A Modest Proposal for the Seattle Times

In a couple of weeks, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is due to stop publishing its print edition. In the spirit of prodding journalists to move on with life, and concentrate on re-energizing journalism in our communities, here’s some unsolicited advice for the Seattle Times. This could be an opportunity for the news organization to take its freedom and run with it…into survival and eventual success. Instead of spending its last dime doing business as usual, it could start a major overhaul that would create a different and modern Web-based nichified news organization with a solid local foundation.

A House that Jurnos and the Community Build

First, create geographic-based community sites: Put a pod of jurnos in each of the neighborhoods of Seattle that have a population of about 50,000 people, give or take a few thou. Each pod includes at least two reporters, an ad salesperson, and a community manager. (Take the U.S. News & World Report approach.)

Second, topic-based sites: Choose the beats you still own. Education? Transportation? Environment? Health? Rename them something catchier (for transportation, how does CantGetThereFromHere.com sound? Hey…I’ve been to Seattle.) And create another pod of jurnos for each of those sites. Reporters, ad salesperson, community manager.

Here's a rough graphic representation of the mini-metro network. Sumopaint's terrific online software, but it can't improve bad art skills. I'll ask my friend and graphics expert Val to fix it up, after folks send in some ideas on how to improve it.

Do a serious competitive analysis of these topic-based beats. Do you still own sports? Or have MaxPreps, the professional leagues, and CBS Sportline swooped in, as they have in almost every other metropolitan area? Has ESPN put Seattle on its list of local sites they’re developing? What about entertainment? Many national organizations glommed onto the local movie scene long ago, including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB.com. But maybe there’s enough local entertainment to keep a site alive. If a strong competitive topic-based site exists that has incorporated social networking, that serves its community members by giving them myriad ways to interact and provide useful information to each other…and many do, and that provides useful information, not just stories, move on to another topic.

Tango into the Webworld Format

Take the Web approach to create a social/news/information network. It’s so much more than a Web site. This must be a place the community thinks it owns. Remember the words “my newspaper”? Now you hear “my Facebook page”. You want people to think that way about this network. You want them to use it so much that they can’t figure out how they lived without it. (Talk to iPhone fanatics for inspiration. See how people use Craftster or Marketwatch and the Marketwatch Community.)

Map the communities. Find all relevant people and organizations that move and shake in a geographic-based community, or who push or put the brakes on issues in topic-based communities. Find out how the community works, how it communicates, what they need, what they want fixed. All that information gets organized into a Web shell of useful and user-friendly databases, resources, links, maps, etc. You don’t have to complete it before launch. Leave some for the community to add to and finish up.

Then, set up the site. Make the community the visual and functional engine. That means the site is a social network first. Big and prominent on the site is an easy sign-up. Free of charge. People have their own blogs, they form groups, they have discussions, they plan events, they buy and sell, give away and pick up, volunteer and ask for help. Anyone can look at anything on the site for free. People have to provide a real email address and their name if they want to participate. Their membership photos are on the home page. So are their blogs, links to their groups and their discussions.

The daily job of jurnos is to blog their beats. They post in a Webcentric way — some combination of text, still photos, videos, slide shows, graphics, polls, quizzes — a half-dozen or more times a day. They engage in a conversation with the community, which feeds them information (text, still photos, videos, slide shows, graphics). They ask this question about everything they put on the site: Is it immediate or contextual? Does it pick up or offer a chronological thread? Is it solution-oriented? How can I make this more participatory? Is this something that other communities would be interested in?

Sometimes jurnos do “traditional” iconic storytelling: a multi-part profile or analysis or summary.

The role of the jurno still fulfills important traditions passed down to us from the U.S. Constitution. We are fact-checkers, watchdogs, myth-busters, investigative reporters. Some people worry that if newspapers as we know them disappear, investigative reporting is doomed. In this network structure, I think investigative reporting thrives. In this structure, jurnos are much more involved in their communities, so problems are likely to be noticed sooner and followed more regularly. This approach has a better shot at preventing abuse. The other advantage is that jurnos can ask the community for input as they work on issues of individual or spot corruption or abuse, as TalkingPointsMemo did with the U.S. attorneys scandal.

