Maybe I'm getting old. Certainly I'm an old media journalism snob. But the fact is, when faced with the fact that an increasing number of people can't process news without a game element, my instinct is to reply... well... fuck 'em."

And of course, he wasn't alone. I have seen a few tweets from folks who were sympathetic to his view: News is not a game. And creating games is just a way of appealing to the lowest common denominator, and furthering the decline and fall of our informed populace.

That view starts with a fundamental conceit: Games, particularly videogames, are making us dumber. Maybe it's a symptom, or maybe it's the cause. But in either case, embracing games is just furthering that decline.

Of course, lot's of folks (not me) would make the same argument about social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and just about everything that seems to be feeding our short-attention-span-theater mode of media conception.

Experiential Storytelling

Here's why I think that's wrong. First, my own view on videogames has changed a lot over the past year as I've begun to play them again myself and as I've interviewed lots of folks who also play. While videogames are new-ish, our playing of games stretches back centuries. And the reasons the best games appeal to us, new and old, is because they tap into some fundamental aspects of human behavior and psychology.

That is why, I think, the videogames have now become our biggest form of popular entertainment, surpassing movies and TV and recorded music. That's a sizable audience embracing a powerful or experiential media and storytelling.

Now, Carr essentially makes the elitist argument, that people have always been too stupid and lazy to educate themselves about the most important issues of the day. And while I wouldn't quite choose his way of characterizing that, it's true that it's always been toughest to get people to engage with the most complex reporting, especially about policy issues like climate change or government budgets. You can always get more people to read about Britney Spears' latest travails than about the debate over where to place new sewer lines in your community. That was true pre-Internet, and it's true today.

Creating Engagement

Games, I think, offer a unique way to create engagement around those loftier topics that we believe are important for a healthy civic debate, as well as less meatier ones. And perhaps this is being a bit pollyanish, but I still believe that we all benefit as a community when more people are informed and engaged on the most important topics that affect all of us.

To turn our back on those who can't or won't engage in the news, is a mistake that will still affect the rest of those who do engage. Games, then, are not a way to pander to the news illiterate, but rather a way to leverage a powerful storytelling medium to improve the quality of our civic discussions.

Photo by thehoneybunny via Flickr.

The use of videogame-like narratives is one of the many promising new forms of digital storytelling that have emerged over the past 15 years. And yet for all the potential, and some extremely successful examples, newsgames have not been widely adopted by news organizations of any shape or size.

The general idea behind the gathering was to identify the reasons that newsgames have not gained more traction and brainstorm possible solutions worth exploring to move things forward.

The gathering was organized by Nora Paul, director of the Journalism Center, and Kathy Hansen, a faculty member, who have been early advocates for adopting videogames and were Knight Foundation News Challenge recipients in 2007 for their project, “Playing the News.” (See Idea Lab posts on the project here.)

The Culture Gap

There remains a wide cultural gap between newsrooms and game designers.

Let me say there was not universal agreement even on this point. But that said, many at the session felt it was a fair assumption that most people in newsrooms are not likely to be gamers of any kind, particularly those in charge of newsrooms. By comparison, when thinking about new storytelling forms like video and audio, there is at least some touchstone experience from years of watching TV or listening to the radio. Games, on the other hand, are probably an alien experience. And that can lead to a lot of misperceptions about what games are, and are not.

To some degree, social media probably encountered such resistance for similar reasons. But as it’s become part of the fabric of our digital lives, it’s helped melt away those barriers. The same, now, goes for mobile which is being embraced in newsrooms as more people buy smartphones.

Why Newsgames Matter

Let’s start with the misperception that videogames are for kids, or young adults. To the degree newsrooms have experimented with newsgames, it was probably with an eye toward reaching teenagers and young adults and other audiences that long ago abandoned newspapers. But let’s be clear: Thinking about the audience for newsgames in those terms is far too narrow.

That’s because at this point, the majority of people in the United States play videogames of some kind: console, browsers, on their mobile phones. If you don’t play a single game, you are part of a shrinking minority. And many of these forms of games, particularly social, mobile, and casual games have now expanded deeply into mainstream audiences of all ages.

And far from being just trivial or simply fun distractions, these games offer benefits that ought to appeal to any newsroom. The best games create deep engagement, they are intensely social, and in some cases, they show a path to new ways to think about making money from digital content. Any of those items ought to resonate with publishers.

If newsgames hold all of these benefits, then, what seems to be holding them back from wider adoption? Again, there was no universal agreement on an answer, but the discussions created a long list of culprits that I noted above.

