The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times.

There are few details available about the project, in part because they haven't really been worked out. But the news is emblematic of something much larger going on across the country. As various people try to figure out the future of news, the non-profit model has gained substantial momentum.

This struck me last week while I was attending the two-day UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google.

Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn't. It left me with a sense of the challenges the Hellman project faces to get off the ground and have an impact. The odds are against most start-ups. And that's no different for non-profit news organizations.

A 'kvetch-free' journalism conference

The Berkeley-Google conference was devoted to exploring the intersection between technology, news, and business models. It was organized by Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections Of A Newsosaur. You can find Alan's opening thoughts here, and his takeaways on having what he called a "kvetch-free journalism conference" here.

Besides being hosted by Google, it was presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Sponsors included The Koret Foundation, Google, and the McCormick Foundation.

There were lots of interesting tidbits about various technology trends. For notes on the conference, you can search Twitter for #mts to see all the tweets (and there were a surprising number of tweeters there). The tweets were also being captured by live bloggers on day one and day two. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on things news organizations could be doing more efficiently or effectively to increase traffic, engagement, and advertising revenue. But, frankly, there wasn't much that sounded revolutionary or that would move the needle.

It was the discussion about non-profit models that I found most intriguing. Not because I necessarily believe that's where the future lies, but because at this moment so many others clearly do. There are enough emerging or current non-profit experiments that over the next couple of years we should have a pretty good sense of whether or not this model is relevant and sustainable.

The NPR Model

One of the speakers at Google was Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Weiss, who has been at NPR for almost two decades, summed it up nicely when she said that the non-profit model seemed a bit like the "flavor of the month."

For better or for worse, non-profit news organizations represent a big departure in terms of business models from the for-profit mainstream model. In a way, it seems like some of this push is driven by a sense of resignation that a new model can't be found to reinvent for-profit news. I don't buy that. But, clearly, others do.

The highest profile non-profit effort to date is ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. There's also Investigate West, Voice of San Diego, and Minnpost.com. Already in San Francisco, there's The Public Press and California Watch. There are many, many others out there.

In an era of financial challenges, the so-called NPR model seems appealing to many newsrooms. But Weiss delivered a little reality check. Of NPR's $166 million budget, 40 percent of that comes from member stations and 30 percent comes from corporate sponsorship. NPR gets no money directly from the federal government, Weiss said.

She noted that folks from a traditional media background don't always understand how hard it was to build that model. In NPR's case, they've had 35 years. Of ProPublica, she pointed out that the organization was started with a large personal donation, a "lightning strike," as she called it. But they haven't proved they have a sustainable model.

The problem is that if the non-profit model catches on too much, then what little money that exists to support these organizations will be stretched too thin. "One girl selling girl scout cookies is cute," Weiss said. "Two are okay. Three or more is just annoying."

Her bottom line: "Will non-profits save us all? They're an essential ingredient. But I doubt it."

Texas Tribune

Another fascinating non-profit presentation came from John Thornton, a partner in Austin Ventures and chairman of the Texas Tribune. Thornton is hoping to launch the Tribune next year, and has raised $3.5 million of the $4.5 million targeted. Just last week, Thornton announced he'd bagged another $750,000.

But that money really is just a start. Thornton provided a lot of useful data and shared his spreadsheets with the conference. According to his calculations, the organization needs to raise $1.3 million in donations every year to support a newsroom of 10 full-time journalists.

Thornton said people donate $20 million each year to dance non-profits in Texas. From that perspective, he said getting $1.3 million each year doesn't seem like big hill to climb.

We'll see.

Perhaps the most cautionary tale came from Geoff Dougherty, a fellow blogger here at Idea Lab and founder and CEO of the Chi-Town Daily News. Dougherty's grant was to "recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists -- one in each Chicago neighborhood." But despite his efforts, Dougherty said at Google that the support from the local philanthropic community didn't materialize to sustain it.

Last month, Dougherty announced Chi-Town was going to re-launch using a for-profit model.

Bay Area News Project

All this brings us back to Hellman and the Bay Area News Project. UC Berkeley Dean Neil Henry gave a short presentation at Google, but he didn't reveal much more than had already been announced. Here's what we do know.

The goal is create a news organization that employs full-time journalists, perhaps anywhere from 10 to 15 to start. They hope to leverage KQED's fundraising experience. And they're exploring a partnership with the New York Times to provide content for that paper's new Bay Area edition.

Beyond that, there are lots of blanks to be filled in. The first step is to hire a CEO and/or executive editor to actually map out what this organization can and should be, what it will do, and how it will operate. This is a tall order. And an expensive one. I had been telling folks that to find someone with the right set of skills and experience, they'd have to be paid well over six figures in salary.

Then I saw Mutter's post that included information about the top salaries paid to ProPublica editors. Editor Paul E. Steiger got a whopping salary of $570,000 while the number two editor pulled in $296,370. Whoa. That will eat up Hellman's money right quick.

This leads to my own reality check: $5 million sounds like a lot. But it's not. Not when you're talking about starting an actual news organization with paid reporters. The same day the project was announced, I happened to be visiting a start-up in San Mateo called Caring.com, which produces content related to elder care. The CEO said he needed to raise "a little money" to get through the next year, about "$5 million or $6 million dollars." That would sustain an online-only content start-up with a staff of 14 that already has a growing revenue stream.

All of this is to say that $5 million is purely seed money. KQED and the other parties are going to need to put serious fundraising muscle behind this. They still need to hire a CEO, executive editor, and staff. It's going to be some time before it's having any impact on the ground.

The reaction to Hellman's project has ranged widely, and I must say I'm quite surprised. On the positive side, David Cohn weighed in with advice for Hellman, including to hire folks who think "web first."

But not everyone was giddy. Popular local blogger Greg Dewar, who writes the N-Judah Chronicles on the Njudah blog, tweeted: "this Hellman/KQED/UCB J School thing sounds like a disaster in the making, at least for us who don't have wealthy financiers..."

And Suzanne Yada tweeted: "@mediatwit I am only officially speaking for myself re: Public-Press. But yes, I feel like Hellman ganked our model & left us to dry TBH." The Public Press, for which Yada does some work, had been operating through bootstrapping and small grants.

The East Bay Express worried that this project "threatens traditional news media in the Bay Area, because it will rely on 120 journalism students at Cal who will work for free."

I think the fears of the other local and hyper-local news start-ups are valid. Hopefully, the organization will take a collaborative approach that builds the news ecosystem.

Finally, if you want to hear from some of the folks involved in Hellman's project, check out this interview from KQED's Forum:

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here's a selection:

• Citysourced: The company has a platform for "citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution." They are launching soon with a project with the city of San Jose. For now, you can sign up to be alerted when the full site is launched.

• Insttant: The site provides "real time people-generated news." According to the founders, Insttant will use "Twitter's public stream to generate a comprehensive overview of what's happening in real time through headlines and visuals." You can sign up to get an invite to the beta.

• DocWrite: An iPhone application that allows you to easily perform dictation and transcription. The sound file is automatically uploaded to a site where you can listen to it while using a window to type up the transcription. (Yes, you still do the transcription yourself.) Still, it could be handy for journalists.

Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach.

The Anecdotal And Observational Approach

But numbers and data can often obscure the important lessons of the way people behave. And that's why I advocate for the second approach, which is anecdotal and observational. It tends to be overlooked or even dismissed. In the work I've done over the past two years, I've found this approach to be far more helpful in thinking about the opportunities for reinventing news and information.

My thinking on this topic has grown in part out of a conversation that started on Twitter between myself, Steve Buttry, the C3 Coach at Gazette Communications, and Tim O'Brien, the editor of the New York Times Sunday business section. Steve cited my post to support an argument and Tim replied that my post didn't prove anything because my analysis was too subjective. He wanted data to support it.

That's an oversimplification, of course. The series of tweets led to Steve blogging a response here. In the comments, Tim felt his point was misrepresented and explained himself further:

But to extrapolate from Fine's data to say, as Chris does, and as InfoWeek does, that it shows that newspapers didn't understand what their readers were paying for is ridiculous. I asked for any empirical data, reader surveys, etc., that outline why readers buy certain papers so we could look at that issue in a less subjective way, not one driven by Chris or InfoWeek's assumptions. And once we have more of that, then maybe I'll be proven wrong.

