This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and Arizona State University journalism students Chris Cameron, Adriane Goetz, Travis Grabow, Chrystall Kanyuck, Bailey MOsier, Elizabeth Shell and Evan Wyloge. We chose, for this experiment, last week's Phoenix "First Friday Art Walk" -- a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number of galleries and craft-oriented shops.

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

The G1s are the first in a line of what Google hopes will be lots of devices using the Android operating system, which is considerably more open than Apple's iPhone and has, in my view, roughly equal potential. The G1s contain, among many other capabilities, digital cameras and GPS (global satellite positioning  radios that tell location within a few meters).

Each of us shot a dozen or so pictures at various places along the Art Walk streets. After snapping each picture, we sent it by email to a special address at Flickr, using the name of the gallery or other location as the subject line and adding some body text to describe what we were looking at.

Embedded in the JPEG photo files created by the G1s is a critically valuable bunch of zeroes and ones: the location as determined by the GPS. Flickr reads that location data as it imports the picture files, and then places the images autormatically on a map.

In other words, the map was being created in real time, as we walked the streets and snapped the photos.

Now, this is not a new idea by any means. And we could have done a much better display of the pictures with a bit more time; Flickr's mapping display to the general public is very crude compared with what it could do (the image above, much better than the one you'll see if you click this public link, is available to the account holder of the map, but not to other people) Moreover, sending pictures via email was a crude way to handle the images; there are applications for the iPhone and Nokia's GPS-equipped phones that upload to Flickr much more efficiently than anything written so far for the G1.

Still, it was trivially simple to set this up and make it work, using tools that already exist and are, for the most part, easy to use. We'll be doing much more with the G1s over time (including, I hope, creating applications that more fully explore the devices' potential).

The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags.

We're planning to open up this page to others in the Phoenix community, so that over time people create a rich photo set of First Friday. We'll help people sort by dates, not just location, so that we can see how the monthly event changes over time, too.

We are planning a series of other experiments with these phones (and others), and would be grateful for ideas on how we might take best advantage of these incredible devices. Our goal is simple: testing ideas that will help create valuable community information resources and services.

Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar bragging rights; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there's no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student's future.

Even if McNeil overstated the case, however, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs' traditional reason for being is increasingly murky.

Our raison d'etre is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead -- if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I'm teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn't nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers -- by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I'm a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they're important.)

The principles underpin everything I believe about modern media consumption in general -- entertainment being the major exception -- and journalism in particular. Especially for the creators of media, they add up to being honorable.

If the principles are the foundation, the practices and tactics are an evolving superstructure. Journalism education needs to deal with both.

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

Still, the experiments are growing in number, in scope and in potential. What's more, they're involving not just newcomers to the journalism education ranks, but faculty members who've been on the job for some time. The News21 Initiative, funded by two major foundations, is an example. We're working on entrepreneurship as a core mission, and so is Jeff Jarvis at City University of New York, among others. Rich Gordon at Northwestern University's Medill School is helping computer science students understand the value of journalism, and how they can help create tomorrow's version. And so on.

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We're not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data -- some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant -- has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York's Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won't go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I'd like to see in journalism education, but it's a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I'd start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

I'd also direct the alumni relations director to find out who attended the journalism program and then went onto great things in non-journalistic fields. To the extent that McNeil is correct about our offering such a useful program for students of all kinds, surely we'll find plenty of accomplished graduates in other professions and crafts. Take a look at the Cronkite School's "Alumni Hall of Fame" -- a listing, begun in 1993, largely comprised of former students who are now employed by traditional media organizations. They are all worthy honorees. Sixteen years from now, I hope, this list will offer a much broader cross-section of affiliations.

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:

• Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
• Create a program for people in the community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education -- not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
  
• Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
• Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they'd be better off for the exercise.
  
• Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven't yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles -- not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.
  

Community efforts would, of course, include training of citizen journalists to understand and apply the principles and best practices, and helping new entrants in local media find business models. Sometimes the business models will be for-profit; others will be not-for-profit.

That will likely mean partnering with other parts of campuses -- business schools, engineering/computer science, design and more -- to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media. Ambitious? Sure, but imagine what we could all accomplish.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they've had in the past. We're not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don't, someone else will.

(Many of the projects cited are funded, wholly or in part, by the Knight Foundation, funder of this blog and the work of people who are making these postings.)

