BuzzMachine

Darned good story about Rob Curley, one of the two most creative people I know in the newspaper biz. Hyperlocal is where it’s at. And the big, old paper in the most trouble these days — the LA Times — reveals just why it’s in so much trouble. Read on.

: Speaking of hyperlocal, see this story about a trend in newspapers to get more local. At last.

The American newspaper is being forced to reinvent itself.

Virtually every major paper is making the shift to local coverage, often as it cuts deeper into editorial operations. Only recently, the Dallas Morning News announced it was closing its national bureaus while cutting 20 percent of its newsroom staff. It was becoming a local paper again after several decades of rising stature for its national and international coverage. More than 100 people were let go.

Similar, if less dramatic, changes are taking place at such papers as The Washington Post, New Jersey’s Bergen Record and Herald News, and the Richmond Times Dispatch. And joining them all is Gannett, the largest newspaper chain and publisher of USA Today.

“We’re going to get hyper-local,” says Tara Connell, a Gannett spokesperson.

A throwaway line I used in a post the other day keeps repeating on me like pepperoni pizza: If you want to be big in media in the future, make yourself into an API.

I’ve been wondering what it would mean for a news organization to turn itself into an API — that is, a programming interface that lets the public use and remix and also contribute information. Or put the question another way: What would Google do (WWGD) if it ran a news organization? And I don’t mean GoogleNew but any of the reporting organizations it could afford to buy (though I’m not sure why it would): The New York Times, the LA Times, CBS News, CNN. Or, for that matter, what would YouTube do? Or Firefox? What would it mean to open up the news? I’ll start with a few answers of my own. Please add yours:

* Let people — no, encourage — people to distribute your stuff for you. You can no longer spend a huge marketing budget to get people to come to you. So go to where the people are, with the people’s help. That’s what got YouTube seen: letting people put players in their own space, which in turn drove people to discover and dive into YouTube.

* Think distributed in your business, too. That is how Google makes much of its fortune: by taking its ads to where the people are and sharing just a bit of that wealth.

* Let people — no, encourage — people to remix your stuff. They’re doing it anyway. They’re taking a paragraph from here and a quote from there — or video from here and audio from there — to tell the story from their perspective. Stop thinking of that as theft and start thinking of it as a compliment. If you’re not being remixed, you’re not part of the conversation. And the conversation is the platform of the today. So feel free to set some rules — it’s only polite to attribute and link — but then open the doors and let people create more great stuff on not only your finished product but also your raw material (your quotes, your data, your cutting-room floor). Look at the great things people have built on top of Google, YouTube, and Firefox. You want to be part of that construction project. The BBC has started down this path. So should others.

* So be a platform for news. Enable people to use you to make connections to people and information. Provide the means for them to record those school-board meetings and share the fruits. Give people tools and training to accomplish what they want to accomplish. Create networked reporting tools that let the people join together in acts of journalism (see: NewAssignment.net).

* Experiment. Start labs for news and let the people in to create and criticize alongside you. Don’t be afraid of betas and don’t be afraid of failure. You can’t be perfect. You never could.

At the Shorenstein Center at Harvard for a 20th anniversary session on the future of news, Prof. Frederick Schauer begins by talking about news as a public good like symphonies, parks, museums, universities — things that are needed but for which there may not be a commercial model of support. I hope we are not going to start throwing in the towel on the support of journalism via its value in the marketplace. I’m not willing to do that, not by a long shot.

And now we are hearing from consultant Scott Anthony, who’s heading up the Newspaper Next project, about which I have been less than enthusiastic. He’s going through their standard spiel (don” talk about readers, talk about consumers…. arrrgggh, no we are customers… as Rebecca MacKinnon, sitting next to me, says). So I’ll keep the snark gun holstered. But suffice it to say, this is a watery challenge to this group.

He added something new to the spiel: video of the participants talking about how wonderful the process is. That’s a shameless plug. But worse, I think, it indicates their blinders. My worst fear about this thing is that it is false comfort to newspaper execs: See, we’re changing. But not enough, not nearly. Bill Marimow, ex-head of NPR news and now its ombudsman (as of this morning’s news), argues that what bloggers write is not subjected to the same scrutiny as his reporters’ work; I’d say we are all subjectd to the same scrutiny: that of the public.

