What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with.

If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you should (download the podcast) because it's probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard. I listened to it on a long car trip when everyone else was sleeping. Going in to the program, I didn't understand the mortgage mess at all: mortgage backed securities were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old respected firms?

Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam, why it happened, and to whom. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts and different levels, with no heroes. And the villains were mostly abstractions!

Typical of the program's virtues is the title. It's called The Giant Pool of Money because that is where the producers want your understanding to start. They insist.

Lots of people have noted how effective the program was. Adam Davidson told NPR's ombudsman, "By a very long margin, this is the most positive response I've ever seen to any story I've worked on." I knew there would be fans of this episode listening, so I asked the people in my Twitter feed what made it different and "explainey" to them.

• Mike Plugh: Compression of time and space, like in a classic movie, "a broad network of characters into a few representative types."

• Liza Sabater "Because when Richard finds out the bank lied about his monthly income, it sums up how the loans were just a scam."

• Denise Covert: "Because it used small words. Because it still used big words for those of us who could grasp them."

• Scott Karp: No demonizing. Instead, "why it seemed like a good idea at the time... What were they thinking when they were doing all this? And why did they think it would work?"

• Howard Sherman: It met the ultimate explanatory test. "I could actually explain the mortgage debacle to someone else." He calls it viral: you can pass the explanatory gains on. "It also made me really angry. Their incredulity was contagious."

• "You can almost lust, with the characters, after the money that the idiots have left available." Oh, sorry... that was me, talking on Twitter.

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to "The Giant Pool of Money." I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. Previously I had skipped over such reports because I just didn't understand the story. Now I did. 'Twas was a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information. Before that moment I had ignored hundreds of news reports about Americans losing their homes, the housing market crashing, banks in trouble.

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most "basic" acts are reporting today's news and providing other current information, as with prices, weather reports and scores. We think of "analysis," "interpretation," and also "explanation" as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior accounts.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and note it. (""Subprime lenders in trouble. Must keep an eye on that.") Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye out. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is up) I might then turn to an "analysis" piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps the work of an economics columnist. I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That's the way it works... right?

But there are certain very important stories--and the mortgage crisis is a good example--where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of them because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I've picked up a blinking red light from the news system's repeated placement of "subprime" items in front of me.

And on top of that, if I decide to buckle down and really pay attention to "subprime loans go bad" news--including the analysis pieces and the economics columnist--I am likely to feel even more frustrated because the missing master narrative prevents these efforts from making much of a difference. The columnist who says he is going to explain it to me typically assumes too much knowledge ("mortgage-backed securities?") or has too little space to actually do that, or is bored with the elementary task of explanation and prefers that more sophisticated interpretations of the latest developments appear under his byline. Or maybe, as with this story, the very people paid to understand the story barely know how to explain it. That's the opening theme of this column from The New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, "Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club."

I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, "Can you try to explain this to me?" When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: "Can you try again?"

And he does give it his best shot. I remember reading this column at the time and feeling grateful that someone at least tried. (He got about a third of the way there.) But Leonhardt's column wasn't displayed or classified in the right way. It should have been a tool in the sidebar of every news story the Times did about the mortgage mess. Instead it was added to the content flow, like this: news, news, news, news, "analysis," news, news, news, "interpretation piece," news, news, news, news, "Leonhardt: explain this to me," news, news, news...

That's messed up. That's dysfunctional. We have to fix that.

This American Life and its brilliant host, Ira Glass, started with the same feelings I had: ill-informed, overwhelmed, and out of the loop about the "subprime" story. But then they mastered it; and it is that trajectory--from drift to mastery--that the listener takes during "The Giant Pool of Money." In a way the star of the story is understanding itself. It struggles but emerges victorious.

What's basic? If the providers of information aren't providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don't deserve those customers and won't retain them. So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what's this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That's not about web design. That's a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

Shirky, who teaches in a different program at NYU, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody ("The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.") But this speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here-- after reading this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along with Shirky as he explains "the cognitive surplus" we developed during the age of TV.

This a huge deposit of waking hours lived in front of the tube, a vast expanse of free time occupied for 40 years by commercial television. We're at least starting to find the architecture of participation (Tim O'Reilly's phrase) that would turn some of those couch-born hours into sentient activity, followed naturally by inter-activity, as in massive multiplayer games, which can lead to public works and social goods, as with "the online encyclopedia anyone can edit."

Clay's imagery is geological: the release of trapped deposits. He thinks we can reverse the brain sink that commercial television represents for some of the people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn't care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn't afford the costs of usefully interacting with you. I was one of those people--1964 to 1974 were my wasted years of heavy watching-and Clay was one them. We both watched Gilligan's Island. So I took his talk very personally. I would love to have those hours back for something a little more constructive. But where does that love go?

A "cognitive surplus" means the total amount of unoccupied free time available (think of it as "screen hours") after the basic needs of society have been met. Television swallowed up most of the surplus American society produced during the period of relative affluence after World War Two.

Clay figures it took 100 million hours of people around the world writing, checking, editing, gathering, and talking it over (fighting!) to make all versions of Wikipedia. "And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year." Therefor if 99 percent of the TV watching in the US remained as is, and we broke off just one percent for the information commons and other cool stuff we could have 100 Wikipedia-class projects per year.

All you have to do is convince one kid in 100 that participation in media is more fun. That's good news for Idea Lab writers and readers.

What we need are lots and lots of different projects that try to deploy this existing surplus-- and "fail informatively." So the kid in the basement, the developers at the Web 2.0 conference, the Knight Challenge winners and others with new media ambitions should go forward with their best ideas.

Someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

Q. Where do people get the hours to participate?

A. From the de-commercialization of their time!

Q. Yeah, but people like to consume their media. Sometimes they just want to sit there... Right?

A. Of course they do! They also want to produce (sometimes) and share what they made (some of those times). They want to be audience, producer, distributor... at different times. Deal with it or die!

They also expect to operate their media. At least more and more of them do. Clay illustrates this beautifully with a story about a four year-old girl who wanders around behind the DVD player as its playing her show. When her parents ask her what she's doing, she pokes her head out and says, "I'm looking for the mouse."

I heard that and thought: Yes. That's what I've been doing for 20 years or so. Looking for the mouse in American journalism. Many other people have been seeking the same thing in their separate but interrelated domains.

To the really young people any device that ships without a mouse is "broken." It happened a long time ago, of course, but the modern professionalized press, the mainstream journalism we have now shipped without a mouse because it was built for overlay on a broadcast--one to many--system.

"We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience." Dig: Those are the trapped deposits. Watch Shirky explain them... and then get to work!

My favorite moment, because it was the most personal: Clay's response to the television reporter who asked... "where do people find the time?"