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right," Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. "And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information -- even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, "a cesspool" of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

The piece drew plenty of other attention from journalists and industry watchers including an interesting question from the Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachary M. Seward, who wondered how much it would cost "to sustain every American newspaper in perpetuity as non-profit organizations" -- and, after consulting with Alan Mutter came up with a guesstimate of $114 billion. Cough.

This is to save only the editorial staff, mind you. Journalists have an unfortunate habit of forgetting that other people also work in their organizations; and the logic here is that what we want to preserve is the jobs of the journalists who report the news -- never mind that the people who still buy newspapers don't do so entirely because of what fills the news columns, but also to see the ads and non-news features.

Seward reasonably points out that we'd be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

We're unquestionably losing something important as the newspaper business model implodes. As a shareholder in three of those companies I'm unhappy about it, but I'm also not going to suggest that I blindly invested. Over the years I've made much, much more on my newspaper shares than I would lose now even if all of them (not a chance) were to fail tomorrow.

But we're already seeing some models for the future emerge. One, just one, is nonprofit.

The idea that philanthropists should get into the community information business is not new, nor bad. It's come up a number of times, most recently with the Knight Foundation's funding support, along with community foundations, of local initiatives.

And not-for-profit media is hardly new. PBS, NPR and many other organizations don't aim to make profits. But nonprofits are enterprises, too. They require business models as much as any for-profit enterprise.

Nonprofits generally exist, meanwhile, to ameliorate failures in the for-profit marketplace. Markets do fail, and they do so frequently. (I'm not talking here about the financial meltdown we're experiencing, which is all about society's failures in a much wider way.) Bill Gates' worthy philanthropic efforts to rid the planet of diseases that aren't profitable for the medical industry speaks specifically to this issue, as do countless other such enterprises.

The market failure most notable in the newspaper business of the past half-century was felt not by the journalists but by the buyers and sellers of products and services in communities. This was due to newspapers' monopoly status, leading them to extract outrageously high profits from advertisers who essentially had no alternatives. Ask anyone who used the classifieds before eBay and craigslist and other better, cheaper competition came along -- they'll tell you what a failed marketplace looks like.

That era was good for the editorial staffs, which enjoyed long-term, stable employment and, in many cases, some distance from advertiser influence over the contents of the news pages. However excellent the journalists were, however -- and many were truly superb -- this was not a climate that bred risk-taking and innovation beyond imagining how to be better reporters. Improving the journalism was a great thing; but becoming conservative in other ways was not.

We're seeing an explosion of innovation now. Some of it is coming from inside news organizations. But the majority is, from my perspective, coming from outside, from people inventing or adapting business models as well as journalism and information techniques.

Do we need funding sources for these new and adaptive projects? You bet. Some has already been committed or is in the pipeline now. It's not enough, but it's a start.

I'll wager, with little fear of losing, that a great deal of the community information we'll get in a few years will come from for-profit sources. But that will still leave vast territories for two other models: volunteers and nonprofits. Sometimes these will overlap.

The most essential role for nonprofits is almost certainly going to be in addressing the new market failure. This is the category I call "eat your spinach journalism," the reporting that we all agree we need but which requires money and time to do. Certain kinds of investigations and watchdog reporting, including such basics as keeping an eye on what the City Council and local/state agencies are up to, may not support for-profit ventures, and we'll desperately need other sources of funding for those.

That the New York Times used its valuable op-ed space to showcase such shallow thinking by the Yale financial guys is depressing. At least their essay sparked some conversation. But please, let's move onto realistic possibilities.

Entries for journalism awards must be based
on material coming from a text-based United
States newspaper or news organization that
publishes--in print or online--at least
weekly during the calendar year; that is
primarily dedicated to original news
reporting and coverage of ongoing stories;
and that adheres to the highest journalistic
principles. Printed magazines and
broadcast media, and their respective Web
sites, are not eligible.

But let's also recognize that these new rules don't begin to address the more fundamental issues about how journalism is changing. Excluding text-based journalism by magazines and broadcast media, for example, is illogical.

The release of the new rules -- which are bound to evolve -- frees me from an agreement of confidentiality I made earlier this year when asked by the Pulitzer Prize Board to answer some questions and offer my own suggestions about how the prizes should recognize changes in technology and journalistic practices. Here is what I (presumably among many others the board consulted) suggested:

You asked me to think broadly about the prizes, and asked five questions. Before I respond to each of them directly, let me offer a few general thoughts. None of these will surprise you, but they add up to a challenge unlike any the Pulitzer board has faced in the past.