I got up and said just what you could expect; so did Anthony. He said we agree that this isn’t about consumers; it is collaborative. I asked him to rate the change undertaken by the organizations in the project (as they graded the industry in the report). He said the organizations were at 30 percent of the goal before the project and that the project moved them 10-15 percent. I think we likely disagree on the definition of 100 percent. I think the requirement for change is quite radical.

: Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, gets a hand at lunch leading off with this: “I am here to today to discuss Americans as citizens rather than as consumers.”

After a tribute to the value of education — broad, not specialized education — he says, “We never teach people what to ask. And that brings me to journalism.”

He talks about the program that Carnegie and Knight funded for five journalism schools, saying that he is “not impressed with the names of the institutions; I am impressed with the content. . . You, deans of journalism, you, scholars, have a civic duty to educate our public.”

So is that the role of the journalist — to educate the public? Is the journalist qualified to do that?

Gregorian says the journalist is the intermediary and interpreter “between society and knowledge” and that the journlist is “the guardian of our democracy. . . . Yo are the ones who keep democracy alive. Economic institutions won’t.” He says that news media outlets need to be made invulnerable to economic interests. He says “we don’t encourage people to be in the truth business. We encourage people to be in the profit business.”

I am afraid we continue to try to insulate and separate the old ways of journalism from the market — from the public they are trying to serve. That is terribly dangerous.

Gregorian actually suggests making news organizations should be subject to maximum profit rates! Good lord, it that dangerous.

: Next, a panel on “traditional” news organizations. Rick Kaplan, ex-head of MSNBC and CNN, says that the public views news and information as different and values information higher. John Carroll, ex-editor of the the LA Times, says that 80-90 percent of the reporting in the country is done by reporters at mainstream organizations; don’t know how he calculates that.

I’m sorry that we’re separating “traditional” and “new” news. That, itself, is much of the problem today.

And we continue the discussion about profit margins as an evil and shareholders as the handmaidens. Carroll says that Tribune Company should have reduced its margin from 20 to 10 percent and then he would have had another $75 million to spend on journalism and make the paper bigger. Or $75 million to waste. See Michael Kinsley on the 15 editorialists. This is a hymn Carroll has been singing for sometime.

A journalist-turned-mutual-fund-manager says that what Wall Street celebrates and demand is not protecting the past but building for the future. Wall Street celebrated Google’s investment in YouTube.

Eric Alterman asks what’s wrong with the Economist model: an elitist model that charges more for a smaller audience. Apart from the irony of liberal elitism, I think he has a point: don’t try to serve everyone; be what you should be and make that work. (Yes, Alterman and I agree.)

The person I’m really liking on the panel is Robin Sproul, Washington bureau chief of ABC News, who talks about putting the World News up online in the afternoon so it can be downloaded as a wonderful thing. She pushes the panel to make news two-way. Marvin Kalb challenges that, asking her to prove that “reaching out” to the people would improve news — clearly, he’s dubious — and not sure how to do it. I’m ready to go into afib back here in the blogging gallery.

: Next came the panel I was on and having had red wine in the meantime, I’ll skip recounting it. Suffice it to say that we new-media folks were more positive about the future of news. Arianna Huffington called the argument about old and new media obsolete: “It’s like the old barroom argument: Ginger vs. Maryann. Let’s have a three-way.”

[Here's Rebecca MacKinnon's take. And Dave Winer joins the conversation from the other coast, via blog, looking at what comes next.]

A favorite parlor game among fellow media blatherers these days is, “What would you do with _______?” Fill in that blank with the LA Times, any old newspaper, a TV station, a TV network, a cable network, a radio station, a cable company, a book publisher or any media company. The rules of the game are simple: When asked, sigh, shake your head, say you’re just not sure, and then come out with your personal prescription for the shrinking enterprise. The current round of the game is about the beleaguered, bedraggled LA Times.

Kit Seelye reports today that the LA Times just assigned a task force of reporters to a Manhattan Project to figure out their future. I wish them luck, but I fear they are off on the wrong if predictable foot: namely, preserving print and the past.

