BuzzMachine

Good on Richard Perez-Pena for reporting on new sites doing strong local reporting and investigations — and good on The New York Times for playing it on page one: “As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.”

OK, so there was one reflexive snipe at the internet: “Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What Perez-Pena’s story makes clear is that there are new models for creating reporting, that there is a demand for that reporting, and that there are journalists who will do it.

The business angle bears further investigation — and we’ll do that at the CUNY New Business Models for News Project (finishing a MacArthur Grant and starting on a new McCormick Foundation grant).

Perez-Pena says that “publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.” Actually, the cost is way less than half; I refer you to Edward Roussel’s chart from the New Business Models for News summit.

Revenue is also way less than half — and much or all of that is coming from contributions in the sites Perez-Pena profiles — but it’s also important to measure how much is spent on such reporting from big organizations today — how much are we trying to replace (or increase!) — and how this fits into a bigger ecosystem of local news, the new press-sphere.

News will not come from one organization anymore. It will come from a collection of organizations, networks, individuals, companies, technologies, and collaborative projects each operating under different business models. What Perez-Pena profiles is a slice of the new news pie. It will take other slices from other players to add up to a whole.

Still, the recognition by the Gray Lady of these new girls in town is an important moment in the evolution of news.

Craig Stoltz does a masterful job summarizing the Farhi-Jarvis-Rosenbaum fest in six Twitter-sized bites. His 2 cents at the end: “Blame doesn’t matter. Journalists unwilling to think and work differently to save the profession should take the next buyout.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”

This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs.

First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas. That’s what I brought into my summit on new business models for news and I wish I’d had time to bring in 20 more innovators who are executing new ideas.

I also wish I had invited more people from other industries to bring other perspectives. At Davos last year, I ran a session at which technology executives - among them, VC Joe Schoendorf, LinkedIn’s Reed Hoffman, and Cisco chief John Chambers - scolded newspaper exeutives for giving up and not reinventing their industry. At my summit, a technology executive observed that the news people - as far as they’d come - were unwilling to “take the leap.” The industry needs to hear these worldviews: tough love.

Second, closed-door is exactly wrong. What they should be doing is asking for help, ideas, perspectives, models, worldviews, and suggestions from outside their industry.

Instead, they will be “a facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value.”

If they haven’t figured out those steps by new, I’d say getting them into a room together isn’t going to do it.

The facilitator, James Shein of Northwestern’s management school, told E&P: “It’s important for companies to see how far along the ‘crisis curve’ they’ve traveled, and there are concrete steps organizations can take to halt and even reverse that journey. We’ll use those tools to illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation, and lay out the steps they will need to take to begin the renewal process.”

If they don’t know by now how urgent it is, then I’d say they’ve failed the vision and IQ test. Any foodl could see that newspapers’ straits are dire.

The summit is only two days away, but if I were the API, I’d fly in people from Google and a bunch of successful tech companies as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in news and let them do all the talking.

After letting the work of the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY sink in, I think we need to convene a working group from each of the discussions at the summit to move to the next step and build at least one concrete model.

When I stopped in the session about the reorganized newsroom, they pleaded for help as they continued to debate whether to cut what exists today or build from the ground up. It was my fault as I didn’t give them a specific task. I should have learned from the Economist’s Project Red Stripe and from a Davos session on innovation last year: Innovation springs from solving a problem — a specific problem, not the grand problem of the future of news and society.

So I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.

They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors. (Which led to much discussion in the final plenary of the day, which I address in the post below.)

That was real progress. Usually in the newspaper industry, this discussion comes after the cutbacks occur as papers then try to figure out how to cope with what’s left. This group of edit and business and money people bravely built from the bottom up, relying on few assumptions about the past.

Next, if time had allowed, we would have taken the newsroom group next door to the network group, which was foundering a bit, trying to figure out how to apply networks such as Glam’s to this challenge. They, too, didn’t have a specific problem to solve. But the newsroom group would have brought theirs: How could 35 journalists possibly serve Philadelphia as 200-300 had? I see one option: with the help of networks of independent agents working collaboratively. So let’s figure out how those networks would operate in terms of content, technology, revenue, education, branding, and so on.

Then we could go down the hall to the group working on new structures for news organizations: the disaggregated news company as presented earlier in the day by Edward Roussel of the Telegraph and Dave Morgan, ex of Tacoda. They also talked — as everyone did through the day — about the need for a drastically lower cost structure for news organizations (see Edward’s chart).