My response is in the comments here. But, again, my message to people designing new services is that there's another way to think about the problems that need solved.

So, with that in mind, below are some key excerpts from what I wrote. I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Why Data Alone Can't Solve Our Problems

In trying to think differently about how to deal with the ongoing news business crisis, over the past two years I've taken an approach that is intentionally anecdotal and subjective. I simply don't believe that any amount of data is going to solve this industry's problems. As I've worked on various newsroom reinvention and research projects over the past two years, I've come around to believe that the quantitative approach -- putting our trust in massive reader surveys, polling data, whatever -- has failed us.

Instead, I'm convinced that we need to take a qualitative approach to understanding the behavior, patterns and needs of our communities when it comes to news and information...

Why? Without listing every single study undertaken and tallying all the money spent, I think I can safely assert that over the past two decades, the news industry has spent millions of dollars accumulating data about readers and what they supposedly want. And our industry has responded by altering its products and newsrooms to produce the things that they thought the data told them that readers really wanted. Today, metro newspapers write shorter stories, with faster ledes, and publish more pictures about fluffier stuff. Our leaders have steadily used this data to make decisions that have made newspapers worse every year. Somehow, no one has stopped to consider that no industry has ever solved its problems by making its main product worse. Instead, management points to the data from readers' survey to insist they're doing what people say they want. The result is that we're worse off than ever.

If a data-driven approach was going to solve our problems, wouldn't it have done so by now? What exactly is the piece of data we're lacking to begin to address the business crisis the news industry is facing?

I don't believe there's a magic data set waiting to be assembled that will lead us to the big "Ah-ha!" I don't think we're one reader survey away from figuring it all out. We live in an era where people turn to data as a crutch, leaning on it to give themselves a false sense of certainty. The facts don't lie, right? Except we know that they do. A lot of such data is formed by the biases and frames through which the questions are formulated, asked, and then interpreted. The newspaper business has failed to recognize its own flawed frames. To this day, no matter what you hear from a newspaper executive, they still believe their primary purpose is to get people to read them in print. It's why newspapers still spend so much money propping up circulation by subsidizing a large number of people through persistent telemarketing.

My intention, in the original post, was to point out that within the newsroom, these questions have been asked, and continue to be interpreted, through an incorrect frame: The belief that the primary product customers paid for was journalism. It's not. I do think that in the newsroom, and in the management suites, many in our industry have failed to grasp the need to reinvent the business side. And even among the most experienced new executives, I think there is truly a failure to understand the dynamics of our business and our relationship to the community. While the functions in the newsroom have evolved (not as much as critics say they should, but still....), on the business side, there's been little attempt to do anything wildly different than what's been done before.

My perspective on the quantitative versus the qualitative approach to product design began to shift two years ago when I became a member of a task force for a project called "Rethinking The Mercury News." In the summer of 2007, our executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News charged us with zero-basing the newsroom and re-imagining all of our products and newsroom staffing as if we were just creating the company today. Rather than hunting down piles of research data, or commissioning yet another survey of readers, we decided to conduct the research phase using the "design thinking" process. Design thinking seeks to create empathy with the user of a product by using observation and interviewing to allow you to see the world through their eyes, not your own. The goal is to "re-frame" the issues or problems in the hope of pointing toward different opportunities or solutions.

For me, it's the anecdotes that provide better insight than the numbers...

The problem with a lot of data we've gathered is that you can't always be sure the people themselves know why they do what they do, or what they really want. Or whether you're even asking the right questions. During one of my Rethinking interview sessions, my team talked to a woman in her early 40s who spoke at length about how un-interested she was in technology and how she didn't feel like technology played a role in her life. As she was speaking, she kept taking out her BlackBerry and checking her email. Now, if I'd called her on the phone, and asked her about her interests, I would have checked her off as a woman not interested in technology. But in observing her, I could see that she was. Was she lying to me or was she ignorant? No and no. But she clearly thinks about that topic differently.

To take another example, let's look at young people and printed newspapers. If there is one piece of data that everyone seems to agree upon, it's that young people don't read printed newspapers, right? Its turns out that's totally false. Over the past two years, as part of the work I've been doing for the Knight Foundation (The Next Newsroom Project), I've been spending a lot of time visiting college newsrooms, which are far more conservative in their journalism culture and behind the new media curve than professional newsrooms. That was confounding to me for a long time. So what's going on? The response I heard from college media advisers and college newspapers editors has been fairly consistent: The staffs at college newspapers look around and see all their classmates reading the printed version of the college paper every day. When they get up in the morning, the newspaper bins are empty. If everyone is still reading the print version, why should they worry much about the Internet and all this new media stuff?

As I've considered what that means, I've tried this experiment a few times myself: Go into the student union and leave a few copies of the newspaper like the New York Times or the Mercury News on a table. They get scooped up pretty quick.

In fact, the generation that doesn't read print does read a lot of print. What the surveys have really been telling us is that this demographic won't pay to have the morning paper delivered every day. But when they encounter a printed product that's free, is compact, and fits the way they consume news and information, and yes, usually has the crossword and comics, then they'll consume it in large numbers. Do I think print is the future? It's a part of it, much bigger than most folks believe, I think. How does this square with all those surveys about the news habits of young adults? Those surveys are being commissioned by news executives who are really just trying to figure out how to get young people to pay for the newspaper. They thought they could do this by altering the content. But what they really needed to do was reinvent the product form (compact, free) to fit into these people's lives (lots of downtime on a pedestrian campus), and that's a step that's too radical to be considered by most newsrooms.

These are insights that I've gained not through studying the data, but through the subjective, anecdotal approach...In my view, the subjective approach is the strength, not the weakness of my analysis.

With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business. If it doesn't make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.

That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the notion has officially entered into conventional wisdom: Local newspapers screwed up by giving away for free the content everyone used to pay to consume.

Conventional wisdom, yes. And untrue.

Correcting this fundamental error is about more than just debating the past. Because this mistaken assumption is driving the debate about new business models for news.

I want to explain why I think this mistaken assumption is causing people to ask the wrong question about the future of local news. And what I think the right questions are. I want to try to reframe the discussion about business models to focus on where true opportunity and solutions might be found for journalism entrepreneurs to pursue.

First, let me address the first half of the assumption about "newspapers that gave away content." This assumes that people once paid for journalism.

The Myth of Paying for Journalism

Let's correct that right now: When it comes to local newspapers, people never paid for journalism.

Believing that they did represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what a local newspaper was, or is. Especially when it comes to the business of a local newspaper. And it's a tragic misreading that I hear repeated on all sides of the paid content debate, whether they're for or against charging for news online. (The equation is a bit different for national newspapers like the New York Times or USA Today. But I'll leave that for another time.)

Let's review the actual business of a local newspaper, at least as it used to be. Back in February, when I was attending a Knight Digital Media Center workshop at the University of California at Berkeley, we heard a presentation from Lauren Rich Fine, a former newspaper analyst for Merrill Lynch and a presenter at Kent State University.

Fine broke down the historic revenues of newspapers. Across the industry, the money people paid to subscribe accounted for, on average, about 20 percent of a newspaper's revenue. Classifieds, on the other hand, typically brought in 50 percent of the revenue, and 70 percent of profits on average, according to Fine.

So let's reflect on that: The consumer was only paying about one-fifth the cost of the product. But what were they getting for that money?

Again, the mistaken notion here is that the primary product of the newspaper is journalism. That's the conceit of journalists, but it's also the general misinterpretation by those seeking to re-invent news from the outside.

The Consumer View

Let's look at a newspaper not from the newsroom-centric view, which assumes the whole value is the journalism. Let's look at the newspaper from the eyes of the consumer.

From that view, a newspaper is a product that, at least at its peak, provided about 50 different services for people. It helped people figure out where to shop. It delivered a boatload of coupons every Sunday. It helped them plan their weekend. It entertained them with comics and puzzles. It let them know what was on the school lunch menu. And along the way, it also delivered journalism.

Anyone who has worked at a newspaper long enough will tell you that what provokes more outrage from readers than anything else is messing with the comics or puzzles.