“We want to collect the best thinking on how to sustain the vitality and profitability of the print franchise,” Mr. Duvoisin said. “And we want to find the best thinking on how to transfer our journalism to the Web in the way most likely to grow audience and revenue.” But Mr. Loeb described the changes to come from the investigative project as a “reimagining” of the print paper in conjunction with the Web site.

I’d say it has nothing to do with the medium you’re in and everything to do with your essential value. And I find it surprising that I find nothing under “Manhattan Project” or its boss’ name at the LA Times. I’d think the first, best thing to do is to get the ideas from your public.

Meanwhile, ex LATimesman Michael Kinsley writes a column in the paper arguing that it should become part of parent Tribune Company’s national newspaper, creating a national brand with national content wrapping around local content in company’s juicy markets — Chicago, LA, Long Island, Baltimore, Hartford, Orlando. It’s a neat idea. I like everything about it but the paper part. I have long believed that there is an opportunity to start a new national newspaper — online. But I agree that sharing the national (read: commodity) content makes a lot of sense. This also focuses the paper on what it should do — local. I also applaud Kinsley for saying this:

L.A. Times journalists are not entirely blameless for the chaos and carnage. Journalists know how to stage a great hissy fit. And I’m not sure a fit was really called for in the initial staff reductions. On the editorial page (I can reveal, from the safety of hindsight) we initially had 15 people producing 21 editorials a week! So now cries that Tribune Co. has moved from cutting fat to cutting bone ring a bit hollow.

See also Doc Searls’ 10-pill prescription (and Doc is also trying to figure out what to do with the local paper near him: the Santa Barbara mess). And see smart newspaper consultant Juan Antonio Giner’s list accompanied by Juan Luis Cebrian’s. (See, I told you it was the hot game.)

I was going to take a turn at the buzzer with my to-do list but, frankly, I found myself going over the same territory I’ve paved here before — in these posts, for example, so I’ll hold that for another day. What would you do with the LA Times?

: See also a vision of the future from Shane Richmond of the Telegraph here and here.

: Matt Welch opens a blog discussion about the Manhattan Project on a Times blog.

: LATER: See Jon Fine pondering the future of the LA Times.

The last panel at Online News was supposed to be about new frontiers in technology and news. I was on it and for the first time talked publicy about Daylife, the soon-to-launch news company I’ve been involved with. I joined Mike Davidson of Newsvine (doing very interesting work in reputation systems), Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and Adam Yamaguchi of Current.

But the event quickly turned into a circus — and, I hope, a journalism lesson — when Arrington launched attacks on news media, contending that journalists will be losing their jobs and that reporters are fools if they don’t quit and start blogs. He then tried to sucker-punch The New York Times, arguing that the only reason the paper could have written a favorable story about the startup Inform was if the reporter or editor had ties, financial or otherwise, with the firm. I challenged him immediately, saying that this is a grave charge and that he clearly had no facts to back it up; he said as much. I also made it clear that Inform is, in some ways, a competitor with Daylife and that Arrington is also an investor in Daylife. It didn’t stop him. He repeated this attack, among others, on The Times. It was most uncomfortable, even embarrassing. I couldn’t sit there letting his attacks go unchallenged (all the while needing to be transparent myself about my consulting relationship with NYTimesCo). But challenging him, I found myself descending into some two-bit TV shout show, which got me accused of joining in his blowhard game.

Now The Times is frequently the punching bag of convenience for people who want to complain about any generalized sin they see in the news business; this, apparently, is the price of publishing from the top of the heap. I’ve been at plenty of events like this when darts are thrown at The Times, and Timesmen, as a rule, sit stoically and don’t rise to the bait. But I am very glad that Jim Roberts, former national editor and now continuous news editor of The Times, rose to the microphone and called bullshit on Arrington, demanding an apology. As Staci Kramer reports at PaidContent, Arrington backed down immediately, as bullies do. He said he was just trying to be provocative. He admitted he had no facts and apologized.

The stinky-cheese irony of this is, of course, that even as he tried to cast aspersions on The Times, he only succeeded in shooting his own credibility — and with it, likely, the credibility of fellow bloggers — in the foot.

