Consider this: the old metaphor placed traditional media as the hub and their audience at the ends of its spokes. Information flowed in one direction, from hub to spoke. For the better part of the last two centuries, print, radio and broadcast television technology have supported this model.

(Not that the hub-to-spoke model went unchallenged. Underground presses, indie radio stations and cable-access channels evolved alongside their respective platforms, although mainstream media and the one-way flow of news, knowledge and culture predominated the public consciousness.)

Then came the Web, throwing open the gates.

The promise of new media was open communication from spoke to hub and spoke to spoke. The people formerly known as the audience could now talk back to media institutions, could broadcast their thoughts to millions of their peers with the click of a button. Web 2.0 was supposed to be all about the almighty You with a capital Y, with users generating content, deciding what’s interesting and newsworthy, and generally calling the shots.

Was that promise ever realized? Yes and no. Something happened along the way, and I think Dave Winer sums it up aptly in his recent post, Big change in the tech world:

The moral of the story of the Facebook patent and all the recent news from Apple and Google: Tech companies are no better or worse than big companies in other industries.

They are all about keeping the stock price high, growing at the expense of their competitors, and the role of users is the same as customers in other industries, you’re a source of revenue.

[T]ech companies are taking a more active interest in the content that flows over their networks, and are doing less to protect their users. Sometimes they’re the ones attacking users. Just like other industries.

And now, bolstered by the vulnerable state of the media industry, some tech companies have effectively strong-armed publishers and content producers into becoming glorified spokes feeding into their own massive, revenue generating hubs.

Case in point: Comcast’s acquisition of NBC, which transfers ownership of a network that reaches 98% of American television households into the hands of the largest cable provider in the country. Or Apple’s plans for the iPad, which will be game-changing all right, but probably not in the way traditional media have been dreaming of, as Frédéric Filloux of Monday Note pointed out earlier this month:

In Steve Jobs’ mind, the iPad is meant to become the ultimate personal computer, replacing most of the devices that we currently use to get music and entertainment. And news. And knowledge. For the publishing community, the choice is therefore:
a) go for it with a flurry of applications — and thus contribute to erecting a tightly controlled gated content community; the more publishers will join the fray the better the iPad will fly;
b) put some eggs in other’s baskets (Amazon’s, PlasticLogic’s for instance), which are neither neutral nor philanthropic. In addition, each of them has its own standard.

These examples are indicative of an accelerating trend that will ultimately bestow huge amounts of control over our society’s information, knowledge and culture (both public and private) to a small number of technology and telecom corporations.

That’s not to say tech companies are to blame, or that we shouldn’t put our trust in hubs. What we should be doing, though, is taking a good hard look at what we’re committing our intellectual property to before leaping. The ideal hub in a post-Web 2.0 world is neutral, open, decentralized, and part of a grounded, resilient network. Such infrastructure on a mass communication scale may not exist yet, but we can already see pieces of its tool-set starting to emerge.

Take Prophet, for instance:

a semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution

And the Open Media project:

an open-source development effort creating web solutions for the workflow needs of public access stations and community technology centers

And Miro, the Participatory Culture Foundation’s shot across the bow of proprietary video and podcast clients:

Our free and open-source desktop video player, built on open standards and designed to encourage decentralization of video hosting.

The movement is afoot, and it is one in which hackers, journalists and community media centers would all benefit from uniting. Who else is in?

WMACP is a non-profit organization newly formed to support journalism education and local news initiatives in the Pioneer Valley. This project has been over three years in the making, beginning in 2006 with a program of UMass Professor Nick McBride’s that sent journalism students into Springfield to cover underreported community issues.

It’s exciting to see how much things will evolve in the coming months. Check out the visual representation below of the organization’s mission and reach.

Here’s the piece I put together, featuring interviews with Regie O’Hare Gibson and Todd Brunel intercut with excerpts from their work, “Letter and Spirit: A Musical and Poetic Presentation of the Words and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The original plan was to move back to my hometown of Lexington, MA and help out with the family business while turning an eye toward new media start-up possibilities in Boston.

That plan never materialized. Over the summer, a medical emergency in the family prompted my switch to a full-time management role in the company and all the responsibilities that come with it. Officially, my title is VP Marketing/Sales of HAI Laboratories, Inc. — a high-tech manufacturer of diagnostic equipment for vision care.

What that really means is eighty-plus-hour workweeks, fielding and re-routing phone calls and e-mails coming in through seven accounts, managing a remote group of US salespeople and international distributors, organizing trade show exhibitions, producing brochures, manuals and video education modules, assembling and shipping orders, hiring and training new employees, traveling an average of once every three weeks to attend shows and assist with on-site customer service, and too many other sundry tasks to name.

What it also means is I’m getting an incredibly comprehensive crash course in management and entrepreneurship, learning at the elbow of my mother, the company’s founder and a brilliant businesswoman.

I haven’t entirely left the world of journalism and community media, though.