What’s more important, though, is that with this structure, jurnos have a better shot at addressing issues of a corrupt, broken or ineffectual system that harms the community, such as a juvenile justice system that increases recidivism, or child welfare services that don’t protect children. They follow an issue until the community reaches its goal or resolves the issue. No more parachuting in and out of communities and stories.

This network does one more thing: it enables jurnos to share trusted information with each other. If it’s a smart network, then it can alert jurnos to similar issues cropping up in several communities, and help them work together on reporting an issue, as well as coordinate developments with jurnos in topic-based communities. This approach is already developing in a nascent form with Publish2.

Figure out how the content of this site can be accessible on people’s mobile phones. Start with the easy stuff first, useful information and tools that are branded and that drive people to participate more in the network.

This Can Make Money

The network is key to financing this operation. Geographic sites pick up the local advertisers who’ve been priced out of the paper for lo these many years. Examples of local ad-supported Web sites exist. One’s right there in West Seattle — WestSeattleBlog.com. (Key advice for the Seattle Times: Don’t try to compete with the WestSeattleBlog; learn from them; partner up with them; make them an offer they can’t refuse.) Topic-based sites pick up niche advertisers who’ve been priced out of the paper, as well as niche advertisers or general advertisers who want to reach several communities, or particular interest-based communities. Look at networks such as NameMedia, NetShelter, and Federated Media. Is it possible to develop a regional version of those national networks?

The organization doesn’t have to be all ad-based. It could throw a little Spot.Us into the mix, if the community gathers ’round an issue and wants to support an investigation. And for neighborhoods that don’t have enough business base to support a news network, perhaps some foundation money could get one started, and the jurnos could help foster the economic health of the community so that, eventually, enough business would exist to support the network.

The Paper

With a distributed news/information/social network, the Seattle Times won’t need a big central office anymore. Sell it. Rent it out. But  keep the printing presses. Yes, it would still put out a paper. It won’t appear every day. And it won’t look ANYTHING like it does now. Model the content on the new Web approach: graphic, community-driven, pushing people to engage with the network, i.e., each other.

Maybe it comes out Thursday, Friday and Sunday, to coincide with the days that advertisers want to reach people in the community with a print product. Maybe Thursday’s food day, and the content focuses on everything food, from restaurant reviews, recipes, to issues such as local food safety or how the community’s doing on its goal of becoming a neighborhood of localvores. Maybe Friday’s local entertainment and weekend outdoor activities. The movies may have been sucked up by Fandango, but there’s probably much more local activity that could support a paper. Sunday’s inserts continue to be as interesting as what jurnos provide (jurnos recognize that the community values information and news in advertising as much as traditional news and they embrace it), and frame a mix of fun and summaries and analysis of community issues.

It’s a Bottom-Up World

A small group of editors — if it’s financially warranted — can aggregate information/stories from all the sites. In this scenario, 90 percent of the organization’s effort is put into a couple of dozen inch-wide, mile-deep sites, and small group puts together a Newser for Seattle.

If the Seattle Times starts now, it could keep its good name, its dedication to good journalism, and its good entrepreneurial jurnos —  the kind of people who can nurture this nichified network through its growing pains. Maybe the organization won’t employ as many people as it does now, but in business-as-usual, the layoffs would continue anyway as the organization shrinks. A shift from mass-media to Web-based nichified media would encourage those who want to write only, who want to stay in a world of we-talk you-listen, who won’t embrace beat-blogging, who don’t see the value in social networking, to go somewhere else.

It would be a tough year or two of experimentation, learning to let the community help reconfigure what the news organization does for the community, learning to be flexible and agile, which means making as many mistakes in the shortest time possible, shouting out, “This is fascinating!” with each one. It’s uncomfortable, messy, uncertain, and scary. And that’s the way it’s supposed to feel if you’re making this very difficult and inspiring transition.