This comes at the end of a conference where I was delighted to see, as I wrote over the weekend, that the wars seemed to be over. I saw no print v. online, no amateur v. pro, no blogger v. journalist. I saw constructive, imaginative efforts to share success stories about 24/7, omnimedia, cooperative, imaginative journalism. But all it takes to ruin things is for one guy to pull out the mortars. The ballroom in D.C. suddenly looked like Lebanon.

Now there was a bit of personal irony in my role here. At last year’s conference, I moderated, if you can call it that, a similar panel and pushed the crowd to stop being so mopey and get to work graspking new opportunities for news and online newspapers. I was supposed to provoke and I did. Some liked it; some didn’t. This year, many noted after the panel, I was the conciliator. But not really. If I was trying to defend anything both times, it was the growth of journalism. I keep harping on the notion that anyone can commit an act of journalism, that we must embrace new partners in our enterprise, and so it is in all our interests to see journalism not only grow but improve. But what happened in this panel did little to improve things.

Arrington does, I think, care about journalism. He works hard for his scoops. All this comes the day after he broke the big scoop that Google was negotiating to buy YouTube and, as Steve Rubel points out, other media picked up the story and credited him for it. Of course, he wants to be right. Before the panel began, the two of us talked about how to handle one of his stories; it was a journalistic discussion. So at the panel, why did he then chose to show so little respect for facts? I don’t know. Perhaps it was just to be provocative, as he said, to entertain. But the entertainment comes at a price.

Part of the problem is that it’s just too fun to maintain the fight story; it’s unproductive and damaging, but it’s a weakness in journalism’s character. So we had Mark Cuban poking the media business one day and the would-be Cuban Jr., Arrington, lobbing bombs the next. At least Big Cuban is charming. When he was booked for the panel, there was no predicting that Arrington would go ballistic. Oh, some might stay we should have known; he blogs, after all. But truly, blogging itself brings no baggage; it’s only a tool. Just as print confers no authority, blogging confers no disrepute. The tool is as good as its craftsman.

In any case, far more valuable than any of these speakers, present company included, was a panel of teens brought in to tell us old media farts how they really interact with our products. Hint: They don’t watch live TV. This made me think that every newspaper and network and station should invite in a panel of young people to scare the bejesus out of the staff and then make them want to find new ways to do their jobs.

And far more valuable than continuing this old fight is finding ways to work together to expand and improve journalism. We can’t afford the fight anymore. And beside, the fight is old news. So give it up. Move on.

: Here is Arrington’s take on the session. He says it was a waste of a weekend.

I could have, and should have, sucked up to these people. Others at the conference were. They still command a lot of traffic and a link thrown our way is always helpful. But I didn’t do that. I never do that, and I’m told that its bad for my career. I made enemies this weekend. Most of those people will never look at TechCrunch without thinking about the things that I said, and judging me for those statements.

Will I do this again if invited? Yes. But I will make sure that I prepare my statements in light of the fact that mainstream media is not prepared to discuss their shortcomings. That’s the path that other new media representatives took at the conference, and is obviously the way to win the game. Tell them what they want to hear, even as they lie dying on the hospital bed.

He misses the point and, sadly, the lesson. I criticize these companies plenty and came back for another round and I now find them quite eager to discuss their shortcomings and figure out what to do about it. The problem wasn’t criticizing them. The problem was ignoring the facts.

Mike says in his comments that he and I agree abot much but say things differently. We do agree about much. But I think that in a crowd of journalists, the way to win is to commit better journalism than they do. That, I’d hoped, would be the lesson learned.

: Chron.com’s Dwight Silverman reacts to Arrington:

Don’t be surprised if, when you start throwing bombs, your targets pick up the explosives and hurl them back at you. Arrington said things that have been said umpteen times at other conferences — most notably by Jarvis — but they were said more thoughtfully and with more respect for the immense job journalists have for navigating a major sea change in their industry.

Arrington in his post accused journalists of not having a thick skin. But it sounds like he’s the one who can’t handle it when his insults and contempt aren’t accepted with gratitude and graciousness.