How to Clear Barriers to Adoption

1. Audience: There is very little information about who is playing the newsgames that have been built, and why and how they felt about the experience. Bogost noted that the problem is that so few newsgames have been developed that there may not be enough data to be meaningful. Still, gathering what little information there is on users and experiences might be a start.

2.  Monetization: There was a legitimate frustration expressed among some game developers in attendance that they were being asked to monetize news content in a way that publishers haven’t traditionally asked their newsroom to make content pay. At the same time, that doesn’t change the reality that if news organizations are going to take on something new, they’re going to ask about the return on investment, either in terms of audience or revenue. So are there better ways to make money from newsgames? Among the suggestions put on the table: creating ad networks around newsgames; developing virtual goods to be sold within the games; fremium services that create opportunites to sell other goods or services in the game; rewards and deals for winners or players; launching a serious game publishing house; continue emphasizing the additional page views generated by newsgames.

3. Costs: Another way to attack the issue is lower the expense of creating newsgames, and reduce the resources involved. Among the suggestions generated here: build mini-games that fit within larger story structures; identify recurring information (i.e., crime, sports, weather) than can constantly refresh existing games; figure out what information is already being created than can be easily be repurposed; creates newsgame platforms that allow non-gamers to create newsgames. Bogost, who was a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner for a project called The Cartoonist , is attacking this issue by creating a set of free tools to help newsrooms produce "cartoon-like current event games - the game equivalent of editorial cartoons." Another attendee, Eric Brown, has co-founded ImpactGames, which offers just such a platform for newsrooms and is currently being used by the Reynolds Institute news site.  

These are brief summaries of the various brainstorming sessions. You can see more detailed notes here. The folks at the Minnesota Journalism Center will be digesting these results to see what next steps could be taken.

Next Steps

The first step is identify and connect with people who have developed newsgames, or have an interest. The initial gathering point is a newsgame LinkedIn Group. But more ways to connect will come. The goal is to share ideas, lessons and promote work being done by others in the field. Despite the relatively limited number of newsgames deployed so far, many of the folks at the brainstorming session were still surprised to learn about various newsgames that were built but that they hadn’t heard about previously.

From there, folks will try to identify other journalists or people in the newsroom who do play games of some sort. The hope is that this group will begin to ask a simple question when a news story is being discussed: Is there a game we could create that would help us explain this better?

After following this conversation for many months, I've come to believe that over the next decade gamification will profoundly reshape the way we experience the web, to the same degree that social media and networks redefined the web last decade. To that end, I've been thinking in the broadest terms what that could and should mean for how we can reinvent digital news.

To carry this thinking forward, I'm announcing the launch of a new project: NewstopiaVille. The goal is to explore how game mechanics can be applied to reinvent the way we produce, consume and interact with news. My hope is that by thinking as ambitiously as possible about this idea, I can accomplish two things.

First, I want to get the concept of gamification on the radar on every news organization so that it becomes a central part of their discussions as they continue to push into digital media.

Second, I want to build a prototype of a fully gamified news experience. There won't be a single solution that makes sense for every news organization. But I'm hoping to demonstrate the possibilities to inspire others to pursue their own concepts in this area.

To be clear, all I have at this point is what I think is a big idea. I don't have any funding. I don't have a demo. And I don't stand here pretending to be an expert in the realm of videogames. In fact, until fairly recently, I wouldn't have even thought of myself as a gamer. That has changed as my own kids have plunged into videogames, bringing me along with them.

Let me start by elaborating on what I see happening with gamification.

About Gamification

Even if the term is new to you, the elements are probably not. Gamification suggests features like leaderboards, progress bars, rewards, badges, and virtual goods. Now that we live in a time where the majority of people play videogames of some kind, often many hours each week, it's fair to say that these kind of features have become widely familiar.

What has begun to change in the past year or so is the growing push to take these common elements out of the videogame experience and incorporate them into sites across the web. That's been driven in no small part by the explosive success of social games like FarmVille by Zynga. But it's also being pushed by a generation of developers raised on videogames, which have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment.

While it's easy to dismiss some of these games as trivial, in fact, they succeed because they take sophisticated approaches to tapping into fundamental human psychology. Developers use those lessons to build experiences that deliberately guide people to perform tasks and behave in specific ways.

Gamification represents a powerful intersection between videogames and social networking. Developers have seen the deep level of engagement these games create. And they have witnessed how games built around cooperative, non-competitive structures have gained a mass appeal.