A friend once said about skydiving — if you ain’t scared, you ain’t having fun. In the case of transitioning to a Web-based medium, if you ain’t scared, you ain’t moving forward.

And if the Seattle Times ain’t moving forward, other folks will.

Here’s John Cook’s take on the Seattle situation. And his 10 steps for saving the Seattle P-I. He’s co-founder and executive editor for TechFlash, an online tech biz publication that’s partnered with the weekly Business Journal, which (obviously) also has a Web site.

In Webworld, How Do You Charge Money for a Flight 1549 Story?

Over the last couple of weeks, several articles have appeared about how to pay for journalism, mostly journalism in legacy media, mostly metropolitan newspapers. In Time Magazine, Walter Isaacson suggested micropayments were the answer. Steven Brill offered the New York Times a solution involving micropayments. David Swensen, Yale University’s chief investment officer, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst at Yale, suggested endowments for news organizations. (Here’s a thorough list of recent opinions about paying for content that Mathew Ingram put together.) Len Witt suggested a cooperative trust.

The back-and-forth between Len and Vin Crosbie in the comments is worth taking a look at, because Vin noted something important:

Newspapers shouldn’t be saved. Their staffs, practices and products need to change.

Case in point: Let’s take a look at what happened when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River on Jan. 15 after a bird strike shut down the engines. The news hit Twitter first — a photo from a cell phone, and people who saw the plane hitting the water. People on the ferries who rescued passengers took photos and sent them to Flickr. TV news crews flew helicopters over the scene and transmitted live video, pieces of which appeared on YouTube. USAirways posted regular updates on its Web site. The FAA issued public statements. CNN and AP, among many others, issued alerts that were constantly updated. Blogs picked up the news and spread it.

So, how does a reader-paid content model for such news work? What individual story about Flight 1549 would you pay 10 or 20 cents for? Do newspapers really think they have a chance of charging even micropayments for their news in such a situation? (Here’s Michael Kinsley’s take on this in a NYTimes’ op-ed “You Can’t Sell News by the Slice”.) Everybody’s on that story, including non-journalists.  (And sending out a swarm of reporters and photographers for a little piece of exclusive detail is cost-prohibitive, as Newsweek has determined. The New York Times reports that the weekly magazine won’t do that anymore. It quoted Newsweek editor Jon Meacham as saying: “The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”)

People who say that readers should pay for news still think in terms of an individual article, with a beginning, middle and end. Something that can stand alone and be packaged to sell alone. However, in a Webcentric world, the daily stand-alone story morphs into serial, collaborative beat blogs. Most reporting will be done WITH the community. Most blog posts won’t make sense if they stand alone — they can only be understood in context of what’s come before, or related linked information.

So, if it doesn’t make sense for news organizations to charge for news that everybody has, such as the amazing story of Flight 1549, or to charge for individual blog posts, because they don’t have enough context AND they’re collaboratively reported (does the community member who provided information get a cut?), what could news organizations charge for?

Even in a world where the blogging format dominates, there’s a place for iconic storytelling, investigative reporting, the status-of article that wraps everything up prior to a vote or public policy decision. But how much of a metro news organization’s content is this? Enough to support a 200-person news organization and keep it afloat in a sea of free content?

Probably not. The days of large metro newsrooms churning out general-interest, been-there-done-that, stand-alone, we-talk-you-listen reporting are waning. Communities were growing tired of that before the Web appeared on the scene.

It’s likely that large metros will be replaced by lots of small news organizations, as the explosion of (many ad-supported) niche-based organizations, geographic and topic-based, continues. In organizations that are making just enough money to support a staff that provides daily coverage, there may still be a need for extra funding for an investigative story or in-depth story. In those cases, perhaps a Spot.Us approach can work. Only, however, if that story relates to an issue about which the community’s already expressed concern, AND if the journalist stays with the issue until it’s been resolved.

Spot.Us sells itself is as people requesting journalists to do one-off stories, or journalists pitching one-off stories to the community for funding. In response to an LA Times column by James Rainey about the weakness of the stories done so far, David Cohn says that he’s creating code that any news organization can use as it sees fit — i.e., Spot.Us is not a product, it’s a platform.