At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, "Well, that's all very nice, very Web 2.0, but where's the business model, people?" As if that were some kind of contribution. I can't tell you how disconcerting-and weird-I find some of these performances.

As Web journalist Scott Rosenberg observed: "Those guys have been doing that as long as the Web has been around -- pointing this lack of prospective revenues out as if it were not their problem but someone else's." Last month it happened again. I was at a conference on the future of the Internet at Stanford and a big name journalist, well known to all the participants, took note of the economic crisis in newspaper journalism and pleaded with us: ""Society should be worried about this!"

Well, a free society should in fact be worried, but not about the fate of a particular industry, like "daily newspaper combine with department store ads and classifieds all locked up..." This was just a stopping point in the much longer and more important march across the centuries by the press itself, and certain forms of journalism it has learned to practice for public benefit. Clay Shirky said this in the Britannica forum:

What's worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century... It's time to get on with the essential task of trying everything we can think of to create effective new models of reporting, ones that take the existing capabilities of the Internet for granted.

A free press trying to inform the people and kindle public discussion, a notion that comes into the world in the first half of the eighteenth century, that is born at the same time as "public opinion" itself, to which it is intimately related, carried on by wave after wave of innovation and commercial expresssion, secured through political struggle by people who wanted to live in a country with a free press... we need to keep that idea strong and alive. And of course that means to embody it in institutions and practices widely adopted.

But we should also realize that these institutions are only adaptations to the media environment of the times. Hence: Media Shift. Lisa Williams had it exactly right, in her elegant essay at Idea Lab: journalism will survive the death of its institutions. The key lines come when she's comparing what journalists are going through to what the tech industry--her world--met with from the late 1980s on...

When our central institutions blew up, people asked many of the same questions I hear among journalists today. Without these institutions, who will fund the mission? How will we attract the talent we need to make the transition? Just as journalism without newspapers seems inconceivable now, it seemed inconceivable to many then that innovation could continue without the might, resources, and sheer heft of the companies that formed the core of the high tech industry. Who would write the next operating system? Create the next generation of microprocessors? Today, journalists ask how democracy will fare in a country without a robust free press. Then, technologists asked how the United States could retain its leadership position without big, powerful computing companies.

When I started my blog, PressThink, it was behind a similar pry-things-apart observation, which I put into the Introduction (Sep. 2003). The press goes on, apart from the rising and falling of media forms:

We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of what technology they use. The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached.

At the Britannica site I point out that rich and powerful people will always get their news. "Traders and emperors, ministers and spies will arrange for their news systems." What's at stake is the fate of our public systems, and the whole idea of having widely available news reports about the life and times of the nation, such that the general public will be informed of what's going on, especially... the voters. I did my dissertation on the history of this idea. ("The Impossible Press" 1986, NYU.) Recently Eric Alterman used it to frame his extended report on the state of the newspaper (and the rise of the Net) for the New Yorker.

Britannica-- the anti-Wikipedia--has its own crowd. In the comments someone using the name "Notebook M," and obviously a writer, floated an idea that is probably more widespread than we at Idea Lab realize: the public doesn't deserve to be informed because it won't pay! In fact there is no "general" public; that's a myth. There are elites who need information and masses who don't, really. If you need it, you pay for it. If you don't want to pay, you get what circulates around, what's "out there" and pushed at you by forces you do not understand.

The masses don't want or need news. They are not primary consumers. They consume in the secondary markets, like Leno and the water cooler. The future of news is in the primary market. What is one copy of the New York Times actually worth to Leno and his writers? A lot. What is one copy of the Wall Street Journal worth to Bill Gates? Same answer. Journalism needs to build a golden fence around itself, with a diamond-studded gate. Only those with hard cash and lots of it get to come in. Information is power and power will pay for information. News people need to become crowned members of an elite whose currency is written on notepads. Shut out the ham-and-eggers. They don't want us. Stop wooing them like some pathetic love-sick stalker. Let them learn to live without information. Let those who buy it make fortunes off the backs of the don't-know-it-alls, who now will have to settle for talking to each other in a great vacuum, after coming home from thankless jobs to tiny apartments and dinners of bland food. We shall lord over those who spurned us and settle in with the rich and knowledgeable. To hell with democracy. Viva the Info-tocracy!

The masses. This is one of the ideas "public opinion" replaced, but the two of them continue to battle for intellectual supremacy. "Let them learn to live without information." This is a counter-revolutionary idea to the rise of the public sphere and the evolution of public news systems. Underneath the commom arguments about business models there may be arguments about who is and is not to be included in the need-to-know class.

What was revolutionary about public opinion in the first place: not the inside players but the general public needed to know how things worked, and, for example, who said what in Parliament. Public opinion could not be avoided; therefore it had to be informed. Don't think that notion can't be uninvented or beaten back. It can.

The press will survive the death of the newspaper and continue its arc across the centuries if the public remains what James W. Carey called the god term of the press.

I said I was trying to recruit at least 12 beat reporters and get their editors on board with a simple proposition...

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

I felt the only way to find out was to try it for a year, with different beats in different locales and different editorial settings. Now I'm back to announce that twelve beat reporters--and their editors, plus the bosses above them--have agreed to do just that. (I'm attempting to wrap up agreements for a few more to join in. If I can do so, they'll be announced after Thanksgiving.)

So here's the first group. It actually totals 13 editorial "shops" because one--the News-Press in Ft. Myers, FL--had a beat all picked out but the reporter suddenly switched careers. Officially signed up and in various stages of readiness are:

Houston Chronicle, with Eric Berger doing a reported blog about science.

Star-Ledger of Newark, with Ed Silverman news blogging on the pharmaceutical industry .

Wired.com, with Eliot Van Buskirk, reporter, beat blogger and columnist on digital music.

Dallas Morning News, with Kent Fischer on the Dallas public schools beat, joined by Tawnell Hobbs

Cincinnati Enquirer, with Keith Reed reporting on Procter & Gamble.

ESPN.com, with Henry Abbott covering NBA basketball, blog-style.

Education Week's Digital Directions, with Michelle Davis on technology in the K-12 classroom.

News-Press of Ft. Myers, Florida, with a statewide child welfare beat by a reporter yet to be named.

San Jose Mercury News with Matt Nauman on energy and "green" tech.

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA with Daniel Victor covering the town of Hershey, PA.

MTV News with Stephen Totilo on video games and their makers.

Chronicle of Higher Education with Brad Wolverton on the business of college sports, nationwide.

Seattle Times with Brier Dudley covering Northwest technology companies.

Scroll down for more detailed explanations of these projects.

You can follow their progress over the coming year at beatblogging.org, the compendium site that is also launching today. David Cohn of NewAssignment.Net will edit it.