In the past few months, I’ve gone back to my alma mater twice: at the start of September to assist J-profs Steve Fox and B.J. Roche in teaching the inaugural UMass Journalism Multimedia Bootcamp, and last week to give a guest lecture on video production to student interns for the Mass. Academy of Sciences.

I’ve also been working on PEG Point, a beat blog for public access and community media centers in the digital age. Keep an eye out for a new video series coming out this month called “Making the News” that explores the intersection of citizen journalism and access stations. The first episode (currently in post-production) will feature a behind-the-scenes look at UVC-TV’s student volunteer-run news show, UMass This Week.

There are a couple other projects currently in the pipeline, which I’ll hold off revealing until they reach a more concrete stage.

And what about this blog?

For a while, I wasn’t sure what to write about now that I’m no longer a student journalist or even, strictly speaking, working in journalism. But in a recent conversation, my friend S.P. Sullivan mentioned that it’s probably a good idea to infuse some outside thinking into the whole future-of-journalism conversation, especially now that “journalist” and “entrepreneur” are two words being strung together with increasing frequency.

So with that in mind, I’ll be adding to the mix of posts here lessons I’m learning from the business world, as well as chronicling the ins and outs of running a company. For those of you following along at home, I hope you’ll find the occasional dispatch useful. Do let me know if there are any topics in particular you’d like to read about.

Notes and references:

Part One – Introduction (starts at 00:00:00)
00:00:58 – Illustration 1
00:01:59 – The People Formerly Known as the Audience, by Jay Rosen

Part Two – The converged media network (starts at 00:03:35)
00:06:38 – Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly begins in Washington state
00:07:40 – Convergence in action
00:09:06 – Professor Steve Fox (@stevejfox) speaking
00:09:24 – UMass Student Media Summit
00:11:41 – Professor BJ Roche (@BJ_Roche) speaking
00:12:44 – Ralph Whitehead speaking
00:15:13 – Rosie Walunas speaking

Part Three – The converged community (starts at 00:19:33)
00:25:25 – Framework for reinventing classifieds
00:27:32 – Twitter Used by J-Students to Track Handicapped Spots (correction: the students used laptops, not cell phones)
00:27:53 – Spot.us’ We Hella Hate Potholes Bike Event (correction: the event took place in Oakland, not San Francisco)
00:29:29 – Professor Martha Fuentes-Bautista speaking; Ushahidi
00:31:33 – Professor Nick McBride speaking

Discussion (starts at 00:33:08)
00:34:45 – Evolution of the Voice It! project
00:36:38 – Global Beat Blog on the Amherst Wire
00:52:02 – Illustration 2
00:58:40 – Professor Dennis Vandal (@dennisvandal) speaking
01:03:52 – Applying the link economy to j-school

Consider this: Why are so many people willing to buy music online for 99 cents a song, even when it’s possible to get the same music for free? Here are a few possible reasons that might drive someone to open his or her wallet:

It’s portable and on-demand.
Nowadays, there are tons of ways to listen to streaming music on the Internet without paying a cent. But sometimes you’ll like a song so much, you want the ability to take it with you wherever you go and play it whenever fancy strikes. Paying to download an mp3 lets you move music to places without broadband or wireless connectivity.

It’s convenient.
A majority of consumers have decided that they would rather pay 99 cents than go through all the effort of other (and sometimes legally dubious) means. Apple’s iTunes store gives people a streamlined delivery mechanism from browsing, to purchasing, to deployment across various playback devices.

It’s (relatively) cheap.
With the Internet came the great unbundling of many products, the music industry serving as a prominent example. Gone are the days of having no choice other than paying $15 for a complete album, even if you only liked one or two of the songs on its track list. Compared to previous alternatives, the current price point for a song doesn’t seem all that bad.

It’s a shareable experience.
We love sharing music with our friends, whether its burning mix CDs as gifts, loading up a party playlist, or rocking out to tunes while on a roadtrip. When we discover an awesome new album or band, we want to spread the joy. Shared music is a form of social currency.

It’s meaningful.
There are songs that make you laugh, songs that make you cry, songs that make you want to get up and dance. It’s the ones that speak to you the most that end up in your permanent collection. Think about the songs you currently own. Why do you like them? How many of them describe the world, relationships, and everyday experiences in ways you can strongly relate to? If something adds meaning to your life, chances are you’ll want to keep it around.

So, what’s the takeaway for the news industry?
By the end of this little thought experiment, the ideal pay model for online news is remarkably clear and simple. This is it, in just three sentences:

Create content that showcases compelling and brilliant storytelling, adds meaning to people’s lives, facilitates socially enjoyable experiences, and/or provides useful information that solves a problem. Offer it in its entirety for free on the web. Charge reasonable prices for convenient delivery to multiple platforms and portable devices.

You’ll notice that in this model, people aren’t paying for content. They’re paying for the delivery — just like the way it was with newspapers. Ultimately, the quality of the content, and by extension its replay value, will determine whether or not someone thinks the delivery costs are justified.