Just this week, I was eating lunch with a chief executive who had been in Silicon Valley for 30 years. Toward the end of our lunch, he said he had read the print version of my newspaper for 30 years, and still does. But he was frustrated that we now run the puzzles on a different page every day. He's not alone. About two years ago, when my newspaper all but eliminated the features section, the outpouring of emails from readers were primarily expressing outrage that the puzzles and comics were being moved.

You can shake your head, but that's as important a part of the newspaper for many people as the journalism is. For their monthly bill, which only represented 20 percent of revenue, consumers were getting a product that did many things, only one of which was the journalism. Did journalism have a higher social value? Certainly. But it wasn't the core of the business. For the reader, an ad telling them about a sale or a new store might be just as important in their lives.

Losing the Community Marketplace

So if journalism isn't the business of a newspaper, what is?

Pull back the lens. At their peak, local newspapers did two things: They created community. And they provided the local marketplace for goods and services. These services were so profitable, that they subsidized the civic good of journalism.

The reason newspapers are in trouble today is because they have lost their dominant position on both of these fronts. Classifieds have evaporated, blowing a massive hole in newspaper revenue.

People know this, yet they somehow forget that this was a completely non-journalistic function.

When it came to community, the sum of news and information in a newspaper created a shared base of knowledge, set the conversations about civic life, and provided a bond that created a sense of place. Today, as newspapers have shrunk, and as the audience has splintered, the newspaper no longer serves as community hub.

Having lost all of these things, all that is left is the journalism. And on its own, we're discovering this is not something people will pay for.

Getting Beyond Paid Content

So the solution that's carrying the day is to start charging for content. I don't favor this approach, but I think it's too late to stop the train. If paid content succeeds, local newspapers wouldn't be getting people to pay for journalism again. They'd be getting them to pay for the first time.

Once the paid content strategy comes and goes, it'll be time to look for other solutions. I don't believe, as some have written, that we've tried everything and should simply give up. In my view, there is still enormous opportunity to create business models that support local newsrooms if journalism entrepreneurs ask the right questions:

Let's stop asking how to get people to pay for content, because they never did.

Let's stop asking: How do we reinvent journalism? Opportunity abounds here. The new digital tools are allowing us to create deeper, richer journalism than ever. And more people than ever are reading my journalism. Journalism is doing fine.

Instead, newsrooms need to ask:

> How do we reinvent local community on the web?

> And how do we reinvent the local marketplace online?

By no means are these puzzles solved. I don't believe that Craigslist represents the last, best way people in a community will buy and sell things. Yelp, while growing in traffic, continues to have reputation issues with local merchants.

The discussion over paid content and tweaking the advertising model is too limited. Solve those two bigger challenges of community and the local marketplace, and you'll create a business that will support smart, multi-platform newsrooms. These newsrooms won't be dominant, as they were in the past. They'll exist as part of local news ecosystem.

But create community, help people succeed in business, and you'll find a way back to re-igniting the passion for a local news organization.

In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement each other and extend and enrich our journalism. That is the great opportunity of this moment.

False Trade-Offs

I got to thinking about these false trade-offs last weekend when I saw the The New York Times headline: Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle. The piece, by reporter Steve Lohr, discusses a recent study released by Cornell researchers called Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle. The three researchers built an algorithm to track the way news moves across the web to better understand the dynamics of the evolving news cycle.

Now, I'm not qualified to assess the way they designed the algorithm. But what caught my attention was the decision to essentially place all sites into two categories: mainstream news or blogs. While the study has some interesting findings, this construction strikes me as perpetuating that binary choice. Us vs. Them. The Future vs. The Past. Choose A or B.

What I've been arguing through my Knight Foundation project, and others have also, is that news is now an ecosystem. And going forward, news organizations of all shapes and sizes, from the blogger at Starbucks on up to whatever remains of the major metro newsroom, need to focus on how they fit into the ecosystem. And more importantly, how and when they collaborate with the other parts. Continuing to make artificial distinctions short-circuits that thinking. It emphasizes divisions and competition, rather than collaboration.

The paper, co-authored by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstron and Jon Kleinberg, does make a nod to this notion when they write:

"For example, one could imagine the news cycle as a kind of species interaction within an ecosystem..."

Yes, one could indeed imagine such a thing. But the false construction of the study (mainstream media or blogs) essentially ignores it.

There are any number of holes that could be punched in the study. And Scott Rosenberg does a nice job of mapping out many of those red flags here.

Blurring of the Lines

But on a fundamental level, it's still the "blogs or mainstream news" construction that bothers me. Most problematic, of course is simply tackling the problem of which site goes in which bucket. The lines were never really all that clear to begin with. But they're become increasingly blurred in an era where newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times run enormous blogging networks.

In this fast-changing era, identity and labels are hard to sort out. Just to use myself as one example, I've been a professional journalist for 17 years now. Currently, I write a column twice each week for the San Jose Mercury News. But beyond that, I've been blogging about my family here for three years; blogging about my Knight research here; blogging at Idea Lab for two years; and, oh yes, blogging for my employer here. On any given week, I produce more words for blogs than the newspaper. So what am I?

Answer: It doesn't matter.

What does matter is that I'm constantly trying to see how all those different pieces fit together and complement each other. I see blogs not as competition, but vital parts that help expand the conversation around news and information. I worry less about who is winning the battle of breaking news first, whether it's mainstream sources, blogs, or Twitter.

Seeing these other pieces as competition leads down the poisonous road where people complain about bloggers stealing content. Or, it takes you down the equally poisonous path where people argue that blogs (or now Twitter) have rendered the mainstream newsroom obsolete.

I don't want to choose option A or B. I want "All of the Above." That is the mindset we must choose to fully realize the enormous potential of this digital era of journalism.

After reading the story, I dutifully tweeted a link to it to those following me through my Next Newsroom account:

Columbia J-School struggles to adapt to the digital age: http://is.gd/mY0s "F--- new media," says one prof.

A short time later, I received this reply from ajsundby:

@nextnewsroom That @nymag post has many reporting holes in it. If you bothered to look at the comments, you'd know that. You've had a week.

That phrase gnawed at me for quite awhile: "bothered to look at the comments." I believe that at the time I tweeted the link, there were several dozen comments. When I checked today, it was up to 71.

But am I really obliged to read the comments? Says who?

Of course not. The story was long enough on its own. And I didn't feel compelled to wade through the ensuing conversation.

But clearly a conversation had emerged around it, challenging some of the facts and assumptions. And in that case, if I didn't read the comments, did I in fact actually read the story? Is the "story" now the original article plus the comments? And if I didn't consume the whole enchilada, should I refrain from recommending it, tweeting it, posting it on Facebook?

No Hard and Fast Rules

I don't think there can be any hard and fast rules on this. But since commenting on articles continues to cause such heated discussions, I have a few thoughts on this from the perspective of a reader.

First, I just don't want the pressure of feeling like I'm required to read all the comments. It's just not realistic. I don't have the time, except in the rare cases when I'm feeling particularly passionate about a topic and I want to really dive in.

Second, I recognize that comments are important. But if you really want to overcome my reluctance to engage, then consider this yet another in a long line of pleas to improve commenting systems. Ideally, reporters or someone at the news organization would identify the best comments and highlight them by incorporating them into updates to the original article.

In the case of the New York Magazine article, at some point someone added an editor's note acknowledging some of the feedback in the comments. (Though I wouldn't have seen the note if I hadn't gone back to re-read the story to write this post.)

I'm sympathetic that this might not always be possible given time and resources. So, third, embrace a commenting system that allows readers to help rate and boost the best, most insightful dialogue. The folks at SFGate.com have a pretty good system. Not perfect, but helpful when there are hundreds of comments on a story. I can click on the "recommended" tab and get the ones that garnered the most votes.

You might do all this. And I still might ignore the comments. And when I do, I'm going to try not to feel guilty.

In this case, design refers to the fundamental way a product is conceived and built. The D School teaches something called "design thinking". It's a powerful method and I'll be writing more in the near future about using it to find new ideas for journalism.

In brief, a design driven approach to creating something new favors a qualitative approach over a data-driven approach. Rather than amassing mounds of data from customer and marketing research, you go out and observe people to understand their lives and needs and how products could fit into them. Folks who embrace design thinking commonly refer to this as building empathy with the customers.

