It’s not yet that a majority of newspaper websites have adopted this model, but more and more keep announcing just that. The latest: the San Diego U-T (formerly known as the Union-Tribune). The trend has spread to Australian newspapers.

“Hey, I’ve got an original idea! Let’s all follow NYTimes.com!!”

It’s often said that newspaper publishers act like sheep, and that’s clearly the case with “going paid” online. Nearly all the announcements are for programs that mimic NYTimes.com’s “metered paywall” model, where for newspaper websites, users can view 10 or 15 or sometimes 20 articles per month without needing to be paying subscribers or members. Most, too, make their walls “leaky”; e.g., you can just type a headline into a search engine and view a story, even if you’ve bumped past the free-article limit, because you’re coming into the news site from an external source.

Umm, did anyone think that maybe this “X free articles per month” model is not the best one?! Or did everyone just go into sheep mode?

A modest alternative proposal

How about this as an alternative for newspapers that wish to get some portion of their online audience to pay for reading their content:

• Instead of 10 or 15 or whatever “free reads” per month for non-subscribers, make the top 10 (or pick another number) articles of the day free to view for non-subscribers.
• Mix up that selection each day. A columnist who has a great piece one day would be in the free top 10, but not regularly. A review of a blockbuster movie or even a great recipe story might be in a day’s top 10 free reads, but reviews and food stories wouldn’t be included often.

Of course, you’ll notice that I’m suggesting that news website publishers “give away” a lot more content than they do following the “sheep model.” Ten free reads a day: about 300 articles a month; five free a day: 150. It’s nowhere near as skimpy as 10 or 15 articles a month which has become the norm.

Oh well, does everyone really need to know what’s happening in Syria, or that the City Council banned drinking diet sodas in public parks?

The other major difference is that with the sheep model, the non-paying user gets to select what articles to read. He/she might use up the monthly free allotment on coverage of Justin Bieber and the Kardashians, or local stories about bears in garbage cans and drunken co-eds invading people’s houses. (The latter is for real here in Boulder, Colorado; this spring a drunken female student got shot when she stumbled her way into an occupied bedroom where the homeowner kept a loaded gun next to the bed. Yes, she survived.) Oh well, does everyone really need to know what’s happening in Syria, or that the City Council banned drinking diet sodas in public parks?

What I’m suggesting is putting editors back in the driver’s seat (to a degree), by selecting the best 10 (or pick your number) articles or other news content of the day for non-paying website users. The advantage is pretty obvious: Non-paying readers of a newspaper website will be reasonably well informed about the most significant things going on in their communities.

While running a newspaper (and a news website) is a business in most cases, newspapers continue to have a public-service role. I will argue that keeping all of the community’s citizens informed — including those who will never pay a newspaper company a dime — is a good thing. The sheep paywall model doesn’t do that anywhere near as well.

A better bottom line?

What about attracting non-subscribers to start paying for news? I think this model can work, though someone heading a newspaper will have to wake up from sheep mode and give it a try. (Sharp readers will know that the “top stories of the day are free” model already is in practice on the New York Times’ smartphone and tablet apps — but not on the Times’ website.)

Are you sheep, following the (apparently successful) lead of NYTimes.com? Or can you think and act for yourselves?

We can think of the top 10 free articles a day as a marketing technique for a paid digital subscription or membership. If the free web reader enjoys a stellar columnist but only gets to read her work once every couple of weeks or so, that’s incentive to pay for a digital subscription or membership. If a newspaper website has particularly good, say, technology or automotive news coverage, and an online reader only sees the occasional tech or auto story when it makes it into the daily top 10, that’s significant incentive to pay for full access to the news site’s complete content.

Will the model I’m promoting here result in more people deciding that reading the top 10 news articles a day selected by a newspaper website’s editors, without having to pay anything, is enough, so they won’t upgrade to a full-access digital subscription or membership? I don’t have data to back it up, but my educated guess is that if “X” in “X articles per day selected by our editors” is the right number, this model will do at least as well at growing paid digital subscriptions/memberships as the “10 (or 15 or 20) articles per month” sheep model. I’ll place my money on it doing better at enticing more news-website readers to upgrade to paid subscriptions or memberships.

And if I’m right, then citizens in newspapers’ communities will be better informed, even if they choose not to pay for digital news access, and/or print-edition delivery.

So, newspaper publishers: Do you care about news knowledge and news literacy among the citizens of the community you serve? Are you sheep, following the (apparently successful) lead of NYTimes.com? Or can you think and act for yourselves?