Read my earlier post for a more detailed explanation of why I think the social network approach can work-- and some reactions to the idea. As I said there:

This is probably best done on a blogging-style platform at an established news organization that can devote a pro reporter to work with a circle of 'ams' or contributors from outside the newsroom. Thus, beat blogging with a social network is another name for the same idea. Bring knowledge, contacts and interests of many different people from around the beat into the production of news, views and information for the beat, by making use of social networking tools that lower the cost of collaboration and make it viable for dispersed groups to become an editorial force.

The beats will operate independently: thirteen boats steered by reporters and editors in the participating newsrooms. They will decide what course to follow.

My project, NewAssignment.Net (mission: to spark innovation in "open platform" journalism and distributed reporting) will provide the common space where the experiment as a whole can be tracked and progress can be measured. New Assignment will also bring to the project ideas and expertise from outside professional newsrooms. And it's possible that some code will be left behind.

Here are the details on the beats, the reporters and editors involved, and why they think it can work:

• Houston Chronicle (Hearst newspapers.) Beat: Science blog gets a network.

Eric Berger, science writer for the Chronicle and the author of the SciGuy blog wants to involve more scientists and informed lay people in his beat. "The primary platform will be a reegineered version of my SciGuy blog, but I can envision the scientists each having a blog or some Web space for their own area of expertise," he writes. "All of this would be interconnected. The center of gravity of my beat coverage would shift to the Web, and we would develop creative formats for displaying this networked content in the newspaper." (See his "we're in" letter for more.) Supervision by Dwight Silverman, interactive journalism editor (also the Chron's tech blogger) and Sylvia Wood, deputy city editor.

Background: The Chronicle was named top blogging newspaper in the US in a 2006 study by me and my NYU students. They have a very large blogging presence.

• Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ. (Newhouse Newspapers) Beat: Inside the pharmaceutical industry.

Ed Silverman is a pharmaceutical industry reporter with twelve years on the beat for the Star-Ledger. (And a NYU alum.) He is already doing a beat blog--Pharmalot.com--that's quite successful. Big Pharma is a global giant centered in Northern New Jersey, so Silverman's beat is a local story with national and international significance. "Pharmalot already has a loyal, growing and highly engaged audience, and we're excited about finding ways to expand that audience and involve more people in the collection and distribution of news about the industry," says John Hassell, deputy managing editor/online. "A social network built around Ed's reporting fits perfectly with those goals." He and T.J. Foderaro, deputy business editor, will oversee. (Their letter.)

Background: I have had conversations with the Star-Ledger about this approach going back more than a year, since before the launch of Pharmalot. John Hassell met with me at the Networked Journalism Summit and there we sealed the deal.

• Wired.com (Conde Nast.) Beat: Digital Music.

Eliot Van Buskirk covers music technology and is the co-editor of Wired.com's Listening Post blog. He also writes a bi-weekly column. Editor-in-chief Evan Hansen thinks "beatblogging is coming into its own" because it "offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering." Giving beat reporters blogs has "already helped us break news stories that we could not have gotten any other way by letting readers with knowledge find us and inform us." (Hansen's letter.) Wired.com's team is Van Buskirk, Hansen, and culture editor Lewis Wallace, culture editor

Background: Wired.com was a collaborator on NewAssignment.Net's first project, Assignment Zero. The site has gone for beat blogging in a big way-- with results. Twelve blogs focused on beats from gadgetry to gaming to defense technology account for more than a quarter of daily news traffic. According to Hansen, "Unique visitors to WIRED.com have more than tripled in the past year, from about 2 million to nearly 7 million in October, thanks largely to the growth of our blogs."

• Dallas Morning News. (Belo) Beat: Dallas Public School System.

Schools reporter Kent Fischer will take the lead on the project. Tawnell Hobbs, his partner on the Dallas schools beat, will also contribute regularly. Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor for interactive, said "we have been looking for an opportunity to engage our audience in a collaborative reporting experiment." This tuned out to be it. "We plan to build our network around a blog we're creating to expand our coverage of the Dallas Independent School District," writes Kit Lively, education enterprise editor. "As one of the country's largest school systems, with 20,000 employees, 160,000 students, 220 schools, DISD comes with a ready-made community that is intensely interested in the district's workings and, we believe, eager to weigh in on what they see." (See full letter.)

Background: Fischer has covered education for almost 15 years in New Hampshire, Kentucky, Florida and now Texas. He's currently vice president of the National Education Writers Association. Kit Lively has 27 years in journalism, 24 of them covering education.

• Cincinnati Enquirer (Gannett.) Beat: Covering Procter & Gamble.

Keith Reed, staff writer for the Enquirer, is moving to Cincinnati from the Boston Globe to cover Procter & Gamble, a local powerhouse and one of the largest consumer products companies in the world. He's going to build the social network approach in from the start of his beat, and also use the network to introduce himself to Cincinnati. "P & G's reach in this region is broad and deep," writes business editor Carolyn Pione. "Their business hits our economy on many levels, from vendor relationships to shareholders, former employees who are now entrepreneurs, retirees volunteering in the community, spin-off industries and community development organizations." (See letter.) Pione, Reed and new media director Chris Graves make up the Enquirer team.

Background: As part of Gannett's new media push, the Enquirer has also been experimenting with crowdsourcing; this project seemed to fit right in. (See Jeff Howe's piece for Wired.) Reed was a Newspaper Association of America New Media Fellow.

• ESPN.com (Disney.) Beat: NBA basketball, blog-style.

Henry Abbott (another NYU alum) is the author of ESPN.com's TrueHoop blog, which he started in 2005 and sold to ESPN after it became popular. (See this interview for the origins of TrueHoop.) "We're doing a lot of this work already, but haphazardly," he writes. "What you're describing would be a powerful and intelligent system, and we'd like to get there quickly, with the power of some collaborative thinking, rather than inventing the wheel every step of the way. Also, I love the idea of sharing thoughts with other beat writers who are engaged in similar work." Overseeing will be Chris Ramsay, ESPN.com's NBA coordinator and Royce Webb, NBA editor. ("We're in" letter.)

Background: Abbott created a video group at YouTube for TrueHoop readers to showcase their favorite NBA video moments; it has 500 members. He also plans to set up an on-the-ground distributed reporting network in New Orleans when the NBA all-star game comes there next year. "It's a massive undertaking in a broken city," he said. "I don't want to rely on press releases to determine how the event might impact the city (last year's event in Las Vegas featured a fair amount of mayhem). I would love to have smart people on the ground in New Orleans giving us a sense of what New Orleans is like in the lead up to the event and during."

• Education Week's Digital Directions (Editorial Projects in Education Inc.) Beat: Technology in the classroom.