One example of how that could look for newspapers can be seen in this recent post by Michelle McLellan about Carla Savalli, a former assistant managing editor who left the Spokesman-Review in Spokane in October. McLellan writes that Savalli's "time away from the newsroom has upended the way she views the daily newspaper." Savalli now sees the newspaper through the eyes of her community, rather than through the newsroom. She's developed greater empathy for her community. Savalli doesn't need piles of polls and surveys to understand the community outside the newsroom, because now she's one of them. Everyone working in a newsroom today needs to have that experience. It requires listening to the community in a very different way.

For an extreme example of this approach, check out this article from the Boston Globe about MIT's AgeLab, where they had students wear an "Age Suit" to understand how the elderly experience the world.

And if you really want a deep dive into design thinking and empathy, I highly recommend reading "Wired To Care" by Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortenson of Jump Associates.

We used a design driven approach during our Rethinking the Mercury News project in 2007 and I found it to be incredibly powerful. Patnaik writes about how design thinking can "reframe" the way you see the world, and that was certainly true for me. I walked away with a number of thoughts about what newspapers should and should not be doing to reinvent themselves. (More on that in another post).

Design thinking is a movement that's gaining a toe-hold in the journalism world. Gannett is embracing it, and has hired one of the leading firms in this field, IDEO. You can watch a series of videos that IDEO and Gannett posted about their process here.

And at the Next Newsroom Conference at Duke University last year, I was fortunate that John Keefe, program manager for WNYC in New York attended. He's embraced design thinking to create a new newsroom for WNYC as well as reinventing some of its programming.

More recently, I connected with Andrew Haeg, a senior producer and analyst for American Public Media in St. Paul, Minn. Haeg is spending this year in Palo Alto on the Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists. During his time at Stanford, Andrew has delved into design thinking and through him, I was invited to sit on the D School panel.

The "Redesigning Journalism" project grew out of a class being taught by Corey Ford at the D School. Ford recruited a number of folks from across campus, including several folks from the Knight Fellowship program and Stanford's Graduate Program in Journalism, and broke them into three teams. Their broad mandate was to "Redesign Journalism."

The teams spent about six weeks on the project, doing observational studies, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and some moderate testing. Again, the goal of the process is to understand the way people live their lives, and use that information to design products. It's a highly intuitive and subjective process. On March 12, we gathered in a space at the D School where the three teams each had five minutes to present their idea.

I was part of a three-person panel that was supposed to offer critiques and feedback. The panel also included Tristan Harris, CEO and Co-Founder of Apture, and Andreas Kluth, the Silicon Valley correspondent for The Economist.

Andreas blogged about his experience that night here. One of the groups showed a video of a woman named Rebecca who talked about how she subscribed to the Economist because she thought it made her look smart, but never actually reads it.

Two of the three groups proposed iPhone applications, and I wondered how much of that reflected their own obsession with the gadget versus what they were truly hearing from the folks they observed and interviewed. That's a tricky thing in a process like this, to truly put aside your own interests to listen fully to what people are telling you. Still, both applications offered interesting services that I could see value in developing.

The first iPhone app was called Newstiles: an iPhone application that aggregates stories by displaying photos into a slideshow on the phone. You can use your finger to slide across the phone and view the photos, and then tap on the photo to call up the story. The belief was that the visual nature of the photos would attract more people into the news.

You can watch their presentation here:

The second iPhone application was called Video DJ. The idea here was that a company, let's say the New York Times, would hire brand-name DJs to mix video clips of the news into 2-minute videos, and at the end, the user could tap on any of the video clips to full a longer version of that news video. You can see a prototype here:

A couple of my main thoughts: iPhones apps are absolutely worth thinking about. But also remember that there are now over 35,000 iPhones apps in the iTunes store. So you have to think hard about why yours is going to stand out. And you also have to think about clutter on the phone. How many iPhones apps will most people use, particularly news apps? I think not more than four or five at most. So newsrooms need to be thinking about how to get on people's mobile devices, but it's also going to be tough to get a spot on that piece of real estate.

Also, the vast majority of news start-ups I come across these days are attempting to create some new way to aggregate stories. I'm sure someone is going to come up with a much better solution that what currently exists, but again, it's a crowded field, so the bar will be high for standing out.

I did like that both applications sought to offer functionality that took advantage of the way the iPhone worked, rather than just re-posting or re-formatting headlines. And they were both visually creative and very appealing to watch. Tristan and Andreas were bigger fans than I was, but I did think they were both very clever. Perhaps most important, they were trying to understand how people used their iPhone, and how they wanted to experience news and information on that particular mobile device.

My favorite of the bunch was the third team's product: the Reader Meter. They only had a conceptual framework and not a working prototype. But the idea in a nutshell is to create an application that would sit on every computer in the newsroom and serve as a kind of dashboard to monitor the community's activity online, both on your own Web site and beyond.

It wasn't a total surprise this group came up with a solution for newsrooms, since the team included Ann Grimes, director of the graduate journalism program and a former writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal. But the Reader Meter solves a real problem for me: How to keep up with all the conversations happening in your community online. I liked the idea of something that tunes everyone in the newsroom into those conversations and activity. Also, as a business, hopefully this would be something that a newsroom might actually pay to use (even if it's just a little bit for each copy, it could add up). When it comes to the Web, selling to other businesses is usually a better bet than trying to get consumers to pay for something.

Given the compressed time frame that they had to work under, I was impressed that each of the teams came up with an intriguing idea that sparked good discussions. Did any of them fundamentally solve the problems plaguing the journalism world? No, of course not. But they all did represent fresh thinking, which is what really matters in a process like this.

For some context, let me confess that I'm a full-time, paid journalist at a newspaper. I'd never written a grant proposal before applying for a News Challenge grant in late 2006. And when I decided to apply, it was a last minute decision that was almost a whim. I figured I had nothing to lose. But on the other hand, I can't say I had sat down and thought about what would actually happen if I was selected. I co-wrote the application with another Duke alum on behalf of The Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke University. My partner and I never even discussed who would actually run the project.

Turns out the answer was: Me. (That, by the way, turned out to be a good decision as far as I'm concerned.)

That brings me to Mistake No. 1: I drastically underestimated the amount of time I would spend on this project. I figured it would amount to a few a hours a week. Nope. This was a second full-time job. And that brings me to...

Mistake No. 2: Underestimating the amount I should request for my time. If I have one thing I wish I could do over, it would be to ask for enough money that would have allowed me to just focus on this project. I'm not complaining, mind you. And who knows whether Knight would have been as interested in the project if it came with a higher price tag? But still, it was exciting work, I always found myself wishing I could be doing more as the year went on.

So my advice to avoid mistakes 1 and 2: Think long and hard about what is really going to take to make your project work in terms of your time. Don't cut corners on this. Be honest with yourself and request money to allow yourself to really focus your energies on being successful.

Mistake No. 3: Volunteers. I underestimated my time in part because I also envisioned recruiting lots of volunteers to help. And in fact, I got more than four dozen folks to offer their help doing everything from interviews to research to site visits. However, the problem with volunteers is that they're, well, volunteers. I spent an incredible amount of time managing these folks, prodding them to complete tasks, and gently nudging them to follow up on things. Eventually, I allocated some of the grant money to hire someone for a few months to manage volunteers and do some research. She proved to be way more productive and efficient.

So if you're thinking about using volunteers, my advice there would be to seriously consider asking for enough to hire one or two folks, at least part-time. This might prove to be a more efficient use of time and money. Because while passion is great, money, alas, is still the great motivator.

Mistake No. 4: Our website. I knew from the start that I wanted to create a site where we could post our research and build a community to hopefully foster discussion around our plan. A firm came forward and offered to build us a site for free using Drupal. Now, I had never overseen the creation of such a site before, never managed a web project, never written a spec sheet or site map. So, no surprise, this part of the project floundered for several months. Worse, it turned out the folks who offered to help really didn't know all the much about Drupal.

It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to fire someone who is working for free. But once we parted ways, I re-started the site using Ning.com, a free social networking platform that took me all of 15 minutes to launch. So, the advice here is that there are an enormous number of free tools out there. Give these some consideration before pouring time and money into building something that may be far more complex than what you need anyway.