Can you try something different, if it makes more sense in the grand scheme of things?

But I haven’t seen many people defending the move, which results in the largest major U.S. metropolitan area without a daily printed major newspaper. Then I’ll step up to the plate. …

1. Goodbye to the stock tables

My first thought at reading about the uproar — and the protests from various quarters, including local advertisers and community leaders, concerned citizen signing a Change.org petition, and of course the unfortunate journalists working at the newspapers (and some of them about not to be) — was to remember how angry lots of people got years ago when more and more newspapers began to cease printing yesterday’s stock tables in their print editions. (The trend truly took hold in the mid 2000s.)

D’uh! Day-old stock prices on newsprint couldn’t compete with online and mobile listings which were easily searchable and as up-to-the-minute as the markets would allow. Newspaper publishers rightfully ignored the complaints of some print-edition readers and stopped the anachronistic practice — yes, giving up on delivering information that people had consumed in print for many decades, but also saving money on newsprint (i.e., printing fewer pages). To continue publishing pages of stock listings in print would have been folly; at best, a few senior citizens might have continued to peruse them, but not enough to make the practice financially viable.

Reducing print editions to three days a week, as the Times-Picayune and Birmingham News are about to do, and no doubt more newspapers will copy in the months and years ahead, is pretty much the same thing. But it’s an amplified version of taking away one piece of a newspaper’s daily offerings; a community uproar is to be expected. T-P management and executives at parent Advance Publications need to weather this metaphorical storm, because there’s no turning back.

The trend line for advertising revenues in print continues to go down for most newspapers, and the trend line for print readers is headed down at an even-steeper level. It’s unrealistic to think that metro newspapers can continue printing seven days a week, lest they go the way of the Rocky Mountain News.

But what about the high percentage of New Orleans residents (especially older people and the poor) who don’t have Internet access, and thus might become less informed about what’s happening in their community because of the T-P’s cutback in print?

I’m unsympathetic. After all, the print edition of the Times-Picayune is not given away free. (Sure, people can go to the library to read a paper copy of the day’s T-P; they also can read the news online at that same library.) If T-P and Advance executives do digital right, they can move those populations to digital news on the non-print days of the week. I’ll explain that in point No. 2.

2. It’s not (just) the web!

In much of the media coverage about the T-P’s print-reduction plans (and I’ve read lots of it), you find many complaints about the company’s website, NOLA.com, not being up to snuff. At The Atlantic, former T-P journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner John McQuaid has an opinion piece titled “Why a Weak Website Can’t Replace a Daily Newspaper in New Orleans.” At GigaOm, Mathew Ingram writes, “While Advance has promised that it plans to devote more resources to the web, its critics say the company’s existing digital properties don’t exactly fill them with confidence.”

Any major metro newspaper that trims its print schedule really needs to figure out the mobile thing, because that’s where the future audience and revenues are headed

Do you notice the problem? Most everyone writing about the T-P’s transition seems to think that the missing four days a week of print editions will be replaced by the website! And if that’s where NOLA Media Group’s focus is — on expecting readers to view its journalistic product and advertising on a web browser on a computer screen — then there is trouble ahead, and the elderly and the poor may become less informed.

What’s been missing from the conversation about New Orleans is what the Times-Picayune and NOLA Media Group will be doing about news on mobile devices, especially phones. Given the obvious trend toward mobile devices beginning to outnumber computers, that’s where a big portion of the company’s resources and intellectual effort must be steered. (Will this be the case? It’s not looking promising at this point, with the number of T-P journalists about to be laid off estimated at 20-40%.)

Let’s skip across the ocean to Africa for a minute. In much of that continent, land phone lines are impractical, non-existent, or unreliable. But in some of the poorest countries on that continent, it’s common for people to have mobile phones. (Worldwide, 85% of the people on this planet have mobile phones.)

Back to New Orleans, where most people have mobile phones. In the U.S. as a whole, mobile penetration is above 100% for people age 13 and older. (That’s active accounts, with some people having more than one phone; of course, a small percentage of Americans still do not have a mobile phone.) Half of all active mobile phones in the U.S. are now smartphones, and that number will continue to grow.

In an ideal world, perhaps the Times-Picayune and other major metropolitan newspapers could continue to publish daily print editions, or at least print enough to satisfy the demand from the elderly and anti-technology crowd. (That wouldn’t be an ideal world for me; I look forward to the day when printed publications are luxury items, most content is consumed digitally, and the environmental impact of newspaper publishing is lessened significantly.) But daily print publication simply is no longer practical, if newspaper companies are to survive in the digital age.