Education Week is a specialty site covering the K-12 landscape for teachers, administrators and other professionals who deal with the nation's schools. It recently launched a new magazine about educational technology, Digital Directions ("trends and advice for K-12 technology leaders.") Michelle Davis is the lead reporter for Digital Directions and will be developing a networked approach that can feed the site and the print magazine. "I envision this group of people feeling as though they have a stake in what I write," says Davis. "The idea that district information technology directors might try new projects they picked up from our online discussion--and be able to bypass pitfalls using advice from others on the site--is something I'd love to see happen." The team includes Davis, a veteran beat reporter for EdWeek; plus Kevin Bushweller, assistant managing editor for online news; and Jeanne McCann, managing editor of edweek.org. (See letter.)

Background: "Education Week has been searching for ways to use social networking to improve the quality of our news gathering," writes Bushweller. He said the company is hiring Pluck to help integrate social networking tools throughout edweek.org. (Austin-based Pluck has also worked with washingtonpost.com on similar tools.) "It is likely that the work we are doing with Pluck will feed us ideas for the work we would do in partnership with you on Digital Directions."

• News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida (Gannett.) Beat: Child welfare in Florida.

The beat is child abuse and neglect. The reporter who was on it quit yesterday to start a new career. But editor Kate Maymont said she and her staff are committed to the project and don't want to miss out. So now the News-Press is going to find someone right for the job. Marymont told me, "I like the idea of seeing if we can recruit using this incentive." Developing a social network approach will thus get incorporated into the job description, she said. "You may ask why we need a child welfare beat. It is Florida. We have serious issues with child safety," she writes. Assistant metro editor Miriam Pereira will oversee along with Mackenzie Warren, managing editor. Hooked up with the right network can a beat reporter do a better job? "Our team here believes the answer will be a resounding yes... We are eager to test, share, test some more, shift, talk, test. That's what we do in our laboratory here in Fort Myers." (Her letter.)

Background: The News-Press made a name for itself with its use of crowdsourcing to investigate the huge fees being charged to connect new homes to water and sewer lines in nearby Cape Coral. (See Help us Investigate!) After that it launched Team Watchdog, a group of 20 retirees--among them former lawyers, CPAs, police officers and an ex-fighter pilot--who help reporters with research and sometimes generate story ideas.

• San Jose Mercury News (Media News.) Beat: Green Technology.

Reporter Matt Nauman, with 20 years at the paper, is new to the beat, which covers energy and clean tech-- a rising industry in the region. (Al Gore just signed up with a venture capital firm in the Valley; Nauman covered it. ) "Silicon Valley is a hub of commercial and civic activity around 'green' energy technology, from solar and wind power to bio-fuels and sustainable development, and the social networking movement has deep roots here," writes Katharine Fong, deputy managing editor for convergence and new media. "Our reporter can tap into this engaged, local base of knowledge and innovation as well as cultivate contacts and sources worldwide who can help shape the issues and discussion and inform our audience." Nauman adds that "green" tech is "rapidly joining the Prius and the iPhone as the local obsession." The Merc already has a green energy page that it will adapt for this project. The team is Nauman, Fong, Rebecca Salner, executive business editor, and Steve Trousdale, her deputy. (See their full letter.)

Background: The Merc--with a staff about half the size it had in 2001--recently launched Rethinking the Mercury News, an effort to go to the community for ideas on what the newspaper should become. (See this report.) It says it's prepared to question everything in the wake of a deep shift in newspaper economics-- and even "blow up the newsroom." According to Chris O'Brien, a technology reporter who is working on the re-think, this project fits right in.

• The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA (Newhouse Newspapers.) Beat: Covering Hershey, PA.

Young (he's 23) and Net-savvy reporter Daniel Victor read my post about this project and appealed to his editors, who went with the idea. David Newhouse, executive editor, writes: "We would propose to have our reporter, Dan Victor, create a social network around his regular beat of the town and schools of Hershey. This may seem like a conservative or unimaginative choice. However, we have created public blogs around topics and found that interest tends to dwindle after a while. In central Pennsylvania, people are passionate about where they live. Community is everything. It is the social network. We believe a town-and-school blog, especially in a community as tight-knit as Hershey, will generate sustained interest because it taps into a network of true stakeholders." (See his letter.) The team is Daniel Victor, David Newhouse, managing editor Cate Barron and Alan Hayakawa, online editor.

Background: Background: Newhouse says the Patriot-News has been very successful with community forums, but it tends to be a quick back-and-forth: "argument and little else." He's looking to this project to generate more meaningful forms of interaction among users.

* MTV News (Viacom.) Beat: video games and their makers.

Stephen Totilo does the Multiplayer blog for MTV News and occasional on-air reports for the network. "The field I cover is extremely tech-savvy," writes Totilo. "The gamers, game makers, publicists, marketers and even the critics of games all have strong online presences. They communicate with each other regularly on message boards, on podcasts and in comments sections of blogs and even in the midst of online games they play against each other. The online social networks of people who care about video games are already being built. But how all these close connections can improve reporting on games hasn't really been explored. It's something I'm eager to attempt."

Teaming up for the project will be Totilo, Ocean MacAdams, senior vice president, MTV; Ben Wagner, executive producer, MTV News.

• Chronicle of Higher Education. Beat: The business of college sports.

Brad Wolverton is senior editor of the Chronicle's athletics section and also a reporter, whose new beat is college sports as big business. "College sports obviously gets plenty of attention in the media, but our hope is to focus more on the money: where's it's coming from and where it's going to," writes Scott Smallwood, new media editor. "We'll be creating a new blog for Brad's beat that will be the home for the project, but we're also very interested in using other Web-based tools to create this network." (Read their letters.) For Wolverton the key idea is connecting people to one another. "Reaching out to people is obviously the hallmark of great beat reporting," he says. "But if we don't provide a forum for our sources and readers to connect to each other, we're missing a valuable opportunity." The team is Wolverton, Smallwood and Jeff Selingo, editor of the Chronicle.

Background: Two years ago, the Chronicle--a pay site--won the Online News Association's award for excellence among large specialty news sites.

• Seattle Times (The Seattle Times Company.) Beat: Northwest technology companies.

Brier Dudley is the Seattle Times technology columnist and senior tech reporter. "I write about the technology business with a particular focus on companies in the Northwest," he says. "My coverage includes national and global companies and trends that have a bearing on people and companies in the region." Dudley notes that "many of my sources are active users of social networking tools (some even create social networking tools and platforms.)" He plans to "develop an interactive advisory board representing different perspectives from around the region and industry." (His letter.) The participants for the Times are Cory Haik,senior producer, interactivity and projects; Mark Watanabe, technology editor; and Dudley.