Next stop: The group working on public support to see what slice of journalism might be underwritten by the community or foundations. It wouldn’t be much but ProPublic, David Cohn’s Spot.us, and Charlie Sennott’s GlobalPost are trying to prove that the public can at least help.

Last and more important stop: revenue. Fred Wilson, leading the discussion, summed up its discovery in a tweet: “clickable will sell joe the pumber a text ad that $goog will route via outside.in geotag to the boston herald.” (Translation: Clickable sells Joe an ad on Google, which will appear on a local story on the Herald site thanks to Outside.in’s ability to understand the geography of articles and target appropriately. Moral to the story: No one is any longer going to own the market alone. Revenue, like reporting, will be collaborative.)

If you add up the work of the groups, you start to see a shape for new news. But there’s much more work to be done to make it concrete. If we take the work that the groups began and bring it to the next level with a clear problem to solve — e.g., replacing a metro newspaper — then I think we will begin to see new models, new ways to organize news companies, new ways to produce news, new revenue opportunities, and new relationships with the community take form. And this, in turn, could yield a methodology and attitude to create more new models.

Under the auspices of the New Business Models for News Project and Center for Journalistic Innovation at CUNY, I hope we can bring in MBA students to help create financial models. We would share these models and the discussion that builds them openly.

We at CUNY can imagine no more urgent work in news: creating the means to support it.

A few notes upon reflection about the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY:

* A few days after the conference, David Carr in the New York Times piled on the lamentations about more layoffs and cutbacks in the news business. On the Media continued the dirge a few days after that. There’s no news here. The industry is shrinking. We already know that.

There’s news in reporting on people who are trying to do something about it and create new models and enterprises for news. Those are the folks we had at the conference.

* A star among them was our own David Cohn, co-organizer of the conference, as he presented Spot.US, his Knight-Challenge-funded startup to create an infrastructure for readers to support reporters doing stories. David’s elevator pitch was a model for all my entrepreneurial journalism students. His enthusiasm, inventiveness, and ability to see opportunities where others see gloom was a model to the executives in the room. What I loved best was watching executives and investors from very big companies stuffing David’s pocket with their business cards. Who says the news business is dying? If you know where to look, it’s being reborn.

Other new models and views of news included:
> Charlie Sennott presenting GlobalPost as a means to support 70 freelancer correspondents in 53 countries around the world submitting stories and also turning their journalism into a process with their audience;
> Upendra Shardanand of Daylife and Scott Karp of Publish2 [disclosure: I have a relationship with both companies] presenting their infrastructure for the link (vs. the content) economy of news;
> Michael Rosenblum showing how training citizens in video can become a source of both content and revenue;
> Mark Josephson of Outside.in on a structure of organizing local content;
> David Chase of NextNewsNet on a local ad network and Adam Bly of Science Blogs on a specialized ad and content network;
> Colin Crawford on the transformation of IDG from a print to a digital company;
> Adam Davidson of NPR talked about the creation of the Planet Money podcast there.

Late additions to the group included Debbie Galant, the monarch of the hyperlocal bloggers at Baristanet, who talked about running a business on the scale of the old independent bookstore, and Rachel Sterne, founder of citizen-journalism platform GroundReport.

* I was delighted that the amazing group we were lucky to bring together had moved past the old rivalries: business vs. edit, new media vs. old. I was also quite relieved to hear a universal sense of urgency about the need to find new means to sustain journalism. There isn’t a minute to waste.

As a result, we saw editorial and business people entering into frank conversations we don’t often hear, willing to reset assumptions and build new models. Included in that was a general acceptance that the cost structure of the news business is way too high and has to be cut. This slide from the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel resonated strongly in the room.

Roussel also said: “If you’re a newspaper group, your technology sucks.”

Just as Roussel was blunt and frank so was his fellow presenter on the topic of the disaggregated news organization, Dave Morgan, who quoted Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy, from only the day before. Pruitt said: “We believe that the majority of the decline that we are currently seeing is cyclical and therefore temporary.” After heaping caveats of praise on Pruitt as an executive, Morgan called bullshit. Exactly so. We need tough, honest talk now.