I humbly suggest that most of New Orleans’ residents can be kept informed throughout the week, even without the T-P printing four days a week. The news company will need to get serious about mobile, and offer (and market!) services that reach the 50% of residents who have smartphones, as well as those still using “feature phones” which have lesser capabilities.

It’s not that difficult to envision a city where residents are alerted to significant local news via mobile-phone alerts and mobile-shortened news reports, whether by smartphone news-alerts or simple text messages on feature phones. If a story is important enough, phone users can read short reports, or smartphone users can read a longer version; or later, they may find a computer to read more, or wait for the next print edition. … Any major metro newspaper that trims its print schedule really needs to figure out the mobile thing, because that’s where the future audience and revenues are headed.

(For an insightful examination of the growth of mobile media, I urge you to read this Atlantic piece by Richard Ting: “Why Mobile Will Dominate the Future of Media and Advertising.”)

I’m not suggesting that the situation in New Orleans is rosy. Obviously, it sucks that many journalists will lose their jobs, and coverage of New Orleans will suffer. But for the Times-Picayune and Advance Publications to heed the call by some in the New Orleans community that it must continue printing seven days a week is not in the interest of having a Times-Picayune news enterprise that can survive long term. The company must make the digital-first transition; postponing this risks the news company getting in truly dire straits not far down the road.

As for the lessened state of journalism in New Orleans, I hope that The Lens, the award-winning investigative and public-interest news non-profit, might expand its reach and influence as a result of a declined Times-Picayune, and be able to hire more reporters and editors. We’ve seen that happen in other cities, such as with Voice of San Diego, which focuses on investigative and public-interest reporting to counter the declines at that city’s major daily newspaper, the U-T.

But what’s happened in New Orleans is inevitable. Let’s deal with it, in New Orleans today, and in other cities tomorrow.

Some news-site user monetization systems truly are “paywalls.” I’m fine with saying that The Times‘ (the UK one) website has a paywall, since you can’t read anything on that site without first taking out a paid subscription — other than rare occasions when The Times drops its paywall, such as it did when the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was taking place. (As a way for a news organization to get people to pay for reading content online, The Times’ approach is perhaps the dumbest one in existence. Latest reports put its digital subscriber base at 120,000; for a paper of its stature, I’d expect that figure to be much higher with a more-intelligent digital pay model.)

Don’t block people with a “wall”; entice premium users in.

The New York Times’ website, by contrast, does not have a “paywall” (if you ask me), though a large number of writers insist on calling the site’s payment model by that term.

It’s often said that NYTimes.com has a “porous paywall,” which is also “metered.” Translation: If you don’t want to pay for an online subscription (or a print subscription which includes full online access), you can visit the site and view up to 10 articles a month, after which you’ll have to buy a subscription for more. That’s the metered part. The porous part means that you can read more than 10 articles in a month if you click through to a NYTimes.com article from another source that’s providing a link to it — such as a search engine (including news search engines), a blog, or a social-media site like Twitter or Facebook. Those article reads don’t count toward your free monthly article allotment if you’re not a paying subscriber.

NYTimes.com is further porous to the at-least-somewhat technically inclined. It doesn’t take much sophistication on a web browser to defeat the 10-a-month limit. If told that you’ve reached your free limit, you can continue reading NYT articles online by: 1) lopping off the last part of the article URL, after and including the question mark, and refreshing the page; 2) clearing your NYTimes.com cookies from your browser and starting a new browser session; 3) copying the headline into a search engine to find the article, then clicking that link; 4) following NYTimes.com on Twitter and clicking through to articles from there; or 5) setting up multiple free accounts on separate devices (laptop, tablet, smartphone) so that you can read 10 articles a month on each.

Some media experts have suggested that NYTimes.com really is using a “donation model,” since it’s so easy to avoid paying and still read more than 10 of its articles a month. The logic goes: The people who are paying NYT’s “demanded” monthly fee actually are those who want to support Times journalism. It’s not that far removed from the NPR model of funding a serious journalism enterprise; public-radio supporters become “members,” and that’s essentially what NYTimes.com subscribers are. That approach by the New York Times (with upward of 400,000 paying digital subscribers) appears to be working much better than The Times’ (UK) “hard paywall” model.

Perhaps I’m just getting into a semantic argument, but I think that what NYTimes.com actually has established is a “freemium” content system. This is especially obvious on its mobile apps, but it’s also the case on the Times website.