By the way, the last person to suggest he’d “dissolve the company and return what’s left to the shareholders” [which was what Arrington said about the Times and Post] was Michael Dell, speaking disdainfully of Apple in October 1997. And we all know what happened there . . .

: Dave Winer says:

…nothing is accomplished by prolonging the animosity between bloggers and pros. There was a time when the bloggers wouldn’t throw any punches, I’m sorry that this time, apparently (I wasn’t there) it was a blogger that provoked a fight. We all can do better, that is inclusive of both pros and amateurs.

At Online News, Chet Rhodes of WashingtonPost.com gives an inspirational talk about how he is turning the paper into video, training print reporters to take video (it takes 55 minutes, he says) and how it is working. Why do this? he asks. Because you have to. When we looked at video from a number of news sites in my CUNY class, the students liked WashingtonPost.com’s video best because it was still somewhat raw, not overproduced. And that makes it easier for print people to learn how to shoot good video, I say, as the definition of good shifts away from the priests of the tools.

: Pankaj Paul of DelawareOnline tells about utterly reorganizing his paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. He said that a few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”

Doc has a wonderful list of suggestions for newspapers. As a preface, he asks and answers why Wall Street hates the LA Times: “Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that.” I’ve been working on my own list. Bonus link: Doc’s prescription for his beloved radio.

The American newspaper industry has only itself to blame for the fate it faces.

I wrote that line above this weekend as the start of a post that turned out to be rather pissy, and so I’ve tried to tone it down. But when newspapers most need brave strategic action, bold reinvention, and new blood, I saw too much evidence in the last few days of the business still whining for sympathy, praying for unrealistic rescue, hopelessly grasping to hold onto old ways, and trying to blame others — mainly, stockholders — for their problems. Instead, I believe, they should be digging deep to rediscover their true value, reinvent their relationship with the public they still want to serve, and rethink the business around the new opportunities more than the challenges of the new media world.

I see the evidence of this Eeyore thinking from the industry Sunday in Richard Siklos’ York Times story about newspaper companies and Wall Street; in Jon Fine’s Business Week column about the complete pickle the Los Angeles Times is in; in a survey of newspaper executives who realize — about a decade too late — that they should have been cooperating; and mostly in a $2 million American Press Institute consultant-and-task-force industry extravaganza just released.

It’s sadly fitting that the API report, called Newspaper Next, landed as a 91-page PDF, requiring me to print it out on paper and run out of ink just to read it, with no opportunity to interact with it. I won’t say that there aren’t some good ideas in the report or in newspapers today. But as Susan Mernit says, the industry’s $2 million might have been better spent on real development instead of just blather.

Yet the real problem the report exposes is cultural inertia, the inability to think in radically new ways and to blow up old assumptions. I feared when the project was announced that they saw their job as fending off threats to newspapers rather than exploiting new opportunities for journalism. When I heard an early version of their recommendations, I warned that they were taking false comfort from making tiny steps when what is needed is an atomic bomb.

But I fear it’s worse than that. From the evidence of the report, the industry’s elders still have not broken out of their old worldview. They still look at us as an “audience” and “consumers” (or, more often now, “nonconsumers”). They believe that we want them to — this is their alliterative festival — enlighten, educate, enrich, entertain, engage, or empower us. Past a few references to the ability of the public to create content now, the greatest value they see in this trend is that we can provide them with free content to save money. They still think their core product is papers and news web sites and believe their salvation is in developing portfolios of products. For that matter, they think they are in the business of producing a product, still.

But isn’t journalism a service more than a product? And doesn’t this new world enable us to expand journalism through collaboration? What’s lost in this is the essential value that I believe news organizations provide: connecting people with information and each other. And I think what’s moved off centerstage, ironically, is journalism and the value it brings. Yes, of course, they are trying to preserve journalism by preserving the business. But they’re so busy trying to protect the “core product” and the old businesses that I don’t see them ask the real core questions: How can we expand journalism? I’ll spare you my screeds on networks and relationships.

One bit of good news is that they see the bad news; they are willing to criticize themselves: “The public is migrating away from us, happily discovering new freedoms, opportunities and choices in a new world of infinite information. . . . For newspaper companies, the very newspaper itself — its form, function, history, role in society and demanding production processes — creates blinders that make it hard to comprehend the fundamental changes happening around them.”