Background: The Seattle Times has a separate reporter covering Microsoft. It also has direct competiton: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (see for example the P-I's staff and reader blogs). As Dudley says, "One interesting angle here will be exploring ways to use these tools in a competitive market, where you don't want the paper across town to harvest your sources and topics."

I was trying for a diverse group of test sites. We achieved that in a lot of ways, but not all: there's good geographical balance, a range of beats (though still heavy on tech-related and white collar themes) and a mix of small and large sites. There's local (Hershey) and national (technology in the K-12 classroom) reporting. Some "general" news operations (like the Star-Ledger) and some specialty journalism (Wired, Chronicle of Higher Ed.) I wanted more women reporters but the women are better represented among the editors and supervisors, which partly compensates.

Counting reporters, editors and NewAssignment folk, there's now more than 40 people on the case for a year. At the end of it, we'll know a lot more than we do now.

LaTourette was unhappy that the newspaper would pay someone who financially supported his opponent to write political opinion. He complained to editorial page director Brent Larkin, who referred him to Editor Susan Goldberg, whom he had never met. LaTourette set up an appointment, then thought better of it and canceled.

Goldberg was also unhappy, but not because LaTourette was unhappy.

"The issue here isn't blogging, or political pressure," she said. "The issue is our financial tie to these four bloggers. To allow someone we pay to use our site to, potentially, lobby for a candidate they financially support would put us in a place we can't go. Had we known that he had contributed to the opponent of a person he might write about, we wouldn't have put him on the blog in the first place."

After some deliberation, Dubail told Coryell he would have to agree to refrain from writing about LaTourette if he wanted to continue with the blog. Coryell declined, and they parted ways. The other liberal blogger quit in sympathy....

And that was the end of the blog, Wide Open. But the episode was just starting. (See Editor & Publisher's account, and Jeff Jarvis once, then again. Danny Glover thinks Jarvis has been too rough on the P-D. Here is Jeff Coryell's resignation, and Jill Zimon's I'm quitting too post. See Jill's blog, Writes Like She Talks, for continuing coverage.)

My own conclusion tracks with what what Mark Potts said: "A classic case of a newspaper so stuck in the old ways of doing things that it shoots itself in the foot when it ventures into something new. The paper's management has rolled itself into a defensive ball over something that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, making things worse in the process."

Which is especially true of Ted Diadiun's odious explainer, "Wide Open blog bumps up against journalistic ethics," almost a primer in legacy media sludge think. What not to do in a blog storm has rarely been better shown. Organization of Newspaper Ombudsmen (ONO), bid your members to study Ted's work that you might warn them not to repeat it. And if you need help, Jarvis took the column apart point-by-point.

"This is a story about how The Plain Dealer got itself spattered by some primordial ooze last week," Diadiun wrote. That would be the mud--an image of ethical taint--that gets slung casually around in the blogosphere. Because a lot of people were sympathetic to Coryell's argument that he was dumped after a Republican Congressman complained, some of the mud hit the newspaper. In case you're wondering what "newspaper" signifies these days, that's the building where they keep the ethics, at least according to Diadiun. "The fallout from all this draws a bright line between the way newspaper reporters and bloggers ply their crafts."

What he means is: bloggers can afford to have zero ethics, journalists cannot. It takes a special kind of mind to divide up the world that way, which why I am including Ted Daidiun's column in Cold Type, my anthology of great curmudgeon lit. (Other selections here and here and here and here.)

Since so much has been written on this episode, and I am late in commenting on it, I offer a few points not made elsewhere: (Okay, so twelve points is not exactly a "few.")

√ Advice to newsroom people: if you're caught up in a situation that appears to pit journalists with ethics against bloggers who ain't got none, you may actually be facing a conflict between one ethic and another, and it would be good to find out what the "other" is before deciding what to do.

√ In this case the other ethic is not "giving money to a politician and writing about his opponent for the newspaper is just good clean fun..." but rather the principle of transparency. In my view the Plain Dealer's editors could have asked the Wide Open bloggers to disclose all their political contributions in their bios at the site. If they were especially concerned about being fair to LaTourette they could have asked Coryell to mention the $100 in a "full disclosure" note at the end of any post he wrote about the Congressman.

√ If Coryell had quit over the demand to disclose--unlikely, in my view--I would have supported the Plain Dealer. And if Coryell had quit over that and gone to the blogosphere with his complaints about political pressure, lots of people would have told him to take a hike. That's how the ethic of transparency works. (By the way, here's my transparency page.)

√ Transparency is not some new media buzzword but an alternative means of generating trust. In one system, which the Plain Dealer unwisely called "journalistic ethics," the newspaper tries to generate trust by persuading readers that no one at the Plain Dealer has a hidden agenda, or an ax to grind. In the alternative system--sunlight ethics--trust is generated when the newspaper persuades readers that all interests and stakes that might bear on the story have been disclosed. I don't think either system is perfect. I don't think either choice solves all the problems an editor will face. But they work differently.

√ Inexplicably, neither Susan Goldberg, the top editor, nor Ted Daidiun have explained why they didn't respond to the discovery of the troublesome $100 by instituting the transparency system at Wide Open. This would be far more appropriate for an opinion blog written by people from the political community who weren't told to check their political commitments and interests at the door.

√ Instead of explaining why the transparency option was rejected, Goldberg and Daidiun have tried to suggest that it was the money they were paying the bloggers that tied them in knots and forced their hand. This is weak. "Just like when we hire a freelancer to review a play, we would never hire somebody who was an investor in the theater production," Goldberg said to a Poynter researcher. Well, her analogy is bad. It requires us to see as essentially similar a theatre critic giving a good review and thereby profiting from the increased business that a well-reviewed play would do, and Jeff Coryell writing a critique of a Congressman he wanted to defeat and thereby profiting from... well, how would he profit, exactly? Susan Goldberg has no idea. In Daidiun's column she worries that Coryell could "potentially lobby for a candidate," forgetting that lobbyists are paid by those they lobby for.

√ Ted Daidun is supposed to be the "reader representative" for the Plain Dealer. But he decided to abandon his post and become, as Jarvis said, the newspaper's rep for the duration of this incident. I can't find anything he said or wrote about Wide Open that suggests he understands the distinction. Wide Open, after all, was written by four readers of the Plain Dealer raised to the status of writer. Daidun abandoned them too. He didn't even ask that his column run as a post at Wide Open so readers could comment. (No comments allowed on his column, naturally.)

√ Dubail, in my opinion, should never have let Ted Daidun be the voice of the Plain Dealer on this incident. I have no idea how it happened, but that was a strategic error. (Full disclosure: I had a few email exchanges with Jean about the Plain-Dealer about joining NewAssignment.Net's next project, Beat Reporting with a Social Network, but we hadn't gotten very far when this thing blew up.) Danny Glover thinks Diadiun's column was "over the top, but that just means he, like Jarvis, would be a good blogger."