So those are the big ones. Despite all this fumbling, we still managed to produce a plan for a Next Newsroom for The Chronicle. That plan is now moving into negotiations with the university, a process I expect will take some time.

So what's next?

I'm going to continue running the Next Newsroom site, including blogging on a regular basis, and continuing to post a long backlog of newsroom profiles to the site. So keep checking back and keep sending suggestions for interesting people I should interview. And I'm going to continue blogging here as well, from time to time.

I'm also helping The Chronicle over the next few weeks develop a new strategic plan for its newsroom, to begin transforming what they do in anticipation of one day moving into a far more advanced newsroom. And The Chronicle is moving ahead on plans to develop a student media incubator, one of the ideas that came out of our proposal. I'll be posting more on that as well and asking for some suggestions from this community.

The plan is available here: http://nextnewsroom.wikispaces.com. But first, I want to establish a little context for that document. The plan was written in collaboration with The Chronicle's board, officially known as the Duke Student Publishing Company. The proposal conforms to explicit guidelines created by the Office of the University Architect at Duke University. So you won’t find a grandiose, philosophical document. Instead, you’ll find a straightforward, nuts-and-bolts proposal whose intention is to give an architect the information needed to begin performing a feasibility study for an actual building.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to lay out a few highlights of the plan, explain how and why we got there, and outline what happens next.

The concept approved by the Chronicle's board calls for:

• A newsroom for a fully-integrated, multimedia news organization.
• Adjacent space for a student media incubator.
• The newsroom would be set in a larger media center, presumably shared by other student and academic groups.
• A central location so the new building will be at the crossroads of campus life

The background

The plan is the culmination of 18 months of work that began back in Spring 2007, when we learned that we would receive a News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation. The idea for the project originated back in October 2006 when I was visiting Duke for a Chronicle alumni event. Duke is considering a massive expansion of its campus, and part of that new construction originally included space for a "media center" of some kind. This required The Chronicle, which is independent of the university, to confront some big questions about its future.

But I also felt this was an incredible opportunity: To imagine the ideal newsroom that would be built from scratch. And that's what we proposed to do. The grant we received from Knight officially required us to do four things:

• Launch a Web site to archive our research, discuss our findings, and stimulate discussion. We continue to do that at The Next Newsroom Project site: www.nextnewsroom.com.
• Hold a conference on the newsroom of the future. In April, we convened The Next Newsroom Conference at Duke.
• Build a version of the Next Newsroom in Second Life. You can find the details of that work here.
• Write a proposal for a new newsroom for The Chronicle. Done.

Since receiving the Knight grant, we recruited about 50 volunteers, including Chronicle alumni, to help conduct interviews, visit newsrooms, and generate ideas. We examined traditional newsrooms that were evolving in exciting ways, and new newsrooms that were taking radically different approaches to their organizations. We talked with reporters, publishers, digital media experts, innovators, and architects. And we tried to look for ideas and inspiration outside the journalism industry.

As we tried to unpack all this information and understand it, we realized that one of the exciting things about the era we're entering is that there would not be a single Next Newsroom, but rather, there will be many Next Newsrooms. We're moving away from a past that has given us a fairly homogeneous set of newsrooms, and into an era where there will be far more diversity in size, organization, and mission. This, I believe, will be a healthy thing for our communities and our civic life, even if it's causing short-term pain during this transitional moment.

Five principles for the ideal newsroom

So rather than start by trying to create a single "ideal," we decided to identify the big themes. This led to the establishment of five principles we think any newsroom of the future should embrace:

• Community: The community should be at the center of a newsroom. That can mean physical spaces for training, spaces for public events, and social spaces. But it also means making the community an integral part of the news and information gathering, discussions and production.
• Multi-platform: The ideal newsroom should embrace all platforms --- online, print, broadcast, mobile --- on an equal footing. Any newsroom that organizes around a single platform, and considers the others to be secondary, risks becoming stagnant as those platforms change and new ones emerge.
• Innovation: We're entering an era of increasingly rapid change. The ideal newsroom today won't be the ideal newsroom of 2012. So any newsroom needs to make innovation a priority and find ways to create the capacity for constant experimentation.
• Collaboration: Because any newsroom will be one among many in its community, it's critical that it figure out how to work with others in the news and information ecosystem, whether that's linking, teaming up on strategic stories, or finding other ways to cooperate when its strategic.
• Transparency: The explosion of information and news creates an enormous challenge for people to figure out which sources they can trust. The best way for a news organization to approach this problem is to become as transparent as possible. In the case of some new newsrooms we examined, that meant a transparent structure that allowed the public to see inside and invited them in. But in terms of content, that also means being as open as possible about
  your processes, sources, decisions and content.

That’s the ideal newsroom. The next challenge was to adapt that to the realities of The Chronicle and Duke University. Let me discuss how we applied each of those principals to our proposal.

Community: The proposal we wrote calls for The Chronicle's newsroom to be set inside a larger "media center." We suggested that larger center have public spaces such as an auditorium for discussion media issues, and social spaces such as a cafe that would make it a place where the Duke community would want to visit, linger, and hopefully interact with organizations that are based in the larger building. And the proposal also suggests Duke include digital media training facilities for the broader university community.

Multi-platform: In thinking about how this looks at The Chronicle, we wanted to make sure that as the paper evolved, it would have the flexibility it needed to grow into a true multi-platform news organization. For the main newsroom, this means creating a space that is as open as possible, with no cubicles and sight lines across the entire space. Everything should be on casters to be moved around to accommodate evolving workflow patterns. There should be as few wires as possible on things like phones, computers, etc., to allow for ease of adaptation. We wanted to allow each new staff the chance to reinvent the newsroom as they see fit.

This main newsroom would have equipment for programmers and developers to be working alongside journalists. Given The Chronicle's size, we knew it couldn't operate a 20,000 square foot broadcast center. However, we proposed a small studio spaces for creating Web video broadcasts or IPTV programming. There would also be a small audio studio for producing podcasts or Internet radio programming.

Innovation: This is a particular challenge for all college media organizations. At The Chronicle, which relies on an all-volunteer staff, most students are already at full capacity just getting the daily paper out. So to encourage innovation, The Chronicle's board is going to create a student media incubator that would have its own space adjacent to the newsroom and its business offices. The board isn't going to wait for a new space to launch this program and is already researching guidelines to hopefully begin the incubator in Fall 2009. I'll be writing more on this as it progresses.

Collaboration: This, among all five principles, is the trickiest. The Chronicle is fiercely independent and rightfully proud of its traditions, which have produced a number of respected journalists from a school that does not offer a journalism degree. So for now, we proposed that any larger media center have collaborative space where The Chronicle's future staffs could pursue collaborations as they choose. It also remains to be seen what other groups or academic departments might be based in such a media center, or choose to offer some programming there. Although Duke doesn't have a formal journalism program, it does have the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, which offers a journalism certificate, and the Information Science + Information Studies group, which produced our Second Life newsroom and is focused on digital media and communities, among other things.

Transparency: The proposal calls for some parts of the newsroom to be "visible externally to create a sense of transparency with the community." Right now, The Chronicle is located on the third floor of a prominent building on Duke's main campus. While it's centrally located, it's also virtually invisible to the Duke community and hard to find and access. As for The Chronicle making its journalism more transparent, that will be an issue left to future staffs.

Next steps:

The Chronicle officially adopted our proposal in early October. That document will now form the basis for negotiations with Duke for a new home. I expect this to be a tremendously complicated process. And much has changed since the idea first germinated almost two years ago (the economy in particular). But we are excited about the plan and the opportunity to create a dynamic new home for The Chronicle, and a facility that I believe will have a positive impact on student life at Duke.

As for the Next Newsroom Project, we're continuing our research and plan to expand the Next Newsroom site. Our hope is that it will continue to be a resource for people grappling with transforming a news organization, or launching a new one. We think there’s an opportunity to expand the conversation about what the newsroom of the future looks like. And from feedback we’ve gotten in recent months, there are a couple of big questions on everyone’s minds.

First, they want to know, “How?” How can they actually create or reorient a newsroom that allows them to do the things they want to do in terms of multimedia, innovation, and the community.