* I was interested in seeing a conflict arise at the end of the day — one of the few, actually — on the relative value of content creators vs. editors. No one in the room would say that both aren’t valued and needed. But when push comes to shove with spare resources, there is a difference of opinion on what added value really means. Some put maximum resource into creating content: reporting. Some insist on the need for editors to create order, to correct and vet, to curate, as we say these days. The disagreement is only one of degree.

* I wish I’d had more people from other industries. When Tom Evslin got up to give his very good primer on network economics, he made a point of saying that he was not a journalist. After the conference, someone from an international technology company said he thought the people in the room were “not ready to make the leap” (perhaps so, but he should have heard similar folks a year ago; the change is striking). At Davos last January, I ran a session between news executives and tech executives in which the latter excoriated the former for throwing in the towel and convinced them that there was fight left in the news industry. The news business is, ironically, insular and it needs to hear that perspective. I also should have had more voices from women, bloggers, and our international participants. We could have filled two days with good discussion but decided, two weeks before an election, that wouldn’t have worked.

* Eric Stein of Google gave us some stats that show where the potential is. He said there are 23 million small businesses in America, six million of them with one or more employees. That is the new population of advertisers who never could afford newspapers. Though as I learned when I visited Gannett’s lab a few days after the conference, those businesses don’t necessarily operate with the same needs and assumptions as present newspaper advertisers and it would be a mistake to try to impose those practices. Stein also said that newspapers reach only 20 percent of advertisers in a market. In that other 80 percent lies much of the hope for the future of local news.

* I didn’t write down who said it but I wrote down this thought: We may want to reframe journalism not as an information business but as community-building.

* At the end of it all, we asked the participants to charge CUNY with next steps as we work to build the Center for Journalistic Innovation and raise money under a matching grant from the Tow Foundation. Among those tasks:
> Develop a baseline business model to provide a community with journalism. (See the post above; I agree that that is job 1.)
> Share best practices and lessons, including mistakes, from various countries. (That will be the main job of the New Business Models for News project in the center; we have the remainder of the MacArthur Foundation grant that funded this meeting to start that work and we just received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to continue it but we need to raise more.)
> Develop new models in detail to share with the industry. (This, too, will be the work of the New Business Models for News project.)
> Develop quantitative research on community needs. (I just spoke with the Knight Commission and found that they are working on that.)
> Collaborate with our business school to better equip journalists with business knowledge. (That’s my hidden agenda for teaching entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY. We’re looking at doing more.)
> Discuss curation in a journalistic context. (I just spoke with a museum curator about creating a symposium to do that.)
> Work on an infrastructure for news organizations to share and monetize original content. (Work on that began that very evening with another group meeting).

* We had an incredible group of people at CUNY, which is a testament to their sense of urgency to work on the business of journalism. I want to thank them all and also thank the MacArthur Foundation for making this meeting possible and the McCormick Foundation for enabling us to continue this work.

At the Star-Ledger’s new LedgerLive daily news show from the newsroom (unofficial motto: It’s not TV, damnit), we are watching a big, old paper fight for its survival as it announced buyouts and a possible sale. And the grand irony is that we’re watching this even as the paper reinvents itself in a new medium: online video. The new show and the momentous news about the newspaper came in the same week.

I was in the newsroom on Friday to watch LedgerLive being broadcast and I heard the staff talking about the paper’s and their future, of course. Some of these folks are going to be, well, independent in the fall if they elect to take the buyout and it comes off as announced.

But what struck me listening to them is that they are not prepared for that independent life. I was looking at this from the perspective of being both a former newspaperman who did find a new life in the academe and elsewhere and from the perspective of now being a journalism educator. It is vital that we prepare journalists for this new and independent life or we will lose their journalism. Preparation, to me, means both training - it’s a great thing that Ledger print people are making video in the Rosenblum Method - and setting up an infrastructure to help them create sustainable journalistic enterprises if at all possible. The first factor is why I’m trying to establish a continuing education program for professionals at CUNY. The second is why I’m holding a summit for new business models for news there. That’s my perspective.

I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now.

Debbie’s message aired on Tuesday from her (very nice) garden in metaphorical PJs:

On today’s LedgerLive, reporter Carol Ann Campbell responded in her PJs:

Unfortunately, this reprises an us-v-them, pro-v-am rivalry. Fine. Let’s get that out of our system.

And then I’ll challenge Deb to come back and now share her secrets with her still-ink-stained peers: How do you find life after print, Deb? What would you advise a print journalist in the post-print era to do? And I’ll challenge Carol to imagine a new world where she might operate independently. It’s hard but it may be very necessary.