But the task force that made this report and many of the projects that come out of it are still insular, with very little effort to get new voices, fresh blood. One company did not seem to involve its online people in new products. Another focused on changing the paper’s own internal structure for innovations. Another redesigned its existing web site.

By contrast, WickedLocal.com in Plymouth, Mass., is a promising attempt to build through collaboration in hyperlocal. Nearby, the Boston Globe serves small advertisers by placing ads for them in Google and Yahoo; the fact that the ads aren’t in the paper or its site should give one pause but this is an attempt to serve new advertisers in new ways in an open world and so I’ll applaud the attempt. As I said above, there are some good ideas here.

And it’s good to hear the industry talking, at long last, about trying to cooperate with each other. I lived through too many hellish task force meetings in the ill-fated New Century Network industry consortium, which proved nothing but that newspapers cannot get along; they all think they’re special and they’re all quite addicted to the independence of operating as local monopolies. Now they realize that they’ve made it too difficult for advertisers to give the industry money. I fear this realization comes too late. Google has long since brilliantly exploited that weakness — to the point that Google is becoming a sales agent for newspapers and newspapers a sales agent for Google.

: Now let’s get real and go to Los Angeles, where the Times is battling for its body and soul. This is being painted too often as a fight among shareholders — in Tribune Tower, in the Chandler family, and in Wall Street — but as Siklos’ New York Times story says: “It’s tempting to paint Wall Street as the bad guy in this, but the relatively brief history of the Street and the press is more complicated.” Jon Fine’s column makes it clear that private ownership for the paper is neither likely nor a panacea.

But I say that the rescue of the LA Times has nothing whatsoever to do with ownership or share prices or EBITDAs or newsroom staff sizes. No, the only thing that will rescue this news organization formerly known as a newspaper is innovation. Make that revolution. Instead of standing up to Chicago to save heads in the old newsroom, the editor and publisher should be looking out into their communities and figuring out how to reinvent what the LA Times can be with new (and often more efficient) ways to gather and share news. They should be trying to find new ways make connections among people and enable them to do what they want to do, whether that involves information or commerce.

But it’s hard to manage and even harder to innovate in a crisis. But that’s where the American newspaper finds itself today: in the 9th inning of a game of crisis. Their Newspaper Next PDF might have been an acceptable step in a process of change in, oh, 1995. But now, I fear, it’s just a beach towel on the Titanic.

: So what the hell would I do? What would you do? In subsequent posts, I’ll suggest we explore that.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism created a roundtable-via-email about online and the future of news. That’s here. My answers were cut short, which is fine, except what was excised was my complaint about the questions; I argued that they were bringing the old-media worldview to the new-media world. So they linked to my full answers and so will I. A few examples from the cutting-room floor:

Question: Blog readership seems to have stalled in 2005. Content analysis also shows there is little of what we most would think of as original reporting in blogs. Yet they often write about events outside the purview of the mainstream press. How ultimately do you think blogs and other citizen media will affect news reporting in America? Will we ever see them as a more significant, or even equally important part of the mainstream American news diet as traditional journalism?

Reply: Your questions are fairly dripping with agenda. You seem to be trying to push a worldview that says that blogs and online video are on the decline – so pay no mind to them – and that what journalism needs is more staff. Sorry, but that attitude is what is putting American journalism in peril. Head, meet sand. . . .

You – like so many journalism conferences these days – make the mistake of trying to turn this discussion into a cable news shoutfest: blogs vs. mainstream media! Enough! The right question to ask is how blogs and mainstream media can work together to improve journalism and an informed society. You should be asking how any mainstream journalist could possibly imagine not doing his or her job without the help of the public through blogs. . . .

Question: Do you think the economic model of the Internet has to shift from an advertising based model to something else for traditional journalism to survive at a level that we have become accustomed to? If so, do you have any thoughts on what that new model might be?

Reply: And why is the standard the “level that we have become accustomed to”? I’m sorry to be such a curmudgeon about the curmudgeonly art of journalism, but that is precisely the attitude that, I believe, could be the death of our beloved craft. Your words presume an agenda of trying to preserve a past rather than trying to imagine a future. . . .