And, of course, there's the other big question: “How are we going to sustain the newsroom of the future?” Business models seem to be on everyone’s mind and we'll expand our conversation to include that subject as well.

Finally: Thanks!

A tremendous number of people contributed to our work, in ways big and small. But I'd like to especially thank some of the people who played key roles:

Kathleen Sullivan, deputy project manager, co-wrote the original grant proposal, helped conduct research, and provided most of the polish on the final proposal.

Erin Ehsani came aboard in Fall '07 when I was in over my head and helped manage volunteers, conduct interviews, and post research.

Jonathan Angier, The Chronicle's business manager, has been a steady hand guiding the paper's professional staff for more than a decade and provided invaluable support, along with financial record keeping, throughout our work.

The DSPC. The Chronicle is fortunate to have a strong and diverse board providing thoughtful leadership as it begins to rethink its mission and role on campus.

And finally, this project would have never happened without the generosity of the Knight Foundation, and in particular, Gary Kebbel, Knight's journalism program director who oversees the News Challenge grant program. We've been extraordinarily fortunate to be part of the incredible community of News Challenge grantees, and the larger Knight family, whose work provides some of the best evidence that this is one of the most exciting moments in the history of journalism.

"Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular 'Madden 09' football game to the street racing 'Burnout: Paradise,' feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads--they appear on billboards and other signage--remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site."

Now, what do videogames and Obama have to do with newsrooms? It's clear that over the past year, Obama's campaign has developed a profound understanding of how its community finds and consumes information across a number of platforms. And Obama has embraced them all, and adapted his message to fit the way people use those platforms.

That's an important lesson that every newsroom should learn. During the past year of research for The Next Newsroom Project, we identified six principles that newsrooms should adopt. One of those calls for newsrooms to embrace all platforms. It's not enough to simply say, "Hey, we want to be online first." Instead, think about how to use all platforms equally: mobile, the Web, print, broadcast (radio and TV). And be ready to experiment with any new ones that come along, including video games.

It's critical that a newsroom understand its community, where they are, the different ways the get news and information, and how they consume it in those different ways. For our project, we spent some time exploring this notion in Second Life, where we built a version of our newsroom. We learned a lot through the process, including the fact that our target community (students at Duke University) wasn't spending a lot of time in that environment. And so for now, it wasn't a platform where we needed to invest a lot of resources.

Of course, a lot has already been written about how Obama's campaign has utilized social networking and micro-financing to turn his campaign into a broad-based movement. The record $150 million he raised in September is testament to that strategy. He's mastered the viral nature of the Internet to tap into a swell of grassroots support that will likely be hard to stop next month.

But what struck me, in the case of the videogame ads, was how his campaign had employed a strategy that reached far beyond the Internet to communicate. No platform is too big, or too small. If they think there is a significant community to be reached, they've gone after them wherever they are.

And they're not just re-purposing messages. Instead, they're creating messages tailored to each specific platform. Beyond the videogames, here are just three more that come to mind:

• Twitter: This is the best known, perhaps. Obama's Twitter account now has 102,247 followers, one of the largest on Twitter. Obama's campaign primarily uses the account to put out links to videos, short campaign announcements, and brief messages.

• iPhone application: This nifty little application can be downloaded from the iTunes store to your iPhone where it searches your contact list for phone numbers of people in battleground states. When it finds relevant numbers, it alerts you and suggests you call that person. It also pulls in news and video updates.

• Text messages: The plan to announce the selection of his running mate via text messages was a dud. But in the process, he got thousands to volunteer their mobile phone number which has allowed the compaign to continue blasting out updates wherever someone is.

Finally, it's important to note that the campaign continues to use all the old "print" platforms. Yard signs, bumper stickers, billboards, t-shirts, etc. It's too easy to get caught up in all the exciting new platforms and forget that the old ones still have significant value.

Of course Obama has the money to do all of this, rather than having to make gut-wrenching choices about trade-offs and allocation of limited resources as is the case in many newsrooms these days. Still, it's the right approach. And it's a good model for any newsroom to aspire to follow.

You can check out the results here.

There are a couple of things that got me excited. First, I just find it visually engaging. Next, it involves an unusual collaboration between comic book artists, a blogger, and online developers to produce something distinct. On a personal level, it warmed my heart that a "newspaper" was trying something this daring.

Some folks may shrug, or dismiss it because it involves comics. But while I've never been much of a comic book reader myself, I've seen some amazing uses of the form to produce some really interesting journalism in recent years.

One of the most dramatic versions of this is a full-length, comic book documentary called "Palestine" by Joe Sacco. I saw Sacco speak a couple of years ago at the Nieman Narrative Conference in Boston. Essentially, he spent months in Israel and the West Bank trying to see first hand what was happening there. He then told his tale in comic form. It's powerful stuff.

More recently, there have been a couple of notable uses of comics to tell non-fiction stories. One was by The Globe and Mail in Toronto. They produced a full-page comic to explain the current fiscal crisis. I first saw this via Juan Giner's blog:

Another comic that got a lot of attention recently was one produced by Google to explain the technology behind its Chrome browser. The comic was produced by Scott McCloud:

These projects are good reminders that innovation doesn't just have to be about embracing the new digital tools (though they played a big role in this case). It can also involve working with new people or groups that you don't usually collaborate with. And it can include finding new ways to tell stories that embrace older forms, such as comics.

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion.

This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local news continues to diminish.

Amy Gahran (who also blogs here at Idea Lab) took up this subject at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog where she asked of the commission's work: "How important is local, really?":

I suspect that clinging reflexively to "local" as the paramount criteria for "relevant" reflects a newspaper perspective that was never a good fit for most people, and that never really served most people's information needs well.

But, in fact, that's exactly the issue here: Even in Silicon Valley, there are growing numbers of city councils and counties that are no longer covered. There are school districts barely covered. And local elections are now barely covered with any depth. The result is a growing anxiety that less information about local issues will lead to less civic engagement. Despite the explosion of virtual networks, we still lives our lives in the real, physical world. And there are issues and information that I would argue are vital and distinct as they relate to your personal geography.

Sounds grim, right? Except there's also an opportunity to create local information networks that could be far better than the ones that are ebbing. Even at their apex, newspapers still only covered a sliver of the news and information that hit closest to home for most local communities.

To tackle this vast subject, the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute announced earlier this year the creation of this 15-member commission. The commission is being co-chaired by Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google, and Theodore Olsen, the former solicitor general of the United States, and it includes other such notable figures as Michael Powell, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission is asking three big questions:

*What are the information needs of communities in our American democracy?
*What are the current trends affecting how community information needs are met?
*What changes will ensure that community information needs will be better met in the future?

A version of my remarks are posted here.

But I wanted to highlight a few issues that were discussed that struck me:

*Trust. I wrote about this issue in a column last week for the Mercury News. The question fundamentally is how does a community filter the explosion of information and evaluate which sources are reliable? This sparked one of the more interesting conversations on Monday. It raised a second question about whether there needs to be some new kind of intermediary, or whether we can count on the wisdom of crowds to help establish reputation and trust and responsibility.

*Community information is a broader conversation than just journalism. When people get together to discuss what comes next after newspapers, there tends to be a lot of journalists in the room, and so a lot of the conversation revolves around journalism. Certainly, that's a critical component. But when I think about community information, I think of things like a visit my family made on our way to Yosemite recently. We stopped in a Target in a small town in the Central Valley and at the front of the store were two computer kiosks. They were there because apparently you have to apply for jobs online at Target. But in this digital era, how are folks in that area able to find out about jobs, let alone apply, if they're not digitally savvy?

*Digital literacy. However things evolve, it seems clear that citizens will need a higher degree of digital literacy to be informed consumers or active participants as they choose. I know the Knight Foundation is going through some soul searching about its mission in this changing landscape. But while I don't think we can expect foundations to fund the journalism we need forever, the area of digital literacy seems like a great place for foundations and educational institutions to focus their efforts.

I'm sure there are plenty of doubters who think newspapers are a lost cause at this point when it comes to innovation. Fine. But it's important to understand that this question is one that any news organization, newspaper or not, must be asking itself. Whether your newsroom is a mainstream media goliath or a virtual community news organization, it's important to make this question a central part of your organization. Why? Because the era of news we've entered is one of constant change, at an ever increasing pace. Nobody can say for sure what is next. But I can guarantee you that even if you create the ideal news organization today, it won't be the ideal in a few years.