My hunch is that a loose network of small news organizations within a metropolitan area will need more than a Spot.Us platform. They’ll need a way to share trusted information with each other, they’ll need a way to collaborate on issues, they’ll need a way to share ad revenue across the network, and they’ll need a way to raise extra funding for those indepth stories.

Who out there is putting that together?

The New Metros

Dollars to donuts, sometime in the next 12 months, residents of a metropolitan area will wake up one day, go to their doorsteps, and wonder why they don’t see their newspaper. They’ll check the metro’s Web site, and it won’t be there. Or, there might be one that’s so pared down that only tatters remain: entertainment, some sports and a small continuous news desk operation.

The shut-down will come with only a day or two of warning.

It’s not very healthy for communities large or small to operate without a reliable journalistic presence. (Even Google thinks so.) The basic reasons are that, even with the amazing and overwhelming amount of information available on the Web, communities need a reliable and trusted source to aggregate and investigate, if necessary, what’s going on that affects the health of the community. That includes economic health, physical health, educational health, environmental health, mental health, spiritual health, etc.

So, what’s to take the place of that one large metro news organization?

Many small ones. Mini-metros. Nichification on steroids.

Here’s how I think it’ll play out:

A large metro area comprises several communities, each made up of several neighborhoods. These communities may be municipalities within a county — or perhaps a part of a city represented on the city council. A small — two- to four-person — news organization covers each community in a collaborative, serial method, 24/7, along the lines of WestSeattleBlog.com. At first, these news organizations are financially supported by advertising from the local businesses who couldn’t afford the high ante to get into the metro news organizations’ publications.

Those community-based operations can cover their local schools, roads, health, events, etc., extraordinarily well, and will bring the community’s voices to bear on local public policy. But they won’t have the resources and depth to cover regional issues, such as education, transportation, the environment or growth. Issues in those areas are usually resolved at a regional or state public policy level. In a metropolitan area, these topic-based news organizations might be supported by those who sell products and services related to that topic. I’m going to try it here in Columbia, MO, with a local health site.

These sites won’t look like the traditional news organizations’ sites. The jurnos will do serial reporting — what Jay Rosen calls beat-blogging. That means jurnos, instead of doing the traditional standalone been-there-done-that story, they follow an issue throughout a day, a week, a month, a year, investigating as they go along, in some cases.  The reporting is solution-oriented —  jurnos don’t tell their communities what to do….they provide their communities with accurate information all the way to their goals — with a LOT of input from the community. So that makes it serial, solution-oriented, collaborative reporting. (The WestSeattleBlog folks estimate 30 percent of their content comes from community members.)

In fact, the community will be the visual and functional engine. The daily conversation and the community’s collaborations will be embedded in a contextual Web shell of information that the community uses — databases, backgrounders, wikis, aggregations of local blogs, forums, and — yes — news and information from those in the community who sell products and services. These sites will be the go-to place, the starting point, for most of the people in the community.

But these enterprises won’t operate as the metros have in the past — standalone operations in competition with every other news organization. They’ll be part of a network in which they can exchange information and help each other cover stories (check out an early start to this approach in Washington State where reporters used Twitter and Publish2 to share the best information about a regional storm) horizontally, across the communities, as well as vertically, with the organizations that focus on regional topics. That network can also be used to distribute information from people in a community who want to sell products and services across several communities.

The era of entrepreneurial journalists — jurnos — is upon us. At last week’s RJI Collaboratory Talkfest, we launched the RJI Collaboratory network, to bring in experts in advertising, technology, entrepreneurship, community organizing, social networking, and — yes — journalism, to help spawn the hundreds, if not thousands, of jurno enterprises needed to step in to the vacuums that are being, and will be left when metros shrink or close. We also want to help jurnos in suburban and rural communities that need journalists, and we want to help jurnos within traditional news organizations that are financially and structurally flexible enough to make the transition.