Much more and less pissy comment from Media Bloggers’ Bob Cox, Dan Gillmore, Jay Hamilton of Duke University, and Lee Rainie of Pew.

My Guardian column this week tells the success story of Netzeitung. Since I haven’t written about that here, I’m copying the full column below (it’s also here).

A grand experiment in the future of news is succeeding. Pity most of you can’t read it, since it’s in German. But thanks to an accident of school scheduling that plopped me into a German class, I’ve been able to follow Netzeitung.de since it was founded in Berlin in 2000 as a net-only newspaper. It’s not a blog, a search engine or an aggregator. It is a newspaper without the paper, but with 60 journalists reporting the news. Netzeitung has not only survived the internet bubble and a ping-pong game of corporate sales, it has acquired other media properties; it is starting an ambitious effort in networked journalism with citizen reporters; and it is set to be profitable this year. Ausgezeichnet!

Dr Michael Maier, Netzeitung’s editor-in-chief and business head, is an experienced and respected journalist: former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, Stern and Vienna’s Presse. No blogger, he. When I met him after he and his partners brought the concept of a netpaper from Norway - where its big sister, Nettavisen.no, is still in business - Maier was adamant that he would have his own staff producing news. I tried to push my populist agenda of interactivity and citizens’ media, but he would have none of it. He was starting a newspaper, dammit, and newspapers have reporters.

In the years since, Netzeitung was bought by Lycos, then by Bertelsmann, then by Maier and a partner, who sold it to Scandinavia’s Orkla, which itself is being acquired by the press baron David Montgomery. Maier says he is glad none of his many masters was a traditional German newspaper, for he doubts he could have developed Netzeitung under its roof. I agree. I got nowhere trying to convince American publishers to try a paperless paper. They are addicted to ink.

Netzeitung remains impressive in the breadth, depth and the timeliness of its reporting. It is among the internet’s most cleanly designed news sites. Maier says the service now serves 1.2 million readers per month. It reportedly will earn €8m this year. It has acquired other large German sites for technology, health and cars. It recently took over a Berlin radio station, and so the online site produces both radio shows and podcasts (what’s the difference?). And it produces online and videotext news for German TV. This experiment in online news has become a budding media empire.

But what brought me back to revisit Netzeitung is its latest effort: Readers-Edition.de, an online paper by and for das volk. True to form, Maier insists that the people must report: “We don’t publish commentary.” So citizen reporters submit news and photos on politics, sports, technology and business. Netzeitung, the parent, puts the best on its home page and then pays the contributors.

Maier says his online journalists were at first afraid of these interlopers. But he also says his reader/writers are better at working with links than ordinary reporters, are fast (helping him scoop competitors), and are smart (they gave him an exclusive on a revival of the 60s radical group the SDS).

One reason we bloggers like blogging is that we have no editors. But the Readers-Edition contributors do: a team of fellow reader/writers act as volunteer moderators with the help of one Netzeitung journalist. They get together in meetings across Germany to share tricks of the trade. They even share rejected stories so contributors can learn what it takes to make the grade. Now that’s transparency.

I wonder whether this model could work elsewhere. The other citizen-written online newspaper of note, South Korea’s OhmyNews, has had difficulty replicating itself in other countries; its political and media landscape may be unique. And when I ran online sites in the early days, I tried to copy what I saw on German sites by having volunteer moderators keep peace in chatrooms. It worked in Germany, where users respected rank, but not in the US, where moderators got power-mad and users revolted.

I would love to see both Netzeitung and Readers-Edition spread, for we need more answers to questions asked at nearly every journalism conference I attend, namely how will we support journalism in the future? What are the business models for news? How does journalism survive post-press? I hope the answers lie in creating vibrant and successful newspapers that do not depend on paper. I hope the answers lie in creating networks that allow professional and amateur journalists to work together. And I hope the answers are also in English, since I didn’t pay much attention in that German class.

Media Guardian’s Roy Greenslade has seen the future of The Telegraph’s newsroom and operation and he likes it. Other papers, including The Times, are starting the process of merging all media. The Telegraph is using a move into a new newsroom as the opportunity to also move the processes, culture, and job descriptions of the journalists into the future.

