boulder, Colo., three years ago. Today, his company, Venom, employs two salespeople. “Every year is bigger than the last year,” he said.

A former professional street skater, Marcus Bandy is the team manager for Orangatang, a wheel company in Los Angeles that is popular with longboarders.

“It’s really all new,” Bandy, 37, said about the longboard culture. “It’s like when punk rock or hip-hop first came out. It’s a whole new thing, and the kids are loving it.”

He added: “People are always going to create their own stuff and that’s what’s happening here. These guys are creating skateboarding and reinventing skateboarding.”

ARLINGTON, Va. — In most newsrooms, the joke would have been obvious.

On Gawker’s “big board,” reporters can check the most-viewed articles, a list updated hourly.
It was April Fools’ Day last year, and Politico’s top two editors sent an e-mail message to their staff advising of a new 5 a.m. start time for all reporters.

“These pre-sunrise hours are often the best time to reach top officials or their aides,” the editors wrote, adding that reporters should try to carve out personal time “if you need it,” in the midafternoon when Internet traffic slows down.

But rather than laugh, more than a few reporters stared at the e-mail message in a panicked state of disbelief.

“There were several people who didn’t think it was a joke. One girl actually cried,” said Anne Schroeder Mullins, who wrote for Politico until May, when she left to start her own public relations firm. “I definitely had people coming up to me asking me if it was true.”

Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.

Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages. Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles.

Once only wire-service journalists had their output measured this way. And in a media environment crowded with virtual content farms where no detail is too small to report as long as it was reported there first, Politico stands out for its frenetic pace or, in the euphemism preferred by its editors, “high metabolism.”

The top editors, who rise as early as 4:30 a.m., expect such volume and speed from their reporters because they believe Politico’s very existence depends, in large part, on how quickly it can tell readers something, anything they did not know.

“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.

“Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.” (Not all reporters are expected to be on their game by dawn, Mr. VandeHei added, noting that many work a traditional 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. newspaper day.)

At Gawker Media’s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall displays the 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker’s Web sites. The author’s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and over all are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the “big board.”

“Sometimes one sees writers just standing before it, like early hominids in front of a monolith,” said Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder. Mr. Denton said not all writers have warmed to the concept. “But the best exclusives do get rewarded,” he added, noting that bonuses for writers are calculated in part based on page views.

The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. Departures at Politico lately have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. At Gawker, it is not uncommon for editors to stay on the job for just a year.

Physically exhausting assembly-line jobs these are not. But the workloads for many young journalists are heavy enough that signs of strain are evident.

“When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,” said Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of the digital media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I worry about burnout.”

In Washington, the news cycle promises to become even more frenzied as outlets like The Huffington Post expand their operations there. The Atlantic Media Company, which publishes the National Journal and The Atlantic, plans to hire 30 new journalists for a new venture set to open this fall that will publish breaking news and analysis online.

At Politico, Mr. VandeHei, who has been known to pace between rows of reporters’ desks asking who has broken news lately, said editors experimented with monitoring how many articles reporters were writing, but decided that raw numbers did not give a full picture of a reporter’s performance.

WASHINGTON — It was not quite the Tony Blair-Bill Clinton love fest of 1997, but President Obama and the newly minted British prime minister, David Cameron, appeared game to do everything they could on Tuesday to take some of the recent chill out of the relationship between their countries.
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Standing side by side in near-identical dark blue suits and blue ties in the East Room at the conclusion of Mr. Cameron’s first visit to the White House as his nation’s leader, the two fortysomethings systematically papered over the few areas of daylight between the United States and Britain (stimulus spending versus deficit reduction, the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan, the need for an inquiry into the release by Scotland of the only person convicted in the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie).

Instead, before the assembled press corps of Washington and Downing Street, they joked about cold beer versus warm beer, whether their children kept their bedrooms tidy and the England-United States World Cup soccer match that ended in a tie.

“While at the World Cup our teams could only manage a score draw, I believe our relationship can be a win-win,” Mr. Cameron said, neglecting to mention that the United States still managed to emerge the winner, over England, of its World Cup group.

Even on one of the main areas of substantive disagreement — the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had served eight years of a life sentence for his role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland — the two seemed determined to project the impression of being in lock step.

But Mr. Cameron, who as leader of Britain’s opposition at the time had objected to the release, said that he did not see any point to an additional investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Megrahi’s release, an investigation that Mr. Obama supports.

“I don’t need an inquiry to tell me it was a bad decision,” Mr. Cameron said. “It was a bad decision.”

Mr. Cameron also said he had no reason to believe that BP had anything to do with the much criticized decision to release Mr. Megrahi from a Scottish prison last year to win oil concessions from Libya.

He and Mr. Obama both strongly condemned the release, which the Scottish government decided on compassionate grounds after doctors there testified that Mr. Megrahi was likely to die of advanced prostate cancer within three months. He is still alive and living in Tripoli, Libya.

“It was the biggest mass murder in British history, and there was no business letting him out of prison,” Mr. Cameron said, adding that he and Mr. Obama were in “violent agreement” on that.

The first formal visit between an American president and a British prime minister is always fraught with historical significance. The two Western powers make much of their vaunted “special relationship,” which Mr. Obama, who never seemed to warm to Mr. Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, mentioned twice during the news conference; Mr. Cameron once.

In this case, not only is Mr. Cameron new to his job, but as leader of the Conservative Party, he is ideologically more distant from Mr. Obama than was Mr. Brown, who was leader of the Labour Party.

Britain’s press pays a lot of attention to every facet of how its prime ministers are treated by American presidents; any slight, real or imagined, is examined, as Mr. Obama learned last year. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had to step in to quell an uproar in the British press over the White House’s rejection of five requests from the British for a meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown last September. (“Stop reading those London tabloids,” Mr. Gibbs said, insisting that the White House turned down the requests because Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown talked all the time.)

Mr. Cameron’s first visit to Washington as prime minister was meant as a way for he and Mr. Obama to tackle a series of issues vital to the two countries, in particular the war in Afghanistan and steps toward a global economic recovery. But the BP oil spill, and a decision by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on July 29 on Mr. Megrahi’s release, dominated the joint news conference after the White House meetings.

Lawmakers who pressed for the Washington hearing on the release — including the senators from New York, New Jersey and California, home states to many of the 189 American bombing victims at Lockerbie — have demanded that BP explain its role in lobbying for the prisoner-transfer agreement Britain and Libya concluded in December 2007. The senators have said they want to explore possible links between Mr. Megrahi’s release and BP’s eagerness to win Libyan ratification of an offshore oil deal that company officials have said could be worth $20 billion.

Brian Knowlton contributed reporting from Washington and John F. Burns from London.