Through this network, we want to build assessment tools, to help jurnos figure out how large a community must be and how many businesses that sell products and services must exist to support a small news organization. For example, we don’t know what the optimum population and economic base should be to support a two-person operation. And, if the population exists, but it’s an economically depressed community, perhaps that’s the place that needs a couple of years of foundation funding to get a journalism organization in place that helps catalyze economic enterprise so that the enterprise can be locally supported. (Yes, jurnos do that!)

We want to help create a “cookbook” that jurnos can use to start their organizations, and a roadmap to help them over the entrepreneurial and technological humps as they grow. For example, display ads may be a good way to start, but when a site starts growing and hits 1 million page views a month, what’s the next step? Is it the Marketplace approach that LJWorld.com has put into place?

There are some folks who think that this network can be put in place as a structure designed before the network nodes are in place. I don’t think so. We’re in Webworld — solutions here come from the network as it grows organically.

WestSeattleBlog — Don’t Call Them ‘Bloggers’

Just because they’re using a blog format, says WestSeattleBlog co-founder Tracy Record, it doesn’t mean they’re “bloggers.” (Unfortunately, that’s still a perjorative term in the journalism community. That’s too bad, since the blogging format is the Web “story” format.)

Tracy and hubby Patrick Sand started blogging about their West Seattle neighborhood in

Patrick Sand and Tracy Record receive 2008 Citizen Appreciation Award from Seattle Police Chief Kerlikowske, left, and Southwest Precinct Lt. Steve Paulsen

January 2006 while she was still working at local TV station KCPQ.

Mark Poepsel, my research assistant at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, and I have done a fairly thorough case study on them.

Besides being a model for jurnos who want to start their own geographic-based news organization, theirs is an interesting story.

They call themselves a commercial news site operating in a blog format. They do original reporting, posting 11 times a day, on average. They support themselves with display advertising, which most people in the Web ad world think is passé. But there’s a layer of businesses that  have been priced out of metro dailies for a long time.  At this point, display ads work very well for them — at least in West Seattle. And if you’re doing a community site — in this case a community of 68,000 people — wouldn’t you want to include the people who sell products and services?

After all, ye olde newspapers were catalysts for economic enterprise; why shouldn’t Web-based news organization be, also?

WestSeattleBlog is hitting home runs on so many levels…advertising, community-building, collaborative reporting, continuous and contextual coverage. They’re so successful that they’ve outgrown WordPress, their free content management system. They could use some help in Web shell and database development.

At next week’s RJI Collaboratory Talkfest, “Putting Feet on the Streets for Journalism”,  we’ll be talking with them, and exploring how a news organization incubator might help people starting out, as well as people like Tracy and Patrick, who are ready to move up to the next level of content management systems, and even, perhaps, advertising.

If you have more questions after reading the case study, let me know. I’ll pass them on.

NYT’s Carr Doesn’t Understand Webworld

In yesterday’s NYT, David Carr suggested that Steve Jobs’ iTunes model, in which many people pay a tiny amount for stories, might serve as a way of convincing people to pay for news.

Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

I respectfully disagree with almost everything that Carr said, as well as his reasoning. It seems as if he doesn’t understand the newspaper business. More importantly, he doesn’t understand the new Web medium that is replacing print, radio and TV as the world’s principle principal communications medium.

In Webworld, stand-alone stories won’t be the norm; contextual beat-blogging will be. (On many sites, it already is.) In Webworld, news and information is collaborative. In Webworld, a jurno becomes a community manager of news and information. So, for much of news, it will become practically impossible to isolate an individual blog post to sell it. And the question arises: if news and information is a collaborative work, who owns the information?

A few words about the dilemma of metropolitan newspapers, and then I’ll yammer on a bit more about Webworld: Metros aren’t imploding because advertising can’t support them. What’s crushing them is mountains of debt; news corporations no longer have the 30 percent profit margins they hoped would pay off that debt. Thousands of other small dailies and weeklies are still doing fine with display ads, in print AND on their Web sites. (For now — eventually, they’ll have to make the transition, too.)