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, we’re proud to announce today that we received a $3 million matching grant from the Tow Foundation to create a Center for Journalistic Innovation. As you can guess, I’ll be very involved in this.

Our idea is to start an incubator to help support new products, businesses, platforms, technologies, and standards from new companies — some that will be started by students out of my entrepreneurial journalism class — and big media as well. We will create a New Business Models for News initiative to gather and share best practices in the industry. Another intitiative will do the same with editorial innovation. We will establish a chair in journailstic innovation and scholarships for entrepreneurial students.

Columbia’s journalism school also received a $5 million Tow matching grant. They will devote their efforts primarily to new journalism education, which is needed across the nation. But because we at CUNY are new and dealt with many of those issues when we started the school from scratch, we decided instead to look outward to the news industry. We believed that the greatest need of the industry is innovation and this was our effort at an answer that we hope will be complementary and collaborative with other efforts in this area from Knight, Poynter, and others. We also will work hard to create international ties for the center’s work so we can learn lessons from around the wrold.

In CUNY’s and my work, there is a continuing theme of innovation in the news industry. The entrepreneurial journalism course received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to provide seed funding for the students’ best proposals for sustainable journalistic enterprises. There were some great plans out of the class but we quickly learned that these llitle shoots need nurturing. We believe there are many similar ideas out there that need such help. Thus, the incubator. Last fall, we held a MacArthur-Foundation-funded conference in networked journalism and David Cohn reported best practices before and after. This October, we will do likewise with another MacArthur-financed conference in New Business Models for News. Those, too, lead right into the work of the Tow Center.

Now we have to raise the other $3 million so we can open the center’s doors. That’s the plug. If you have money, connections to it, or ideas, please do let me know. I’m eager to get going.

Last night at one of the Guardian’s Future of Journalism sessions they are running for staff (and putting online), editor Alan Rusbridger had a conversation with Arianna Huffington and I do believe this is new: Arianna is going local. She’ll devote one editor to curating news and blog posts in the market. Jemima Kiss beat me to blogging this (she must have had less of the red wine at the dinner afterwards). She just added a green section and will launch books, international, and sports soon.

“We are an aspiring newspaper,” she said.

I was just with Emily Bell, head of digital at the Guardian, and she used the right word to describe this: Agile. Arianna and company decide to start taking over the world and they just do it. Big, old newspapers plan and fret instead. Want to offer readers a new area of coverage? Start with one editor, find out what’s available, and get moving. Agile.

In the news business these days, innovation is coming from the oddest places, like Gannett (which has revolutionized its newsrooms more than any other company I can name here) and now the Washington Times. Yes, the Washington Times. Craig Stoltz reviews the new web design there and I think he’s right: It’s groundbreaking. The ability to dig deeper with media, themes (aka tags), and links (very Daylifey, I might add) is quite nice. The wowy presentation of that on the main story on the home page does not, unfortunately, carry through to story pages. But the information and organization is still there. See also the organization of news by themes. I’d have to live with it to see whether it works or wears thin. But give them points: It’s refreshing.

Reading Vin Crosbie’s piece about the resistance to change and general obstructionism he has found teaching at journalism school (he doesn’t say it, but he has spent the year at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University), it makes me triply glad I am teaching at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. This will come off as blatant self-promotion for the school but so be it.

Vin said: “What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors. . . I’ve also discovered that media academics follow, rather than lead, their industries.”

When I arrived at CUNY, I feared I would find what Vin did. But I haven’t, not at all. I thought I might be marginalized as the crazy guy. But that hasn’t happened.

Instead, in the last few months, I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.

I don’t mean to say that my colleagues immediately drink my Kool-Aid; there is disagreement and debate, as I’d hope there would be. At last week’s session, for example, I showed Twitter, predicting that a few of my fellow profs would shake their heads at the tchotchkefication of the world into 140 characters’ worth of words. Heads did shake. One of the professors said she gets the impact on journalism of other technologies we’ve discussed — indeed, she is using them, creating class blogs and more. But she challenged me to demonstrate the journalistic relevance of this one. Fair enough. I showed news organizations using Twitter to distribute headlines and bulletins. I talked about other news organizations, like Sky.com, using Twitter to report on breaking news live. I told them that I’d just seen the BBC and Reuters using Twitter to extract news (by, for example, searching for big-event tripwords like “explosion” and “earthquake”); the thought is that Twitter could be the canary in the news coal mine and that similar use of Flickr, YouTube, Technorati, and other services will surface witnesses’ pictures, video, and accounts. I passed that quiz.