First, is the central issue: convergence. Media of all kinds are becoming digital. Moreover, media availability and distribution are moving onto networks where the data is broken up into little packets at the source and reassembled at the other end.

Second, the blurring of media forms is accelerating. It will be impossible in the relatively near future to distinguish among them.

Third, the business model for newspapers is failing. It's not just about the movement of advertising to better online ad operations. It's also the surging price of doing business as a manufacturing operation, including energy costs.

Under the current rules, these facts are a recipe for making the Pulitzers irrelevant, or at best quaint. I would hate to see that happen, because the Pulitzer Prizes matter. They are a touchstone of excellence. Like many others in the field, I believe they're flawed in their current incarnation, but I would hate to see them become an artifact.

My bullet-point advice (assumes the board's ability to interpret the bylaws in the broadest possible way):

1. Embrace reality. This will only seem radical to newspaper people.

2. Celebrate great journalism wherever it comes from. This includes digital-only, and probably should include English-language reporting that didn't originate in the United States.

3. Create new categories that reflect the way we create and consume media over the long term.

Now to your questions:

Q: In creating the Prizes, Joseph Pulitzer wanted to "elevate" the profession of journalism. In his era, better journalism meant better newspapers. How could we further his goal today, given the makeup of news media and their challenges?

A: Become the top prizes for journalism of any kind. Do away entirely with the distinction between newspapers and other media. There's no real alternative.

Q: Should the nature of the "newspaper" be redefined as multimedia journalism grows and practices change? If so, how? For example, should we include entirely online newspapers? And what should we do with things like videography and its impact on visual journalism?

A: You can't define your way out of this dilemma, except in one sense. You can define what you mean by great journalism, and what you mean by elevating the craft. Beyond that, everything should be fair game.

Q: Should we re-examine and possibly revise the Prizes' journalism categories? If so, how? For example, should we have a separate category for large multimedia packages? Should we reconsider the idea of circulation size as a basis for category definition - at least in some cases?

A: I'd revise the categories in some fairly dramatic ways, but I would not make separate categories for media formats for the reasons I mentioned above.

I would, however, add several areas where the Pulitzers could elevate journalism in a big way. Here are just three:

1. The digital space has many characteristics, but one is that the journalism we create doesn't disappear into birdcages or pay-per-view databases. Stories and projects can accrete influence, and be timely long beyond the traditional periods. This is especially important when we recognize that the manufacturing process of journalism -- create something and send it out, period -- becomes obsolete in due course. Some ideas that take this into account:
a. We'd all benefit from a prize celebrating relentless journalism over time that led to long-term solutions of big problems; this would require a rule change to look back more than 12 months.
b. Along those lines, why not recognize reporting that was ahead of its time? Whenever a major national or international crisis becomes obvious, such as the current credit and housing meltdowns, we can always look back and find examples of prescient journalism that was essentially ignored at the time. If you made that single addition to the prizes, you'd be making a huge advance.
c. And what about journalism that has evolved. I'm working on a book that will live and evolve mostly online, and I guarantee it'll be vastly better in five years than it will be the day it's officially published for the first time. I can show you things that have been updated over time, and which now are as good as journalism can be, even though they were, early on, shadows of what they've become.

2. I'd also find ways to recognize more of the finest work by small entities that do brilliant coverage of small communities of geography or interest. Beat reporting doesn't fully cover what I'm talking about here, but it's the closest you have now. (I'm not talking about separate prizes for big and little organizations, however.)

3. I'd create a prize for innovation in journalism, recognizing an advance by someone who used the collision of media and technology to create something new and valuable to the craft.

Put all of this out for public comment, by the way. You'll be amazed at the great ideas others will have.

Q: Should we re-evaluate the kind of journalism we honor and the entries we encourage? For example, do we sometimes foster journalism projects and packages that lack relevance to everyday lives?

A: Of course you do, but that's the nature of giving prizes. I don't have a great antidote for the bigness impulse. I would try to tweak the rules and judging to favor things that genuinely lead to a better world. I don't have any obvious ways to achieve this, of course...

Q: Should the Board itself be changed? Should we alter the mix of journalists and academics? Should we expand the Board's total size? (The Board now has 17 voting members, four of whom can be non-journalists. The dean of the journalism school and the Pulitzer administrator are non-voting members of the Board.)