And a few more words…about convincing people to pay for news: They haven’t paid for news for decades; why should they start now? Newspapers have been 80 – 85 percent supported by advertising.

Back to Webworld. Here’s where Mr. Carr shows he doesn’t understand the Web medium:

Then again, a friend in the business sent me a link to an item in TechCrunch (yes, it was also free) that described a gadget that actually might work for newspapers.

“Expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the fall of ’09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen,” the item suggested.

The device would allow scanning of pages with a flick of the finger. It sounds promising for newspapers and magazines. Now all we need is a business model to go with it.

The basic nature of the Web medium is that it is participatory, interactive, contextual, solution-oriented, and uses a combo of photos, video, audio, graphics, and text (i.e., it is multimedia-oriented). People like this. Hundreds of millions of them enthusiastically use the Web this way. They converse; make and send photos, music, video; share info and news. Most will never want to scan a non-interactive page. They’re integrating the medium into their lives so completely that it’s like electricity — they use it without thinking about it. They expect journalism to adapt to the new medium, too.

Hence, to adapt to this medium, the way journalism works is changing.

As I mentioned above, in Webworld, stand-alone problem-oriented stories are replaced by beat-blogging — continuous, contextual, solution-oriented beat-blogging. (See the info in the tabs above for much more detail, and please add your own ideas — the info in the tabs is just a starting point.) Solution-oriented does NOT mean a jurno provides answers. It means the jurno follows the issue until it’s resolved to the satisfaction of the community, AND the jurno provides links and resources for people to become involved at many different levels. In beat-blogging, the jurno includes its community members as collaborators and supporters. Community includes business owners who sell products and services.

There are plenty of examples to show that many jurnos grok Webworld and are using most of its characteristics. WestSeattleBlog. Baristanet. MaxPreps. Marketwatch. There are many others. All these organizations are Web-based, and all are ad-supported.

As journalism moves into Webworld, it’s likely that many different forms of success will emerge. At the Reynolds Journalism Institute, we’re establishing the RJI Collaboratory — a Web-based news organization incubator — to provide some useful roadmaps for journalists who want to make the transition. We don’t know what all those forms will look like or how they will function. But it’s clear that all must embrace the nature of the medium if they want to thrive.

We’re hosting a Talkfest next week to start this process, and we’ll launch the RJI Collaboratory Network at the same time.

We have a few initial hypotheses about what may happen over the next five years. It’s very clear that the days of large metros employing 300 reporters is gone. There’s probably a place for the mile-wide, inch-deep approach that’s characterized most large metro (and local TV news, for that matter). (Aggregators like Huffington Post are an example.) But not until there’s enough inch-wide, mile-deep news and information to support it. Many of us believe that the first to fill the metro-newspaper vacuum will be hundreds of small news organizations, each operated by two, three or four jurnos. These jurnos will blog their beats. They will collaborate with their communities. they will serve their communities, whether they are geographic- or topic-based.

How many small news organizations will replace one metro is hard to say. Can an urban neighborhood of 100,000 people support one small news organization or four? How many businesses need to be in that community to support a news organization? What are they willing and able to pay? How much does it cost for jurnos to start such organizations? What do they need? What’s the financial progression? If a small news organization can be supported by display ads from small mom-and-pop businesses, how does the ad model change over time? There are a ton of other questions. We hope to have some answers by the end of this year.

Back to Mr. Carr. I can’t fault him for his beliefs. He’s probably seeing the world from the point of view of the New York Times. But the Times doesn’t represent the predominant model any more. It — with the Washington Post, NPR, Wall Street Journal and USA Today — are in their own class. They’re much larger, have a bigger financial cushion, and are able to move much more slowly. They’ve made significant progress toward Webworld, and they have many good people within their organizations pushing them. But they’ll end up immersed in Webworld, too, someday.

One telling example of the world in which Mr. Carr lives: although you can comment on some NYT articles, you can’t comment on Mr. Carr’s.