So it's important that no matter what size your news organization you find the capacity to innovate. If 100 percent of your newsroom's time is devoted to just producing your current products, then you're already doomed, even if it isn't immediately apparent. This is true whether you're a traditional newspaper newsroom, or an online first newsroom.

Last fall, I sat on a "Newsroom of the Future" panel at the Berkeley School of Journalism with the managing editor of Salon.com. I'd always looked to Salon as a Web pioneer. But things looked different from where she sat. She noted Salon was struggling at the moment because its platform and its organization were geared toward a Web model of publishing from the 90s. As a result, they were having trouble adapting to a world where social media and social networking and user participation had emerged as major forces in recent years. The constraints on employees' time and financial resources were making it difficult to adapt. Her laments sounded similar to the ones I hear from traditional newspaper newsrooms.

So you can be online first and still fall into the same trap that newspapers did by failing to innovate and experiment. Just look at CNET, the Web news pioneer that stumbled in recent years and was recently bought by CBS.

In fact, I think that it's worth pointing out that newspapers' failure to innovate is hardly unique. Critics often want to make newspapers out to be a special case of failure, that somehow their inability to adapt to a new landscape is unique. But it's not. Far from it. It's the classic fate that strikes any once-dominant company when the world turns upside down. It happens all the time in world of technology. Look no further than Microsoft, which after more than a decade, is still trying to adapt its business to the Web, as evidenced by its ill-fated bid to buy Yahoo (another company that's failed to innovate). The Redmond giant can't let go of a legacy product (Windows) enough to reorient itself to where the market and its users have gone.

I don't point this out to let newspapers off the hook. Indeed, the criticism is warranted. But the notion that they're alone in this failure creates an unnecessary layer of self-defeatism that creates one more barrier to innovating: Newspapers have failed to innovate, and therefore can't. I don't buy it.

But how?

I'm going to circle back around to focus on Dan's original question about newspaper newsrooms.

In an ideal world, of course, newspapers would be investing like crazy in new people, new tools, and new ideas. It'd be great if, like Google, we gave everybody one day each week to work on their pet project. (Though frankly, I'm dubious even Google has much to show for this celebrated program). Unfortunately, newspaper companies have become ensnared in a string of mergers, acquisitions and sales that have created mountains of debt while adding nothing of tangible value. Combine that with the current state of the economy, and it's pretty much a given that management isn't going to spend any money. Tragic, but true.

On the other hand, if innovation were simply about money, Microsoft would have quashed Google long ago. Right?

No one can simply order up innovation on demand. Wish as you might, the innovation fairy won't sprinkle pixie dust on your newsroom while you sleep. But you can encourage innovation, nurture it by lowering barriers, supporting those employees with entrepreneurial drive, and providing a fertile environment for their ideas.

So, let's start small. Here are five steps for promoting innovation in your newsroom:

1. Make it a priority: Management needs to make it crystal clear that innovation is now a central part of the organization's mission. It's no longer something that employees do on the side, or when time permits. Beyond making that declaration, management needs to incorporate it into the way it evaluates everyone in the newsroom. "What did you start this year?" should be just as important a question on annual evaluations as the journalism produced. Promotions should favor people who have a track record of launching new initiatives. And while opinion on this tends to be divided, I would also assign someone to be a director of innovation. This creates an alternate channel for the rank and file to take their ideas for cover, especially when they're hitting roadblocks elsewhere.

2. Create a process: Establish an official system for considering new proposals. Commit to accepting a set number each quarter, or month. If you want to be brave, establish a committee to evaluate them that includes members from outside the newsroom that have certain specialties, like a venture capitalist or a serial entrepreneur. For projects that are selected, set up clear milestones and expectations.

3. Foster new collaboration: Tear down as many walls, both literal and figurative, in the newsroom. Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it's long past time to kill this sacred cow). And look for opportunities to regularly mix in people from the community. The goal should be getting as many people as possible to be interacting with people they don't typically encounter as often as they can. Get people out of their comfort zones and routines, and get them talking and meeting, both formally and informally, with people from online, advertising, operations. Change the entire seating arrangement so that each person is surrounded by people from different departments (a photographer next to a reporter next to a sales rep next to a Web producer). When people need to have department meetings, then can gather in temporary spaces. Innovation is often sparked by random conversations between people of different perspectives that create new moments of insight. Do everything possible to create the opportunity for such moments of serendipity.

4. Offer incentives: Newsrooms should, but won't, offer financial incentives. They should, but won't, offer bonuses or revenue sharing for ideas that prosper. But there is one commodity even the most tightfisted operation can offer that will seem like gold to most employees: Time. Anyone working at a newspaper these days is working at 110 percent capacity. In many cases, their managers are fine them trying just about anything, as long as they keep doing everything else. That's unrealistic and unsustainable. Instead, for proposals that are accepted, offer the employee a set amount of time to focus solely on that project and set aside their usual duties. You'll have folks banging down your door for the chance.

5. Evaluate and learn: Review progress regularly and ruthlessly. It's important to know when to pour more resources into a project that's blooming, when to make adjustments to a project that has promise but has underperformed, and when to kill a failed idea. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a middle manager said they're worried that if they support the launch of a new project that it might live on forever as a resource drain even if it's a total failure because no one will take responsibility for killing it. Every newsroom needs to learn how to stop doing the things that don't work. Alas, it's easier said than done. Trying new things means being okay with the fact that most won't succeed. The only thing that matters is learning the right lessons. And making sure that the people whose idea tanked know that you can't wait to hear their next idea.

Literally, I was just preparing to post this late Tuesday night, I received a tweet from Dan as part of a conversation we were having where he said of newsrooms: "But I concede lots are behind. The thing is ... many have innovation "sleeper cells," so there is hope of revolution."

Agreed.

So those are mine. Let's hear yours. What tricks or strategies have helped promote innovation in your newsroom?

Like a lot of folks who have developed a cultish appreciation for the microblogging service, I've increasingly found that Twitter has become the place get breaking news before it hits online news sites or television.

I follow Twitter through a desktop application called Twhirl. Since I only follow a limited number of folks who are in Los Angeles, I switched over to Summize, a Twitter search service that was recently acquired by Twitter. I typed in "earthquake" and Summize pulled up a list of all tweets containing the word earthquake.

To get a sense of the volume of tweets, here's a graph of earthquake tweets by minute compiled by tweetip.com:

The focus of my work here, The Next Newsroom Project, is to try to think about the newsroom of the future. What's exciting about the era we're entering is that there will be many next newsrooms. The beauty of Twitter is that it enabled one version of that: An instant, virtual, citizen journalism newsroom that immediately posted thousands of updates.

On Twitter's blog, co-founder Biz Stone discussed the notion that Twitter was becoming the new newswire, noting the first tweet came nine minutes before the Associated Press pushed out its first story on the quake.

How much does that nine minutes really matter? This has always been a fundamental, unanswerable question, whether we're talking about TV news and which cable station has a 30 second head start on a story, or which wire service is first with new financial news. Over time, though, it builds a reputation and a mindset among members of certain communities and trains them where to get news first. So if it happens consistently, then it will matter over time.

That said, Twitter remains the tool of a narrow, very connected set and has a long way to go before it gets the attention of the mainstream.

Still, as Twitter evolves into this role and gains a wider audience, it's worth understanding what's good about this development, and what limitations exist.

As I attempted to follow the tweets, there were often more than 100 coming in every minute. So there's an overwhelming volume that can be hard to process at times. I was mentally trying to stitch together the larger picture of what was happening but was left wondering what gaps existed. For instance, I'm guessing the Twitter demographic has not penetrated as deeply into low-income and minority neighborhoods. If Compton was burning, would there be someone there tweeting it?

And because the tweets are uncurated, you get the good, with, well, updates likes this:

On the other hand, there was an instant army of civilians that emerged to cover the event. It's the kind of crowd that other organizations could only dream of organizing.