A: Yes change the board, in significant ways if you adopt any of the ideas I've suggested. (It seems large enough now.) The current board members are superb representatives of the 20th Century, manufactured-newspaper model of journalism, and people of that stature and accomplishment should remain part of the mix. But I'd include some very different kinds of folks, who may have a wider vision of the craft.

(Cross posted from citmedia.org)

This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I'd be out there rustling up readers for it, because that's what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) -- but that's true of everything. Writing headlines is, after all, another form of the art of rustling up readers. It can be done with style and flair; it can be done crudely and effectively; it can be done clumsily and stupidly. But it must be done. There is no alternative.

Here are the thoughts I shared with him in full (edited to remove redundancy now that I've added links to previous postings).

Q: When you worked in newspapers, especially at a larger metro with a mobile staff like the Mercury-News, did you feel that reporters and editors were well-connected to the communities that they covered -- engaged in the community and in conversations with citizens that led back to better news coverage. If not, how did journalism suffer?

A: It's hard to speak for others. But my impression was that we were fairly well connected to the tech and local government folks, and less so to others. There were obvious exceptions, including several local columnists.

For me, the conversation started quickly. I was writing about technology in a place where a lot of it was being invented and improved, and everyone I covered had email early on. The readers were not shy about telling me what I was missing or getting wrong. That was when I realized (duh) that they collectively knew vastly, vastly more than I did -- and what a great opportunity I had as a result.

When I started a blog in 1999, I started hearing from even more folks. Tech was and is more than ever a community of interest, not just geography, and I was learning things from a global audience by that point. I can't overstate how much the blog was valuable in expanding and deepening the conversation.

None of that was to the exclusion of standard reporting, such as picking up the phone and going to see people in person. I got some of my best stuff over lunch tables in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Francisco, and in hallways at conferences.

But count me in as a huge believer in the value of online tools to deepen ties especially with communities, local and global.

Q: What did you learn with Bayosphere and in researching your book about the walls between journalists and citizens in their communities? Do you have concrete suggestions for breaking down those walls? Should their be limits on what types of activities a journalist should take part in -- i.e., political activity (some journalists like Len Downie don't vote, as you probably know)?

A: If we're talking about breaking down walls between traditional journalists and communities, we're actually making some progress. Whether it's too late to matter is a separate issue, but it plainly won't hurt.

As I've suggested before, newspapers in particular can have a huge leg up on doing this, and have more options. But broadcasters can do some of these things, too.

The first thing, whether you're a newspaper editor or broadcast news director, is this simple test: Go to Flickr, Technorati and YouTube and search on your community name. You will find a parallel universe of media, being created by people in your community for themselves and each other. Then see what's happening on Facebook and MySpace and other social networks. And see what old-fashioned (!) email lists, such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, are covering hyper-local topics. (Our old Palo Also neighborhood, consisting of several hundred homes, had a mail list where people regularly broke news of interest there, news that would never have risen to the attention of the Palo Alto paper, much less the Mercury News or Chronicle.)

Second, stop pretending your organization is an oracle. It's not. You don't know everything, and even if you did you couldn't publish or broadcast as much as you'd like to. Pointing to outside sources of information -- especially local blogs and other media -- is a great start. It doesn't mean that you endorse what these folks are saying or vouch for it, but it does mean that you recognize that others in your community are creating media with at least some information other people might want to see. Be the portal to everything. Point widely beyond the portal on individual stories and topics, and not just to source material, which more and more organizations are finally doing. Point to your competitors' best stories when they beat you on something local. (I routinely did this on my blog, pointing to the SF Chronicle, NY Times, WSJ, trade journals and other tech outlets, because it was what my readers expected. I sent them away to the best stuff I could find, and they kept coming back because they knew I'd do that.)

Third, make sure your audience can respond and, in many cases, join the journalistic process. Comments are only a start. Moderation is a fine idea, but use a light touch. My rule for conduct is simple: We'll be civil. We can disagree sharply, but we will treat each other with respect. Beyond comments, do what more and more organizations are (belately) doing: Ask the audience for information that can lead to better journalism. But if you're turning people into unpaid freelancers, don't be surprised when they start posting what they know on their own sites, not yours.

Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.

First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities' histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it -- as they would all the time -- as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I'm absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties. (Note: I discussed this in much greater length in 2005 in this posting, "Newspapers: Open Your Archives".)

Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it's already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can't set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful. (More on this in another 2005 posting, "Where Newspapers Can Start the Conversation".)

BTW, one word for the notion of journalists not voting: ridiculous.

Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs.org domain.