For the journalists, this means that there will be no split of functions between print and web. And, in addition to providing text, they will also transmit audio and video for podcasts and vodcasts. And many staff are already building their new skills, appearing on camera to read their own scripts - downloaded on to a self-operated auto-cue - and cutting their own footage after barely an hour’s training.

Oh, good, my students won’t think I’m crazy when I push the end of the monomedia journalist.

Roy also reports that they are reorganizing their output into separate products.

Instead of producing articles once a day for a printed newspaper, they are going to work to four deadlines - in the jargon, “touchpoints” - throughout the day. After what appears to have been exhaustive research of modern audience needs, the paper’s team - led by Will Lewis, the managing director (editorial) - have come up with a round-the-clock schedule of differing “products”. Mornings are for text, so the concentration will be on supplying stories online. Lunchtime into the early afternoon is for video and audio. Late afternoon, drive-time, will see the production of PDF pages, what Lewis calls the “click and carry” service. This allows people to download sets of pages and then print them out, in colour or mono, in various sizes to read on their way home. Evening is then the time for “communities”, with material aimed at the bands of enthusiasts for football, gardening , travel, whatever floats their boats.

I wonder whether that structured biorhythm will become too limiting. That is, when the big story hits, you’ll want to get it out in all forms across all media and devices. I’ll be eager to watch this.

The Telegraph also announced layoffs as part of this process. It’s a necessity of the new economic realities of news and also of the opportunity for new efficiencies. Says Roy:There is a mixture of apprehension and enthusiasm for the new regime, but several of them are also very upset because of the announcement that more than 50 people will be made redundant. . . . It is sobering to learn, even after the passing of hot metal printing 20 years ago, that many articles currently pass through 12 pairs of hands before reaching the reader. That is obviously unnecessary and a key reason for job losses.

News organizations have to reexamine their own value and put their resources there. Heavy editing can improve content, yes, but it can also harm it — homogenizing it, dulling it down, slowing it up - and it’s expensive.

Jay Rosen announces an important experiment in journalism today: NewAssignment.net.

In a nutshell: This is publicly supported journalism. The public will come to NewAssignment.net with story ideas and will collaborate on honing them there. Once assigned by NewAssignment’s editors, the public will contribute both money and reporting to the work that reporters are paid to do. The process is open and the public will have a strong voice and role in the journalism NewAssignment does. Editors will supervise the assignments and the reporting and will edit the stories, assuring that NewAssignment produces quality journalism and also that it is not overtaken by a pressure groups. There’s much more to this with many nuances and Jay examines them all in a lengthy (even for him) FAQ on his blog.

This is an answer — not the answer — to the frequently asked question in the shrinking news business these days: How will we support journalism and investigation? NewAssignment will not replace the work of professional news organizations. It will complement them, attacking the stories that are not being covered. It begins with an article a few articles faith. First: The public will support journalism and investigation. Second: The public will then want more of a voice and a role in that reporting. Third: Given the opportunity to have more of a voice and role, the public will contribute more support. It’s a virtuous circle, if it works.

Jay got funding from the MacArthur Foundation to explore this idea for a year. NewAssignment just received a grant from Craig Newmark’s personal foundation to fund the work on a pilot project. And NewAssigment is getting help from Daylife, the news startup I’ve been working on. That relationship: Daylife will gather, analyze, organize, and create a new, distributed platform for the world’s news. In a sense, then, NewAssignment is complementary: Daylife shows you what is being covered and New Assignment fills in a few of the gaps about what is not being covered. Daylife will provide some technical and distribution help, starting with a pilot project.

I’ve known about Jay’s vision for NewAssignment for more than a year now and I’ve thrown in my two cents. I think this is an important experiment in pro-am, publicly supported, open journalism. We must explore new business models to support coverage of news and this is one of them. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of NewAssignment and I look forward to working with Jay and you on it and learning a lot along the way.

This is your chance: You’ve said you wonder why some stories are not getting covered. Well, now you can gather together and get them covered. You’ve wanted more of a role in journalism. Now you can be involved from start to finish. You’ve known facts that would matter in news coverage if only you could be heard. Now, you can.