That has led to a growing number of developers asking, "If I can get someone to spend hours harvesting virtual crops and feeding digital sheep, is there a way to take those same dynamics and get people to do something even more meaningful?"

Virtual Goods

Though not a gamer, I got started on this line of thinking about a year ago with the subject of virtual goods. I was staggered that people were willing to spend billions of dollars on virtual goods. In fact, I wrote about this idea last year when I asked, "Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online?"

The reason had to do with the emotional context around those goods. But while I felt news organizations should be thinking about virtual goods, I realized that this was too limiting in isolation. The power of virtual goods comes in the context of an experience. I needed to think more broadly, and that led me into conversations about gamification.

The trap one can fall into is with gamification is to break it down into various tools and try to use a grab-bag approach. Stick a leaderboard here, a few badges there, and believe you've "gamified" your website. But used in that way, these tools will have minimal effect.

The reasons the best videogames succeed is because they offer an all-encompassing experience. They leave players with a profound sense of happiness by allowing them to accomplish a series of goals. And they tap into a central desire to do something with meaning, to be a part of something larger than yourself when you team up with others to accomplish shared goals.

Think about that: A desire to be part of something bigger, and to do tasks that are meaningful. Those are core, shared values that motivate the very best journalists I've known in the most successful newsrooms.

The concept of game mechanics is not entirely new in the context of news. I can recall several years ago talking to news executives who were fascinated with Digg and wanted to understand how game theory could help them. The problem comes with focusing too narrowly on the tools, like Digg's leaderboard. To really leverage the potential of gamification, it has to be central to the entire structure of the news experience.

CityVille Lessons

In that regard, I can imagine any number of areas where game mechanics might address some of the most important and challenging questions facing news organizations:

• How do we improve commenting?
• How do we get more people to participate in creation and processing of news and information?
• How do we think differently about monetization?

Let me just give one example related to the last question. In recent weeks, I've been playing CityVille, the latest game from Zynga. The goal is to construct a city by accomplishing a series of tasks, like harvesting crops to supply stores, which then earn you coins. It's free to play and each time you begin, you have a set amount of energy that allows you to accomplish about 30 tasks. Once you run out of energy, you have a few choices.

First, you can take a break and come back later when your energy builds back up.

Second, you can ask your friends in the game to send you free gifts of energy that allow you to keep playing. This rewards you for being super social, and building up a big network of friends that you've helped accomplish other tasks.

Third, you can spend real money to purchase energy. You can do this by buying Facebook credits, or "buying" CityVille cash which you can then spend in the game to buy energy. The money and the credits are not one-to-one. So $2 of real money gets you $15 of CityVille money. This is an important psychological break that makes people feel like this is a trivial expense to feed their desire to keep playing.

Applying It to News

Think about how that could work at a news site that uses some kind of metered revenue model. Someone who is a free member gets to do 30 things: Read an article, post a comment, contribute to a news task. When they run out of credits, they could ask their network for more credits. Or, they could buy some more.

The ability to induce someone to do this would rest on the success of the larger experience a gamified site has created.

Let me also pause here to make another distinction. I consider this project to be distinct from the idea of "newsgames." While there are certainly similar dynamics, I think of them as complimentary.

For me, newsgames represent a way to reinvent storytelling. It is a contained object. (Here's a broader history of newsgames.)

Gamification is about bringing game mechanics to the entire platform and experience of news and information.

These two concepts certainly can and should fit together. I've thought about this relationship as I've watched my son play his favorite online game, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures. In the game, a player creates an avatar, usually a Jedi, who wanders around the virtual world. At times, he enters various rooms where he plays more specific games, such as a snow speeder chase.

Gamification would be about shaping the entire news experience for someone. At times, as they move around that gamified news platform, perhaps there would be rooms or spaces where they enter to play more specific newsgames. That would be one of many tasks that might allow them to earn rewards, or build their reputation or earn experience points.

Getting Started

But the question, then, is where to start? As I said before, it would be a mistake to begin by focusing on the various tools, the technology, or the protocols. Figuring out which of these to use would be something that would come at the end of the design process, not at the start.

Where I want to start is by asking the larger questions that I think are critical to the success of any game: What is the goal? What is the mission? What is the experience we want people to have?

From there comes a longer list of questions about what exactly we want people to do. What are their motivations? How do we reward them? How do we keep them moving through the game? What are the levels and rewards?