• NYTimes.com smartphone app: Without paying, you can read all the articles in the Top News section, every day; every other section on the app when tapped will prompt you for payment to read articles within. But reading NYT’s selection of top stories and nothing else on the app will keep you pretty well informed — for free. If that’s not enough, you pay to upgrade: Purchase a digital subscription. That’s the freemium model. The iPad app for NYTimes.com works the same way; the pricing is just different.
• NYTimes.com website: I’d argue that the website likewise uses a freemium model. If you can live with reading only 10 free articles a month from the Times, then you’re at the free level. Pay for a subscription to see NYTimes.com’s full content and you’ve bought into its premium upgrade.

What I’d like to see NYTimes.com do is market the “premium” access to its news content as a “membership” offer

Actually, I think that publicly calling the NYTimes.com pay model “freemium” to an audience of news consumers is as foolish as calling it a “paywall.” Both are terms for media geeks.

What I’d like to see NYTimes.com do — and other news sites that in growing numbers are adopting a similar model for getting online users to pay to read news — is market the “premium” access to its news content as a “membership” offer. “Become a member and read everything that the New York Times has to offer on your computer or mobile device. Non-members can read up to 10 articles a month online or read ‘Top News’ articles daily on the Times’ mobile apps.”

Then, if we can scratch the word “paywall” out of the discussion and keep it out of any and all marketing communication, we can work on making the most out of digital “memberships.” The base membership can be what’s described above: simple full access to all news content. A higher-priced membership can be that plus other benefits: discounts to physical NYT-sponsored events; free participation in online events or webinars or Google Hangouts with newsmakers and Times journalists; complementary memberships in a NYTimes.com wine club; etc.

As more newspapers have copied the NYTimes.com payment model on their own websites, we’ve seen a wave of coverage about this sea change. And too often, the word “paywall” gets bandied about and published in news articles. That drives me nuts, because it’s not doing newspaper websites any good.

I’ve written before that for news websites and their supplementary mobile apps, a “membership model” is the best way to go. I’d add that a “freemium” approach is inherent in the membership model (or should be). I hope that the industry might take a look again at this model for getting online and mobile-device users to pay something, and thus get newspapers away from being so dependent on online advertising revenues.

The reality is this: NYTimes.com and any other news site that copies its user-payment model will have a large group of loyal free users (i.e., “non-members”) and a smaller group of paying users (“members”). We media geeks can look at this and understand that’s it’s an application of the “freemium” model. Consumers of news can recognize that their choice is to be a (paying) member or a non-member.

That sounds so much more amenable than “hitting the paywall.”

This month’s Carnival prompt is a fascinating one. Put forth by University of Southern California professor Andrew Lih and his students, the provocative question is: “What is your most dangerous idea for journalism?”

Here’s my answer in a video (at the urging of Lih, to get Carnival folks out of their text habit, I suppose):

In the video I mentioned a couple companies. Here are links to their websites:

• FactSummary
• TimeStarvd

OK, it’s going to take someone smarter than me to give a good direct answer to that. I’m sure one or more of my fellow Carnival-goers will rise to the challenge.

When I look at the question, I can’t help but get sidetracked into thinking how social media (i.e., “the crowd” utilizing digital social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Change.org, among others, to amplify their voices) in a growing number of cases is having more impact than the traditional news media can achieve themselves — or is driving the mainstream news media to pay attention to stories that their editors fail to recognize as important.

It’s the public leveraging social media that keeps taking hold of stories where professional journalists either misjudge the importance or just miss because of lack of resources, and then amplify those stories to the point where mainstream news organizations have no choice but to pump up their coverage (and thus look “out to lunch” to those already aware of the story from the social-media uproar). [...article continues below the video]

Twitter’s Twitter Stories website features stories of tweets that made an impact, such as this tale of a son’s tweet that saved his mother’s Portland bookstore from going out of business. In the past, perhaps a newspaper reporter’s story on the store’s plight would have generated the community support to achieve the same result.

The way I see it, traditional news organizations are seeing their “gatekeeper” roles usurped increasingly more often by the public’s use of social media. In other words, when editors do a lousy job of gatekeeping and keep important stories locked behind the gate, the public now has the power to become the gatekeepers and unlock an overlooked story. It’s not that news media don’t have the power to have an impact; it’s that now an outraged public can use social-media tools to have an impact, sometimes bypassing the news media and sometimes manipulating news organizations to join the fight.