As the tweets flew by, I asked my followers if there was a way to know who had the first tweet on the earthquake? In other words, who broke the news? This turns out to be more difficult to track down than you'd think. There were so many tweets at that point, that flipping back through a search engine like Summize meant plowing back through hundreds and hundreds of pages of search results.

Stone himself tweeted that the first earthquake tweet this one:

(I'm not posting the actual tweet from Nicholas Hawkins since it includes profanity, but you can find it here.)

But on his blog post Tuesday, Stone later said the first tweet was actually this one:

Does it matter who gets credit? Not really in the larger scheme of things.

For some perspective on this Twitter posse, I also began checking the Los Angeles Times website. Initially, it was inaccessible, most likely due to a flood of traffic. In fact, executive editor Meredith Artley said in an email that latimes.com had 5.6 million page views Tuesday, up from the usual 4 million. And the forum question, "did you feel it?" attracted more than 1,000 comments.

Ideally, latimes.com would have had more provisions for such events, but this apparently only knocked them down for a few minutes. It appears their first official post about the event came at 11:56 a.m., just 14 minutes after the first tweet. Also, very quickly, the L.A. Times site had maps, live video feeds, and hundreds of comments. It's an impressive performance, and it's a reminder that when big news breaks, people still turn to their local newspaper web site for the story.

Of course, if were up to me, I would have placed a Twitter feed on the front of latimes.com, though as noted above, that's not without some risk given the lack of filtering. And I would have created an earthquake tag and had someone trying to aggregate all the other media people were probably loading at places like YouTube, flickr, etc.

Fortunately, it appears the quake was not catastrophic, certainly not approaching anything on the scale of the China quake earlier this year. But still, the other limitation of Twitter's newsroom is that it's got a short attention span. It's unlikely that Twitter posse could be expected to do follow ups on victims, watchdog pieces on the work of emergency responses, and any other broader issues that might be raised.

But it's okay if Twitter's not great for everything. What matters is that by being exceedingly strong in one area - breaking news - it builds the larger news ecosystem, which hopefully improves the overall reporting and flow of information for everybody.

In April 2006, I was sitting in a Durham, N.C., sports bar with Gary Kebbel, who runs the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant program. Gary was officially letting me know I would be getting a grant for The Next Newsroom Project. Our plan was to research and design the ideal newsroom for The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University, which was considering building a new facility on campus. I was so giddy that something he said at the time flew right by me:

"As part of the grant, we'd like you to build a version of the newsroom of the future in Second Life," he said.

I was just thinking, "Wow, I'm getting the grant."

Only a few days later did this sort of sink in. Of course, as a business and technology reporter in Silicon Valley, I'd heard of Second Life, the virtual world developed by Linden Lab of San Francisco. But video games and virtual worlds have never been my thing. I had never ventured inside Second Life, or had a desire to.

Several weeks after that lunch, I traveled to Miami to join the other News Challenge grant recipients for the announcement of our grants. Later that evening, many of us were at dinner on South Beach, when I was describing my project and noted the requirement that I build a version of it in Second Life. The snark came fast and furious.

"Does this mean the newsroom of the future will have an S&M dungeon in the basement?"

"Shouldn't you build it in World of Warcraft? That's the most popular online virtual world."

And so on. But in the following weeks, I heard from just as many folks who thought it was unbelievably cool. And that's the thing that I've come to realize: When it comes to Second Life, there's not a lot of middle ground. People either tend to think it's way cool, or they don't.

Of course, I had to find out for myself. So I downloaded the application and created an avatar: Roan Oh.

For the uninitiated, Second Life allows a user to roam around a variety of virtual islands. But what's distinct is that just about everything in this world is built by users. On one level, it's perhaps the most sophisticated collection of user-generated content that you'll find anywhere online.

After playing around with it for several evenings, I quickly realized that I could probably spend the entire year of my grant just learning how to make a chair in Second Life. So I went looking for some help. Fortunately, I found it at Duke University through the Information Science + Information Studies department.

Victoria Szabo, the ISIS program director, teaches a class on virtual worlds at Duke. She agreed to take on this part of the grant, and she recruited Duke senior Rob Schirmann to work on the project as part of a course credit.

Now came the really hard part. What should we build? Throughout the fall, we had several of what I call "chicken and egg" discussions. I was looking to the ISIS folks to tell me what we should be doing in Second Life. And they were looking to me to tell them as specifically as possible what I wanted. And so, we were getting nowhere.

One way to go would be just to create a virtual replica of a real student newsroom in SL, with all the pieces and functions that go with it. But this seemed, well, lame. Victoria noted that building such replicas didn't really take advantage of all the freedoms Second Life offered.

Finally, we decided to start simple. As part of the project in the real world at Duke, I'd been trying to find ways to get the various student media groups talking to each other. I thought maybe that Second Life could provide some common ground. So I suggested we take the three main groups, the student newspaper, the cable television station, and the radio station, and create a simple structure where they were all co-located in SL. In the real world, each group was scattered around campus and wanted nothing to do with each other.

I also tried to get our team to think about what we'd giving folks to do in this virtual newsroom. So we created an interview space where anyone could come in, conduct an interview, record it, and post it in the newsroom.

This, at least, gave Rob enough to started. When we held the Next Newsroom Conference in early April, we created a session on Second Life and Rob was on hand to make a presentation. I figured the session might be just him and me. But it turned out to be one of the most well-attended sessions at the conference. There was a mix of folks who were just curious and others who regularly spent time "in-world."

Here's a short video tour I made of the Second Life newsroom:

After a year, I'll confess that I still don't spend much time in Second Life, and probably never will. However, let me also say that the level of energy and creativity that exists in the environment is astonishing. Still, despite some initial misgivings, I'm ultimately glad Knight introduced the idea to us. It created some valuable conversations and some ideas for real-world newsrooms that are applicable beyond virtual worlds:

1. Be platform agnostic: People in a newsroom no longer can choose the platform they want. It's up to your audience and your community. You have to figure out where your community is, how they're getting their information, and make your journalism fit. No matter how much you dislike the concept of Second Life, if 100,000 people in your audience are "in-world," then you have to figure out how to take your journalism to them. That same goes if they're spending lots of time listening to the radio in their car, using their iPhone, surfing online from home, or whatever.

That said, in the case of Duke University, it's clear students ARE NOT spending much time in-world. We initially were going to build our virtual newsroom on an island owned by the Duke Office of Student Affairs. I figured this would be as strategic place as any, right? But last time I looked the island was still mostly vacant. And during my trips to visit Duke over the past year, any time I mentioned Second Life to a student group, there would be massive, synchronized eye rolling across the room. As such, my advice to the Duke student paper at this point would be that it's not worth their limited resources to be focusing on Second Life. That, of course, could change down the road. And if it does,
then the paper would have to embrace it.

2. Understand media habits: Again, this is true across any platform. It's critical that you understand how your community gets and consumes news and information. Our problem in Second Life was a fundamental one. I haven't spent enough time hanging out in Second Life to truly understand how avatars and communities sought out information, how it fit into their virtual lives, and what products and formats a newsroom could create that would fit these consumption patterns.

(NEW) 3. What do we want people to do here?: One way to think about the virtual newsroom was just to consider what we wanted students who worked for the different campus media groups to do there. But we tried to go beyond that and ask what it was we wanted people from the community to do in there as well. We didn't have a lot of clear answers. One thing we did was create an interview area where people could come in and interview each other, record the interviews, and post them in the newsroom. But I think the question is an important one for newsrooms, especially when thinking about their Web sites. Beyond just reading a story, newsrooms should be thinking about what it is they want the community to do at their site. Network? Discuss? Participate?

I'm guessing most folks reading this blog might be aware that Reuters had created a bureau in Second Life, staffed by two reporters. They write about events in Second Life, as well as real-world news about Linden Labs. While I found this to be an interesting experiment and certainly worthwhile, I also felt much of their Second Life work essentially mirrored the way regular reporters functioned offline.

So what's next for our Second Life newsroom? We're asking ourselves just that question. Essentially, we have a start. But is it worth doing a deeper study to create a truly revolutionary Second Life newsroom? And if so, how would we do that?

By the way, our Next Newsroom in Second Life is located on the ISIS island, which is private. That means you need an invitation to actually visit. If you're interested in poking around, go in-world and send a request to Ouida Basevi (Victoria's avatar).