Here’s the Keynote we’ve been using as notes for this discussion.

| View | Upload your own

At CUNY, we are teaching the tools of all media to all students and requiring them to make stories in various media throughout their time there. The faculty are learning the tools as well (I say “are learning” instead of “have learned” because it’s a neverending process). At the same time, we are trying to plan how to pull down the walls between old media tracks — print, broadcast, interactive — while still preparing students for specialized jobs. We believe we have to be careful not to be overeager with this because we risk getting ahead of the job market. But there is no resistance at all to the idea that all journalists must work in all media.

More important, we realize that we are teaching change. Rich Gordon at Northwestern has said this, too: We have to get our students ready to adapt as the tools inevitably evolve. But, of course, more than the tools change. The structure of the craft changes and with it the relationship of journaliasts with the public and with newsmakers. The structure of the industry changes and with it their jobs. And the structure of narrative changes as we have new ways to tell stories. So we are also teaching our students choice. They no longer pick a medium at the beginning of their careers and stick with it. Now, every time they tell a story, they have to make choices about the best ways to do that for their audience and for the story itself. Not all students like this much choice at first; some wish we’d just tell them how to do it. But we agree that choice is one of the key skills we have to teach. That was the discussion we had at our faculty tools session last week.

How am I so lucky? I think it helps that we are a new school without a legacy to protect; instead, we are building one. It also helps that the deans recruited a great faculty and that we both get along well and, as it has turned out, agree about the need to teach change while we also teach what we love to call the eternal verities of journalism: accuracy, fairness, reporting. . . . And it helps that we are drawing students who know they are part of a new school in an industry undergoing upheaval; they are daring and they demand that we are as well. They are the ones who are going to change journalism and that’s why I took this job.

We also see that helping and leading the industry in change is part of our mission. That’s why we got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to hold meetings in networked journalism last fall and in new business models for news this fall. We got a grant from McCormick Tribune for my entrepreneurial journalism course. We got one from Knight to help bloggers learn what the needed about media law. We are about to announce something else along these lines.

We’re far, far from perfect. Every term, we learn — from listening to our students — how to better teach our courses, adjusting syllabi as well as the curriculum. In the videos here, I describe the interactive courses to new students just admitted and we are now trying to do a better job of telling them just what tools and skills they will learn at what level. That’s an improvement. I am also constantly struggling with finding ways to teach interactivity when student journalists don’t have a public with whom to interact (any ideas, please share them). So we must change, too.

Here are the relevant slides about the interactive program.

| View | Upload your own

I can’t speak for any other journalism school anywhere. And I think that Vin said what needs to be said to the academy and the industry. All I can say is that I shared Vin’s fears but I have seen that it is possible for journalism education to change and — only time will tell — lead.

In the meantime, Vin, come on by for coffee.

: ALSO: We’ve just announced our 100,000-mile warranty for students, enabling them to keep up on and brush up on new tools and skills after they graduate.

I’m proud to say that this is one of the outcomes of the Networked Journalism conference at CUNY last fall:

Baristanet and the Star-Ledger are joining to create a cobranded print guide to the Barista’s turf, Montclair, NJ, with content from both partners, Star-Ledger distribution, and shared effort on the advertising.

So a blogger and a newspaper are making business together. Bravo.

Debbie Galant announces the birth today:

Baristanet is again making news in the media world. This time, it’s our partnership with the Star Ledger (yes, the Star Ledger!) to create a print guide to Montclair. Last week, Baristanet founder Debbie Galant and Star Ledger editor in chief Jim Willse spoke about the partnership to a group of newspaper and web editors from all over the world.

The official matchmaker was new media evangelist Jeff Jarvis, who suggested the partnership during his Networked Media Summit in New York last October.

The co-branded 36-page “Explore Montclair” guide will have stories by Baristanet and the Ledger, and even a special Montclair crossword puzzle by Tony Orbach. It goes out to 70,000 readers on May 15. If you’re not a home subscriber, you’ll be able to pick it up at the Montclair Public Library and many other locations (more on that later.)

The ad reservation deadline is tomorrow. If you want to underwrite history, let us know right away.