√ Daidiun writes: "[Coryell] rejects the ingrained ethics of the newspaper world, preferring to read editors' minds and create his own reality. Other bloggers pick that up and repeat it as gospel, and suddenly we begin getting questions from all over the country about why we're letting Steve LaTourette run the newspaper." The Web's engrained ethic of transparency--which for the most part is rejected by newspaper journalists--includes linking to what you are talking about. By this standard Daidiun's column, which doesn't even link to Wide Open, falls short of the ethical standard (most) bloggers keep.

√ I don't understand why the four bloggers for Wide Open didn't get together once the ultimatum had been given and decide what to do as a group. Do you? (Todd Blumer, another of the Wide Open bloggers, seems to have the same question, while Jill Zimon writes, "Why didn't the PD come to all four of us to re-set the rules, but rather only went to one of us?" See also Jeff Coryell in the comments at PressThink: "The four Wide Open bloggers didn't act together partly because I didn't reach out to them.")

√ Finally, as I wrote at Buzzmachine: What I have not heard from anyone at the Plain Dealer is why they aren't a little more suspicious of Congressman LaTourette's response to the big revelation about $100... The Congressman didn't have to be outraged and demand action to correct this alleged injustice. What he could have said is "Politics-and political opinion-ain't beanbag. People have the right to express themselves and be heard in the newspapers. I'm glad that Clevelanders like Jeff Coryell are engaged in the issues, and trying to get others to pay attention. I recognize that when people get engaged in politics they also give money to those they support. This is normal. This is democracy." He could have said that, but he didn't. Instead he rejected the engrained ethics of a vigorously democratic political culture and made a fuss about a writer already publicly identified as a political opponent. Why? What does the editorial page of the Plain-Dealer have to say about that? Has it lost its voice?

This is a simple project testing a single idea:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

That's the entire idea--so far. Beat reporting with a social network: let's see if we can get it to work.

This is probably best done on a blogging-style platform at an established news organization that can devote a pro reporter to work with a circle of "ams" or contributors from outside the newsroom. Thus, beat blogging with a social network is another name for the same idea. Bring knowledge, contacts and interests of many different people from around the beat into the production of news, views and information for the beat, by making use of social networking tools that lower the cost of collaboration and make it viable for dispersed groups to become an editorial force.

The tools for social networking are by now advanced enough that a live forum like that, nurtured by a clever reporter with flexible skills, could become the working heart of an online beat, which could then feed other platforms--the daily print edition, a weekly supplement or magazine, a podcasting schedule, a radio program. As Mitchel Resnick of MIT writes in an Idea Lab post, "In journalism, as in education, new technologies are facilitating a shift from a broadcast model to a more participatory model." My idea is for a beat with lots more participants, but instead of replacing the pro journalist they enhance what a single reporter is able to do.

Let's figure out how it's done! For that we need to do organized proof-of-concept work. And I have a way to keep the organization to a minimum. Twelve reporters (with supporting editors) in twelve editorial "shops" build the social network that makes sense for that beat-- and for that shop. They design it. They run it. They fund it. They venture into it independently but simultaneously with others trying similar combinations.

Doing your own thing when eleven other newsrooms are doing the same thing their way raises substantially the odds of succeeding. But to get the benefits there has to be a forum--a common space--where networked beat reporters, with their editors, can compare notes, share problems, test tools, "fail well," and of course watch how others do it, so as to get ideas for one's self.

That's NewAssignment.Net's job: we'll create the common space and make sure it works for the people whose by-lines and news brands are invested in these newfangled beats. We will also feed into the experiment the best thinking from outside professional newsrooms. I will share some of the ideas I have for how to approach beat blogging with a social network. While there may be advice, there is no consent. Participants run their beats their way.

As I announced at the Networked Journalism Summit in New York (Oct. 10) and the Online News Association conference in Toronto (Oct. 17-19) and the Journalism Leaders Forum in the UK (Oct. 16), I am pulling together a core group of practicing beat reporters to dive into this work, knowing there's back-up available. My target number is twelve: twelve beats and twelve sites from across the editorial landscape. By "backup available" I mean....

√ The eleven other sites where beat reporters are also building social networks into their beats.

√ NewAssignment.Net's David Cohn will be the project's connector, compiler, human switchboard and resident journo-geek, making sure that progress is noted, lessons get circulated, common problems are spotted early, and the best tools get tried. He will also run the mailing list for reporters and editors, and the website where the results accumulate.

√ New Assignment.Net will bring intellectual capital from its network to specific problems and new knowledge needs as they arise in the doing of networked beat reporting.

√ We will try for at least one conference event where we can bring the network together terrestrially. Timed right, such meetings can solidify best practices.

√ "Philosophical backup." Via my own writing at PressThink, Huffington Post and Idea Lab, I will explain the idea--beat blogger with a social network--and place it in the larger online journalism picture, drawing attention to what the twelve beat writers are doing. My goal would be to build an audience for the work among people who follow innovations in journalism and new media.

√ A new site, www.beatblogging.org (not operating yet) will contain tools, lessons, a group blog for reflections, and a handy way to follow all the live beats going on simultaneously in the project. It will also track, document and explain the project, what we are doing and why, so others can get it and follow progress. By subscribing to beatblogging.org's feed, weekly email service or bookmarking the site, anyone can follow the progress at our test sites, plus the thinking, analysis and tool building going on in the project's commons.

√ NewAssignment.Net, with partners (more likely) or on its own (possibly), can have new tools and applications built specifically for beat blogging with a social network, should the practical need arise. First option will be to use existing technology to keep new costs and delays as close to zero as possible.

The key participants and featured players in the experiment are obviously the individual reporters with beat responsibilities who want to give it a try. But the leadership of the news organization has to be in on the deal from the start and committed to trying a networked approach in one beat. In that sense the participants are the "shops" (a dozen newsrooms) that nominate a beat reporter for the project and create a home page where it lives online--a url for the beat.

There's your minimum standard for participation. Five things: a reporter, a beat, a url for the new, networked beat home page, one supportive editor on the "web" or new media side, one supportive editor on the "news" side.

In addition to the reporters themselves, supervising editors are key participants because they have to be in on the larger scheme, fully understand it and back it with whatever resources are required. Same goes for the web division of the news organization: an active sponsor is needed.

Now for a more detailed FAQ:

Isn't this what beat reporters already do?

Beat reporters have always had networks of sources, of course, but the sources haven't been connected to one another, or able to self-publish; they haven't been social networks at all. And we didn't have the easy tools for Web-based collaboration that we have now, like group blogs, wikis, Facebook groups and so on.