Using this as our roadmap for taking journalism to the next level, we can start to brainstorm and experiment with forms beyond the mere news article. Here are just a few examples:

• Audiobook-style narration of literary journalism pieces
• Topical e-books and primers surrounding complex subjects
• Educational resources about current events
• Unabridged video or audio interviews with industry leaders
• Long-form multimedia journalism
• Newsgames and editorial games
• Mobile apps for searching public data

And that’s just the beginning. Can you think of more? Comment with your thoughts.

For that matter, the journalism industry has produced very few songs at all — the staggering majority of stuff being circulated today is commodity news, contextless updates with no replay value after being consumed once.

To flip the analogy, you don’t see Apple banking its iTunes business plan on selling loops and samples. The average music consumer has no use for them. Producers and remixers do, but you can bet they aren’t buying only from iTunes.

Instead, creatives on the web are increasingly turning to royalty-free stock sites as sources for their raw materials.

What can the journalism industry learn from this trend? The answer is two-fold:

1. It’s time to take news to the next level, to a form that not only informs and educates, but also has strong replay value. Then, and only then, will people be willing to pay for it.
2. There needs to be a well-organized resource providing the raw material to feed this new form. A traditional syndication company could possibly reinvent itself to fill this role.

The new, alternative platform would operate something like this:

• Let members add original reporting, photos, videos and audio files to the system.
• Sell this material to news producers and remixers under a royalty-free license. The original owners of the files get a cut of the sale.
• Enable monetization of the link economy through ad revenue-sharing.
• No DRM-like wrapper. No strings attached. This should be an open and transparent model that rewards rather than restricts those who add value to the news ecosystem.

If the AP won’t do it, someone else will. (Reuters, perhaps?) It’s only a matter of time before the news industry’s operating models dovetail with the natural economies of the Internet. Those who come out on top will be the ones who flow with the current rather than fight against it.

What if news websites already running on open source content management systems made their entire sites — content, databases, applications, templates, etc. — freely available to the community? It could simply be a matter of packaging their nightly backups (which any smart organization should be making anyway) into a downloadable file and putting out an open call for users to submit code contributions. This could also serve the twofold benefit of defraying the costs of web development and providing an educational resource to j-schools and other organizations.

I’m thinking that college news outlets are the more likely candidates to adapt such a practice first, but as we continue the trend toward increasing transparency, others in the professional world might be willing to try it too. Can anyone think of possible downsides to this?

Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are “too big to fail”–that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components.

I think we can apply this concept to new journalism enterprises: the daily metro newsroom of the future will be decentralized, with self-sustaining branches located in each neighborhood of a larger geographic community.

The growing popularity of hyperlocal journalism supports this theory — people want stories and information that affect them most directly, and local news down to the block ranks high on the list. Funding for the operations of each branch can come from a variety of sources, including highly targeted advertising from local businesses, hosting of community events, and crowdfunded investigative reporting. Link journalism and a portal page for the region as a whole would then pull all the elements together.

A budding example of this model in action can be found in California’s Bay Area, though their portal page functions more as a directory than a news site in its own right at the moment.

I also plan on starting up a similar effort upon my return to the Boston area this summer, with the help of Amherst Wire veterans and local reporters. So if you’re a journalist in the area and want to get involved, be sure to hit me up.

I’d like to expand here on a thought that bubbled up during the session, in the middle of a discussion about the inclusion of entrepreneurial journalism in j-school curricula. I had suggested that j-schools should apply the basic theory behind link journalism — do what you know best, and link to the rest — to structuring their own programs. In other words, focus on teaching the craft of journalism and its fundamental theories, techniques and tools within the major, and “link out” to peripheral knowledge bases (business/advertising, information technology, programming and design) by sending students to other schools within the university system.

So what does that look like in action? Let’s take the UMass Amherst Journalism program as an example: currently, students enrolled in the major must complete an official minor, concentration or second major in order to fulfill the requirements for graduation. Now suppose the journalism department established interdisciplinary programs with the other schools and, in collaboration with faculty in those schools, created specialized tracks for j-students. This opens up a wealth of possibilities:

• A student who wants to get into the business side of news would take a planned series of courses in the school of management concurrent to classes in journalism, then apply that knowledge to a hands-on master class in entrepreneurial journalism.
• A student interested in environmental beat reporting after college would take a class on environmental policy in the department of natural resources during the same semester as a newswriting class, and practice writing stories for that beat.
• A team of students could take a programming class in the comp sci department together and develop apps for journalism as part of an independent study.

And so on. The advantage of an interdisciplinary approach is that students get exposed to a much wider range of knowledge, while journalism faculty can focus on teaching to their strengths.

UPDATE
Betty Medsger’s essay, Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way, was brought to my attention and contains a similar line of thought:

Journalism faculty should become gate openers to the entire university, rather than guardians of journalism studies. As such they would work far more closely with colleagues in other disciplines. They would develop the relationships needed to recruit excellent students from other disciplines, not to a major or minor in journalism but to an intensive senior year introduction to journalism. The curriculum would be truly interdisciplinary. Assignments in journalism courses would make use of what students have studied in their major areas of inquiry and also tap the expertise of faculty in other disciplines.