Apparently, Britney Spears is the future of business news. How do I know that Britney Spears is the future of business news? I know this because I recently attended a seminar in New York for business journalists where I learned that almost any story with the name Britney Spears in it will do well on the internet.

So, if you put Britney Spears in your story, you are likely to get lots of hits from people searching for news on Britney Spears. The more you talk about Britney Spears in that story, the higher it will appear in a search engine when someone enters "Britney Spears." (Britney was the third most popular search on Google News in 2007.) This is important to business news, because we are worried that people would rather read about Britney Spears than the stock market or housing or pretty much anything else delivered via "old media" right now.

(Oh, and be sure to put "Britney Spears" in the headline. It makes it easier for the search engine to find your story!)

If you have been reading about Britney Spears and missed everything else, then you may not know that traditional journalism in general, including business news, is in trouble. Unlike news about Britney Spears, "serious" journalism is hard to sell. As traffic moves to Google and Yahoo and YouTube, newspapers and TV programs are losing market share and cutting back.

If only we can find a way to make our stories as easily marketable as some juicy piece on, say, Britney Spears. But that is a path to the dark side. If we mindlessly follow the clicks and only respond to what people like to read about, then the public service mission of journalism disappears.

We do know what's important and we should be paid to sort the fluff from the real stuff.

But the market has spoken. More and more, it demands something different than the products most journalists are now paid to produce.

What to do? What would Britney do?

First, we should innovate faster. Like what Britney did in that video with Madonna. (I wonder if mentioning Madonna will help this post rise up through the great search engine in the ether?) Journalists always push politicians to think faster and better. We should do the same for ourselves.

Second, we clearly need to sell harder and smarter. As Charles Fishman of Fast Company pointed out in the seminar, Coke spends half its budget on advertising and has nothing new to say. Why can't media companies sell our stories better? We need to put more effort into marketing.

Part of the problem is that, unlike Britney Spears, we are used to advertisers coming to us. Not too long ago, newspapers and TV stations were the only game in town. Why remake your marketing campaign in a Madonna-like burst of reinvention? Everyone has to be in the paper, on the six o'clock news, right? Wrong.

Another participant at the seminar suggested a milk-like marketing campaign for newspapers. I like "Got Think?" Or something like "Ink, it does a mind good!"

If we do think new thoughts and execute on them, I believe journalists will end up being more like Britney, except for the rehab part. We will give the people what they want and need. The internet is telling us not to take ourselves and the nation's obsession with fun stories about Britney too seriously. Relax a little. Readers and viewers want us to give them serious news and some fun.

Like most journalists, I like to get good and depressed about our business now and then. (Oh, we creative people are soooo tormented, so misunderstood!)

But the more I think about it, the more I came down on the side of -- insert multimedia drum roll here (apparently it is important to be "multimedia on the web") -- the future.

More people than ever are creating journalism. They just don't work for a TV network or a newspaper. We mainstream types need to innovate or our products will become as irrelevant as Britney's last album.

What was that album called? I'll have to Google that . . . .