To better understand the difference, take the Rolodex of a typical beat writer and imagine all the scattered but well connected people in it wired together. Pooling their knowledge for the good of the beat, they also get something from participating in its daily buzz; it's river of news. We haven't "always" had a reporting system like that.

From the reporting staff, who's right for this project?

Reasonably Net-savvy. Committed to working in an interactive way but for the sake of real journalism. Open to doing things with different premises. They do not have to be "techies" in any sense, or citizen journalism evangelists. But they do have to believe that readers and listeners--amateurs--have a lot to contribute; they ought be interested in working closely with non-journalists to improve beat coverage.

Reporters chosen for the project should be able to handle a certain amount of uncertainty and fuzziness at the outset, since it's not like we have a formula for doing this. It's great to have people who are excited about learning new, social media skills, who want to be part of the solution for how journalism thrives on the open Web.

What kind of beats would work best?

Beats where it is relatively easy to identify the people "out there" who have hard won knowledge, an invaluable perspective or a network of their own, the kind of "assets" the reporter is likely to need to do a better job in covering the beat.

I picture a reporter in the Hampton Roads, VA area who is responsible for covering family life in the military for a sprawling region, with a lot of big bases. The reporter isn't on those bases, or in the military. Getting an overview is hard because there are so many places where the story is happening.

But there are a lot of people around Hampton Roads with pieces of that story, who have built-up knowledge about it, vital glimpses into it, who might want to connect with other pieces, other glimpses, other people. They're online and connectible. To some degree they're already connected. What's it going to take to get them to join your beat's social network? What kind of contract--trust--emerges between reporter and network? These are some of the first questions participants in the project will have to answer.

Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, put it as well as it can be put. "My readers know more than I do." Beats where that statement is true and obvious to the reporter are probably the best.

Is there anyone doing anything like this now?

I'm sure there is. Here's an interview with a Wired.com columnist who runs an online forum at her site that is intimately related to her beat. The forum feeds the beat and helps her keep track of stuff she might otherwise miss. That's the kernel of the approach I am suggesting. Know of others? Let me know.

What size social network is anticipated?

This is hard to say because I think the answer is going to vary a lot, but I was imagining a reporter starting with about 20-40 people as a core group, and seeing how that worked. That figure is really a guess. Your guess is as good!

In choosing participants for the reporter's network, what sort of criteria should apply?

Obvious criteria. They should be people with the kind of knowledge, insight, experience, perspective or contacts that are likely to be valuable to the reporter, given the issues the beat visits. They should be diversely placed across the beat: from different institutions and levels of responsibility. (In education: administrators, teachers, parents, students, alums, board members, union officers, vendors, pols.) Get lots of points on the dial, but make it a tight dial in the sense of sharply defining what is "in" the beat, and outside it.

Participants should represent the different perspectives and stakeholders normally found in news coverage on the beat, and those not normally found but needed to round out, spread out and plain ol' improve beat coverage. They should have diverse views and opinions while at the same time sharing a common "field" of newsy interest. They should be able to get along without fisticuffs. Some might fit the category of expert, but others might not. More important than formal credentials is: they know territory that is central to the beat. The system as a whole covers the waterfront.

Let's say we decide to join up, and we have a reporter with a challenging beat, fully briefed and ready to give it a go... what happens then?

Your mileage may vary. I see these initial tasks in the first month or two:

1.) Pull together the network by picking the right people and asking 20-40 of those people to join as "friends of the beat;" includes figuring out what to say (what terms to offer) in the letter requesting their participation. It also means working on the give-get bargain: what do participants give, what do they get out of it? (See this post, "Grok their motivations and they may contribute.")

2.) Decide on tools: the initial methods by which the reporter will convene the network, get it running, and communicate with it: blogging platform, mailing list, online discussion forum, wiki, Facebook group, weekly conference call, or some combination of forms.

3.) Come out with an adaptable home page (with a unique url) for the newly networked beat that displays the reporting, but also other fruits of the network, as well as other beat information. News feeds, aggregation, lists and calendars, weights and measures. The beat blogging with a social network home page must be a tool in motion--versions of it keep coming out.

4.) Run a few simple trials to test how well the network works in providing concrete assistance to the beat reporter in doing particular stories, investigation or news features. The sooner these small raids can start the better for the big battles later.

If we decide we're in, what do we need to do?

First, you need to designate a reporter and a beat. Then I need a "we're in" letter via email stating your willingnesss to participate, and a bit about why, how this fits into what you are doing. It should include three names, with their titles, email addresses and phone numbers. 1.) The beat reporter chosen and a short description of his or her beat; 2.) an editor on the new media, digital, interactive, online, or innovation side of the operation, who will support the work, and 3.) the editor with direct supervisory responsibility over the beat reporter, who also has to be in on the deal and supportive.

Got suggestions or ideas? Put 'em in the comments. Or, if you write for Idea Lab, make a post.

√ High quality aggregation within a strong editorial focus. (Like the Huffington Post nationally, or Twin Cities Daily Planet locally.)

√ Blogging platform with the best posts filtered to the front page. (Like Daily Kos)

√ Original reporting with hybrid strength: amateurs with pro support (training, production values, copy editing, editorial oversight, and traffic), pros with amateur support (like Regina Lynn; see also my Idea Lab post on beat reporting with a social network) and pros doing what pros have always done.

√ Features with narrow comprehensiveness: everything about something. (Lisa Williams: "That is, a site with some Denver restaurants is OK; but a site with ALL Denver restaurants is better.")

√ Forums that allow a previously atomized group--people sharing interests and problems--to connect and converse with each other.

√ Crowdsourcing projects that gather information impossible to get any other way. (Like WNYC's efforts, or the News & Observer's speeding investigation.)

√ Find, prepare and place online data sets that are "available" (but not easy to use), and of strong interest to a user public; let people access and interact with the information by framing it properly and providing the bigger narrative that the data is a part of. (See chicagocrime.org.)

√ Reverse publishing: web-to-print, for the highest quality content generated online. (Read Dan Barkin: "Every day except Sunday, we take photos, forum comments, user-submitted school news, user-nominated volunteer stories and publish it on Page 2." See YourHub.)

√ Absolute commitment to breaking news in the coverage area by any means necessary: pro, am, aggregation, blogging, crowdsourced.

√ Geo-tagged information: organized so people can access it by location, or via a map.

√ Headlines and summaries optimized for search; open archives and permalinks.

√ Put-it-all-together key topic pages that combine... aggregation, original reporting, blog posts, data, forums and crowdsourced information on something big and of intense interest, like a bridge collapse.