I did suggest the partnership as I played Oprah during Q&A in a session at the conference. But Debbie and Jim Willse both rejected the idea of starting online. They came up with the idea of a print guide with Barista’s cool attitude and the Ledger’s stores of information.

I am delighted that they recognized their complementary assets and goals. Barista has its unique local knowledge and voice as well as its reputation in town and online (including with hyperlocal advertisers). The Ledger has the power of its infrastructure — printing, distribution, ad sales — and its reporters and archives as well as its brand and reputation. To compete would be silly and destructive. To cooperate, they can build something together they couldn’t build as well apart.

This is thinking like a network.

(Disclosures: I also sat in on their meetings. And I used to work for and still work with the Ledger’s parent company.)

One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’ problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.

We start, of course, with the way things were: news through the filter of the press to us with few other options. We all know this chart:

This is replaced today by a press-sphere in which any of many sources can, thanks to links, add up a story and to fulfilling the need or desire for news and information. The press may be involved and may create a news story. But we might have found that via links from our peers who tell us it’s news (“if the news is important, it will find me”). Either of those might have linked to source material from a company or government site — which now plays a press role in adding to the whole of a story. Witnesses can join in the process directly. Background might come via links to archives. Commentary from observers may add perspective. An accumulation of data may alert us to news or augment it. All of these elements add up to news.

When we put the public at the center of the universe — which is how these charts should be drawn and how the world should be seen, as each of us sees it — we see the choices we all call upon: the press still, yes, but also our peers, media that are not the press (e.g., Jon Stewart), search, links, original sources, companies, the government. It’s all information and we curate it and interact with it with the tools available. And, again, the press stands in a different relationship to the world around it.

So this yields a different view of the news story itself. The notion that news comes in and stories go out — text and photos come in and paper goes out — is an artifact of the means of production and distribution, of course. Now a story never begins and it never ends. But at some point in the life of a story, a journalist (working wherever) may see the idea and then can get all kinds of new input. But the story itself — in whatever medium — is merely a blip on the line, a stage in a process, for that process continues after publication.

When I was talking with the Guardian about their new newsroom, I saw two views of news in 3-D relief: In print, the process leads to a product. Online, the process is the product.

This has an impact on how a newsroom and the journalists in it see themselves and their relationship with the public, over time. It calls into question the organizing principle of newsrooms. It used to be that we were organized around sections — news, sports, business… — and job descriptions — reporter, editor, photographer, designer. Then along came online and we were organized around media — print, online.

But in this new ecology, I think newsrooms will need to be organized around topics or tags or stories because the notion of a section is as out of date as the Dewey Decimal System (hat tip to David Weinberger).

Stories and topics become molecules that attract atoms: reporters, editors, witnesses, archives, commenters, and so on, all adding different elements to a greater understanding. Who brings that together? It’s not always the reporter or editor anymore. It can just as easily be the reader(s) now.

Of course, these aren’t the only architectural changes. Last week, I joined a discussion with the faculty at CUNY about these shifts, which included these ideas:

* The separation of content from presentation on web pages means that design, navigation, brand, and medium can change and are not necessarily controlled by an editor’s design.

* Feeds also have an impact on — and can reduce the value of — packaging and prioritization (also known as editing).

* Live reports from witnesses also reduce the opportunity to package and edit.

* The ecology of links motivates us to do what we do best and link to the rest. It fosters collaboration. It changes the essential structure of a story (background or source material can be a link away).

* Links also turn our readers into our distributors.

* Links turn our readers into editors.

* Aggregation, curation, and peer links become our new newsstand.

* Search and SEO motivate us to create repositories of expertise (topic pages) and make news stories more permanent.

* Search reduces the power of the brand.

* We see ourselves not as owners of content or distribution but as members of networks.

* These networks can be about content, trust, interest, or advertising relationships or all of the above.

I could keep drawing bad charts all day to illustrate the new network, reverse syndication models, the audience as the network, and more. I’ll spare you. (But if you have any charts to show, please do send links.)

These are all fundamental shifts in how news and the world around it is constructed. So to keep talking about newspapers as if they were news is far too limiting in the discussion. It’s bigger now. It’s more complex. It moves over time. It’s more about process than product. It has no limit of sources and handlers and distributors and curators and perspectives. When we rethink this ecology of news, we’ll be in a better position to plan for what’s next.