Next Steps

My next step: In the coming months, I'm going to accelerate my personal research and interviewing in this area. This coming week, I'll be attending the first ever Gamification Summit in San Francisco, and next month I'll be at the Game Developer's Conference.

I'll be blogging along the way at NewstopiaVille.com to share my thoughts and to hopefully get lots of feedback. Most importantly, by making this a public discussion, I'm hoping this will bring folks forward who want to take these ideas further.

In a few months, I'll try to gather these folks together for a more focused discussion. I'm thinking this might take the form of a meetup/bar camp/or hackathon. The goal being to produce something tangible that can test some of the ideas that have been formulated, and to figure out what resources would be needed to create a real prototype or demo.

As I said, I don't pretend to have all the answers. Just a serious curiosity driven by the belief that I think this is potentially a really big idea.

If you agree, then I hope you'll help me.

On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it's greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers' actions, the exact opposite is true.

I've been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People are expected to spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods this year in the U.S. alone. The emergence of this market, I think, is one of the most important business trends on the web. In Silicon Valley, it's reshaping assumptions about online business models. As the focus on ad-driven models loses favor, the virtual goods market is generating a lot of interest.

Lessons for the News Business?

Does the rise of the virtual goods economy have any lessons for the business of news and information? I think so, but I'm not sure exactly what they are. And that's why I'm writing this post. I want to share some of my thinking about virtual goods and news. I'm throwing it out there in hopes of sparking a discussion, or catching the eye of some entrepreneurs (or future News Challenge applicants?) who might take this a step further.

The phenomenon of virtual goods confounded and fascinated me for a long time. I couldn't get past the absurdity of spending money on such trivial things. And part of me was in denial that so many people were doing it.

My thinking began to shift when I visited the folks at Second Life last fall. It's a company that had been written off by many, but which is in fact still growing and is profitable. Rather than rely on advertising, the "in-world" economy revolves around the buying and selling of virtual goods. This revenue stream has continued to grow and enabled Linden Lab, which created Second Life, to do just fine during the economic downturn.

Consider, also, the success of Zynga, the social gaming company that created mega-hits Farmville and Mafia Wars for the Facebook platform and other social networks. From nowhere, Zynga has grown to 750 employees in just 2.5 years, and has 300 job openings. That means it's almost as large as Facebook, which has 1,100 employees. One of Zynga's prime sources of revenue is virtual goods.

Or check out this interview that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington did with the founder of Slide, Max Levchin. In this chat, Levchin explained how Slide, which makes many of the most popular widgets on Facebook, has moved from an ad-based business model to one built around virtual goods:

Levchin discusses the "shift from advertising to virtual goods" and reveals that most of Slide's revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads.

The True Value of Virtual Goods

The person who helped me begin to get my head around this was Susan Wu, a virtual goods pioneer and former venture capitalist who has started an online gaming company called Ohai. Here's what she understood early on about the value of virtual goods: In the real world, we have all sorts of intangible interactions, from shaking hands to smiling to offering blessings. The value of virtual goods is not about the object, but rather its ability to express an emotion or feeling in a way that has value.

"Sending someone a virtual beer is not about the beer," Wu told me. "It's a way to show, 'I have an affection for you.' It's the same reason people have bought bouquets or other ostentatious gifts -- to demonstrate a feeling."

She pointed me to a post, "Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model," she wrote for TechCrunch outlining her vision of virtual goods. That was published in 2007. It's a good starting point if you want to dig into this topic.

Applying it to News

I've been trying to apply this framework to news. I think it provides an interesting, and different way, of thinking about where the true value lies: Not in the thing itself, but in something adjacent to the thing, some feeling you have about it, or something you can do with it in terms of expressing yourself.

Is there a feeling or emotion or something around consuming or sharing news that possibly has some value that can be captured and expressed?

Are there virtual goods that news organizations could create that would entice people to spend some money?

And are there models in social gaming that provide structural lessons for news organizations of all shapes and sizes that would demonstrate better and more powerful ways to harness the power of social networks?

I think the answer to all of these questions is, "Yes." But that said, I don't really know. It's still a considered hunch at this point.

I do think this convinces me that, in terms of business models on the web, we are still in early days. There's been a lot written here, and elsewhere, that the search for business models is futile. I would agree that there is no single revenue stream that will ever replace the classified, ad-based model. I think most news organizations that are sustainable will have to be built on a vast array of revenue streams.

I'm wondering if virtual goods is one of them. What do you think? Do virtual goods have anything to teach us about the economic value of news and information?

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.