Like my coordinates for distributed journalism, these are the coordinates I see for the emerging model of a successful online news organization.

I would secure the cooperation of the paper and its editor, and find a willing reporter for the test. With that idea I applied to the Knight News Challenge 2006 competition.

I thought I would start with a single reporter covering a local beat in a particular place. My pilot project, NewAssignment.Net, would work with the journalist to develop the network, equip it with the proper tools (whether that means blog, forum, mailing list, wiki or something else) and demonstrate that this is a viable way to have stronger beat coverage. With the first beat reporter in the fold, I would recruit a second, and a third until we had a group of 10 or so willing to explore this approach simultaneously.

Now I think it's better to start with ten and make a working group out of them.

What I mean by a smart mob or social network is a group of people who are knowledgeable, diverse and well-placed within the pale of the beat, and who are then organized via the Net to help in the production of new knowledge ("news") and the telling of stories. The educated guess I want to develop is: reporter + social network = richer beat coverage.

I got the idea from this interview by Amanda Michel with Wired columnist Regina Lynn.

Beat reporters have always had sources, of course, and in a way that's what a social network is: a network of sources. But the sources have not been organized in any productive way; they're people a reporter calls on from time to time. "He's really wired into country government."

In my notion the sources would join a network because they have an interest in better news coverage from the beat reporter and because they like to inform themselves. They would participate in an on-going forum where they engage with each other and the journalist. They would furnish tips, leads, suggestions, facts, feedback and guidance to the beat reporter-- and possibly write some of the coverage themselves. They would help inform, steer and refine the work that is published. Instead of a beat by one imagine a beat by, say, 41 people.

Simple examples I started with, just to illustrate the notion to myself. The beat reporter covering AT&T for the San Antonio Express-News, where the company is based, gets a network of knowledgeable people-- suppliers, former executives, customers, regulators, bankers, truck drivers--all of whom know a lot about the company, talk regularly with people in it, or follow it closely. If they are co-producers of the beat and not just sources they can supplement his sources with their sources, and start building a way better beat.

Or an education reporter for the Charlotte Observer covering schools in Mecklenberg County learns to collaborate in a reporting-based column with a hand-picked network--parents, kids, teachers, administrators, tax payers, academics, vendors, local people, union people, anyone well placed and interested--who keep it real and keep it connected.

A lot of people who care about the survival of local journalism and newspaper reporting have come to the point where they genuinely believe that citizens have a lot to contribute, that readers can be content creators, as well as 'consumers." There's clear interest among a vanguard for such things as crowdsourcing, where the community helps the newspaper investigate.

We can't just say it: "a social network approach could improve local reporting." We have to show it. The proof is in the journalism our networked beat reporters will be able to do. That may mean a reverse publishing strategy (web to print) and a bending of forms to avoid shoving the networked approach into pre-fab news holes.

There's something happening today because of the Internet, and people in the news media are just beginning to figure out how to work with it. What's happening is that for people who share an interest (like living in Akron, Ohio together, or upholding human rights around the world) the cost--and difficulty--of finding each other, sharing information, and collaborating is falling dramatically, whether we measure it in time, money or training and equipment required.

It seems to me this must have implications for beat reporting. I have written about this falling cost many times, especially in describing my pilot project, NewAssignment.Net. If all goes well New Assignment will undertake beat blogging with a social network as its next project.

As John Abell, a pro-volunteer in Assignment Zero's pro-am said in the comments at PressThink: before the shift to the Web "there wasn't really any frictionless way to include the public in the reporting enterprise."

Now there is.

Because I write about the Internet and what it's doing to the press, and follow that story at my blog, I am sometimes asked what I believe the future of newspapers to be. Or, more bluntly, "will newspapers survive?"

Very rarely is anyone satisfied with my answer: "I really don't know what's going to happen." (I like that answer, myself.) "... And I don't think anyone does."

Not knowing what the model is, we go on. We go on with newspapers. We go on with Internet journalism, and the practice of reporting what happened. We go on with the ordeal of verification. We go on with the eyewitness account, and with the essential task of getting and talking about the news.

Reasons for my uncertainty about the newspaper in the combination we know it now were well stated recently by Doc Searls of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, who also writes about the Internet and keeps his own blog.

For metropolitian newspapers, whose problems I know best, it's not just the forced march to the Web and the decline in revenues from the printed product. It's not only that free content seems to be the standard online.

"The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work," Searls writes, "and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding -- or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it."

So (class) why does Searls say that the advertising model may be broken too? Isn't there advertising to be won on the Web? There is, and it is coming on. But underneath that something else is going on. "Harder to see..."

While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

The inefficencies that created modern advertising are themselves under pressure from the Internet. That is what Searls argues, and I think we need to consider it. "The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all," he writes, "because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It's also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers -- on customers' terms and not just on vendors' alone."

Searls thinks sellers and buyers can increasingly get into information alignment without advertising and its miserable kill ratios in the battle to break through the noise and reach the few who are actually in the market. (I will leave you to read the rest and figure out why he thinks advertising will shrink to the the perimeters defined by "no other way." It involves something he calls VRM.)

Suppose he's right. Possible outcomes are a new business model, or "no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects -- building reputations and making money because of one's work, rather than with one's work."

Searls means the hypothetical blogger who pours time and effort into her reported blog may do it for free because it builds reputation points. Then she gets paid for other things that result from the (free) blogging. Hardly a perfect model--in fact, it has tons of problems--but it is different. Money because you do good work at your site is different than being paid for the work you deliver to the masters of production at the local newspaper.

Scott Rosenberg thinks the likely decline in advertising under Web rules may be good for journalism. "We have the chance to invent new ways to support our work -- ways that don't depend on the essential bait-and-switching of old-fashioned advertising."

One alternative was announced this week. "Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets."

So here is the deeper set of possibilities we must contemplate: Many newspapers may find that they are unable to charge, or recover "lost" revenues from the print era with Web advertising. If that happens, will existing news organizations die, shrink, limp along with expiration dates, get absorbed into larger Web empires or find a way to grow some other subsidy business?

It is also possible that newspapers will morph into something new, Net Based News Organizations--also called NORG's by combining in a fruitful way with "the amateur calling" that Searls mentioned. Non-profit, lower profit, semi-profit, part-profit: all combinations should be ruled in.

Private business, family business, non-profit trust, community ownership, cooperative ownership, the public radio model, the crowdfunding model, the "rich person with a conscience and good advisers model," other variations on the gift economy... all these should be made seaworthy. We don't know how many will make it across so we need to launch a lot of boats.

We don't have to save the newspaper industry. We do have to bring "the press" across the digitial divide.

A different version of this post will be published next month by the Newspaper Association of America in a special forum on the future of the newspaper.