Jurno’s Bright Future

According to Benjamin Adair on Weekend America, the death of news is greatly exaggerated. [ReJurno: We jurnos believe that wholeheartedly.] He pointed out three myths:

1. News organizations aren’t making money.

“No, that’s not true at all,” says John Morton. Morton analyzes the newspaper industry and helps newspaper publishers figure out how to make money in this new economy….

“For the first nine months of this year,” explains Morton, “the average operating profit margin was 11 percent. There are some industries that can’t ever hope to get that high of a profit margin.”

It’s the big metros and chains, with their enormous debt, that are in trouble. Small to medium newspapers and some of those chains are doing fine.

2. The Internet, and Google, wants newspapers to die. That’s ridiculous, and Google’s Josh Cohen, who’s responsible for Google News pointed out that Google News wouldn’t be Google News without news organizations. [ReJurno: However, as those large metros shrink and/or collapse, we’ll see wholesale nichification of the news, and many organizations, including Google, anticipate that.

3. Newspapers are dying, so journalism is dying.

“Journalism is very much still still alive,” says Neil Henry. He’s the dean of the journalism school at the University of California Berkeley. Not only is it still very much alive, Henry says it might be “at the dawn of a

tremendous rebirth.” Newspaper newsrooms can be very sad and depressing these days, Henry says, but he tells his students that times of great tumult have always meant really good things for journalism.

Image of the Internet, 2005

Right on, Neil! The Internet and the Web are the best inventions ever for journalism. We jurnos can serve our communities so much better, and do better storytelling. The key is to understand this new medium, and all it can do. For a handy primer (and a larger version of that cool image of the Internet), just click on the Web Traits tab at the top of this blog, or link from here.

Friday picks

Newsecon: Newspapers better hope Nick Denton’s wrong on advertising in ’09 — Zachary Seward in NiemanJournalismLab. The best part is his review of Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker’s analysis of where online advertising’s going.

A Gavin O’Malley article in Online Media Daily about research by tech firm Attributor: Nearly 60% of views of publishers’ content takes place off their destination sites.

Nichification: HealthCentral Expands Potential Partner List, an Online Media Daily news brief, notable because HealthCentral shows the continuing trend of nichification and networking as it buys TheBody.com, an HIV/AIDS resource/news/info site, and partners with others to develop an ad network.

Social networking: Gannett bought Ripple6, which powers the social networking engine of the Moms sites. RIpple6 also provides social networking for General Mills and Proctor & Gamble, and will soon launch MixingBowl.com for Better Homes & Gardens.

Meebo’s partnering with Hearst Corp. to set up Meebo Rooms in the Stars Style 2008 section of Seventeen.com. This is interesting because the chat rooms are surrounded by videos and other content, part of the continuing move to integrate elements (stories, data, resources, social networking) into one page. A little klutzy, because some of the content takes you to a new page, away from the chat. Also, not much activity in there yet.

Everybody’s getting into social networking, even the Financial Times. They’re setting up a spot on the Alphaville blog for market professionals to discuss the day’s news, says Portfolio.com’s blogger Jeff Berkovici. But how to keep out rumor-mongers? The editors of FT.com will approve the people who want to participate.

Noncitizen journalism: Okay, this is a week old, but that’s my modus operandi these days…catching up. In interviews with NowPublic founders Leonard Brody and Michael Tippitt, Seattle Post Intelligencer’s Brian Chin discovered that they really don’t like the term “citizen journalist”. On NowPublic, they practice “participatory journalism”.

Brody, in fact, is famously quoted in Jeff Howe’s book “Crowdsourcing” as saying that “Citizen journalism makes about as much sense as citizen dentistry.”

“I think that the term ‘citizen journalism’ sounds like you’re a nut or something,” Brody explained. “It’s not particularly engaging. It sounds like work.” It’s also a barrier to participation, he said, “because it doesn’t mean anything. This is about people’s experiences and sharing those.”

NowPublic is a combo — aggregation, commenting, and original news — from folks all over the world. But, to continue the mantra…..Citizen dentistry. Citizen plumbing. Citizen surgery. Citizen pilot. Citizen construction worker. Citizen flight attendant. Yep. I agree.