The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would guess by typing it into the browser, such as ford.com or dowjones.com or other such domains.

But that's not the same as saying you can't find a good name, because you almost certainly can. (And even if it's not instantly guessable, modern search engines will soon find it if what you're doing has any value. The Idea Lab URL -- already in the top five items in a Google search on "Idea Lab" -- demonstrates that point.)

I've worked on a bunch of new projects in recent years. Each time, we've had little or no trouble finding a useful domain name. In almost every case, the name was available for sale from one of the many registrars that are in this business; domain registrars charge different prices for this service but . On several occasions when someone else did own the name, we were able to buy it for an affordable amount.

We encountered the domain issue in creating a website for our new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. Should we just put it under the Arizona State University hierarchy, such as asu.edu/kcdme (which does not exist)? Or should we find a unique domain name that more reflected the center's basic idea and mission? The latter made more sense.

But what name? I asked my students to help find one, with the single proviso that I was leaning toward a .org domain, reflecting the not-for-profit reality of the center and its university parent. I suggested they use several Web-based tools for the purpose, including:

• MakeWords is a "name generator" -- essentially, you plug in keywords and it gives you suggestions. The flexibility is impressive. You can tell it how the domain name should start or end, and you can get refinements from a long list of keyword themes, as well as affixes by theme. For example, I searched on "California" and refined it with a "travel" theme, and got a list or allegedly available names that included farescalifornia.com, flightcalifornia.com, getawayscalifornia.com and tripscalifornia.com.

• NameBoy is another generator. In my experience it's simpler to use, but much less nuanced. You type in a primary and (optional) secondary word, and it spits out results. None, in the example above, looked very interesting.

Like MakeWords, NameBoy's results of available domains should be treated as possibilities, not definitely open names. You always have to check with a registrar to find out if a domain is actually available or not; sometimes these sites say something is open for the taking when it isn't.

My students and I came up with a bunch of interesting domain possibilities for the Knight Center. They included mediadevelopment.org, newmediadevelopment.org, smartmedia.org, digitalstartup.org, mediyum.org, digitalfuture.org, startupmedia.org and many, many more.

In the end, we picked startupmedia.org, which we all thought captured our purpose and, happily, had several meanings. Most happily, it was available, and I grabbed it.

Which leads to a final issue, and an area of caution in this process: If you're looking for a good domain name and check to see if it's already registered, be prepared to jump if you find it's available. I've seen believable suggestions that some registrars engage in a practice called "front-running," in which they grab domains themselves after people check availability, or that hackers have somehow interjected themselves into the search process to do the same thing.

A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth.

But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including journalism, entertainment and PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero.

This is one reason that communications of all kinds are being disrupted for business, in both methods and models. Traditional media-related enterprises, including journalism and advertising, are feeling the effects earlier than most, but everyone is vulnerable.

Still, one person's vulnerability - in a world of low-cost experimentation - is another's opportunity.

Clay Shirky, a New York University scholar and writer, points out that a person holding a good idea "doesn't have to convince anyone else to let them try it - there are few institutional barriers between thought and action." (Do not miss Clay's new book, Here Comes Everybody -- by far the best recent book explaining how the Net's collaborative potential is coming true.)

As a result, the research and development that the news industry should have done years ago is now being done in a highly distributed way. While some is being done by people inside media companies, most is not - and increasingly it won't be. It will take place in universities, in corporate labs, in garages, at kitchen tables.

So while the old career ladders are disappearing, there may never have been a better time to become an entrepreneur in media. But there has also never been a greater need to instill entrepreneurial thinking in the next generation of media people.

This is one reason why I've just embarked on a new project, creating and running a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Our goals are simple: to help students understand the value of intelligent risk-taking; and to help them create new kinds of products and services in the media sphere. (I have two PR majors in our initial class. I'm glad, because the PR business has just as much a need to think entrepreneurially as any other.)

Much of what's happening, happily, is made to order for the university environment. Universities provide time to think, research, build and iterate, and to do this with others who are on the same mission.

At the same time, semesters have start times and end times. The students also have other work to do besides our course and independent study projects. Entrepreneurship is about many things -and focus is one.

In the end, most of these projects will "fail" - fail, that is, in the traditional sense of the word. This is just like the real world of startups.

But the people who work on them will learn enormously valuable lessons. They will find themselves becoming more valuable to future employers - and they will understand even better the virtues to be found in taking intelligent risks. Maybe there are lessons here for businesses, too.