Here are just a few recent examples:

• The Trayvon Martin killing in Florida. It took several weeks for news organizations to pay due attention to this racially charged incident of a neighborhood watch volunteer shooting an unarmed black teenager; initial news reports treated it as a routine crime story. The story truly picked up thanks to a petition on Change.org, which as I write this has gathered 1.75 million signatures asking for prosecution of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, who was not arrested. At Poynter.org, Kelly McBride has a good write-up about the Martin case and how social media drove the news media coverage to eventually turn it into a national story: “Trayvon Martin story reveals new tools of media power, justice.”
   
• The Susan B. Komen Foundation dropping Planned Parenthood funding. Komen, the breast-cancer charity famous for its “Komen Walks for the Cure,” succumbed to right-wing pressure to stop giving funds to Planned Parenthood for breast screenings. This action created a huge firestorm on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social-media sites. Komen officials tried to ride out the controversy, but the furor online (including online petitions and the online threats of many women who had been Komen supporters to stop giving to the foundation) forced them to overturn their decision. By the time mainstream news media were paying serious attention to the Komen story, the social-media-led furor already had made an impact; news reports merely added to the already intense pressure on the organization to back down.
   
• The UC-Davis pepper-spray incident. Who can forget the university police officer pepper-spraying a line of peaceful students sitting in a line on the ground during an Occupy protest on the Davis, California, campus? I first noticed this on Twitter and began following the story there and on Facebook. I remember early on looking for coverage by mainstream news organizations, but finding very little. It took a couple days, as I recall, for this outrageous act by a law-enforcement officer to hit its stride in the traditional news media. By then, calls for the firing of the officer and the removal of UC-Davis’ chancellor were already at fever pitch across social-media channels.

This is not to suggest that news media have been neutered by social media’s power. News organizations that still have a strong investigative-journalism mission and the resources to conduct this kind of reporting can have an impact and effect change on their own. Propublica offers a great example: The non-profit news organization’s major investigation into the oil and gas industry’s practice of “fracking” and the environmental threat posed to groundwater supplies has been a four-year effort, with tangible impact.

Another example of a traditional news organization’s journalism having an impact is the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of corruption in the small city of Bell, California, for which the Times won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and which led to corrective action and criminal prosecutions.

Of course, the LA Times’ Bell-corruption investigation points to the reason that journalism has less impact today than a few years ago, before thousands of journalists across the U.S. took buyouts or were laid off. Municipal officials’ corruption in Bell had been going on for years, but a weakened press and no strong local news organizations allowed it to continue uncovered for a good long time.

To circle back to Greg Linch’s question, we need to figure out how to measure the impact of journalism, and track how it fares in the years ahead. Measurement will be how we know that we’ve climbed out of the hole left by the departure of so many professional journalists from traditional news organizations.

But for a final word, let’s get back to social media. I think it’s fair to say that social media will continue to grow in impact, as citizens spot outrageous things (say, Rush Limbaugh calling a college student advocating for birth control to be covered by all health insurance a “slut” and “prostitute”) and use the new tools at their disposal to accomplish goals (which occurred in the Limbaugh episode when well over 100 advertisers dropped the right-wing commentator’s radio show).

For news organizations to have impact (and not just report the news), they’ll need to get better at leveraging social media and incorporating it into the news process. For instance, if more newsrooms had editors who monitored social media sites routinely and deeply, they wouldn’t get blind-sided by a social-media firestorm because they’d know about it already. If those editors also curated the social-media chatter around breaking news events and exploding issues, they’d be part of the process instead of laggards catching up when it becomes obvious that they need to start paying attention to a story.

Social media and traditional news media both have the capacity to impact an issue and force change. At this point in time, I’d have to say that social media is gaining the edge. But news organizations have the ability to make an impact more often, as they’ve done in the past. Will they?

I’d been wanting to play host to a Carnival, and got my wish for February, thanks to Carnival overseer David Cohn. Here’s the question:

“What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead? And how do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?”

Got an opinion? A good answer? A contrarian point of view? Please consider participating! Here’s my original post introducing this month’s Carnival, which has all the details about how to take part.

I’ll probably open myself up to charges of being “ageist,” but here goes…

Working at a university journalism program (University of Colorado Boulder), I’ve come to the conclusion that the next generation of journalists will be better capitalists than older journalists. Because what I’m seeing on this campus, and I’m sure it’s similar at other university journalism programs, is a growing number of students who are interested in business-model innovation for news. No, certainly not a majority, but enough to feel some optimism.

More new journalism graduates will want to build new news businesses, because they’ve grown up to see lone bloggers starting on a shoestring build sizable media enterprises

That’s logical, since many journalism students (but not all, in my experience!) recognize that the old news institutions that try to cling to their old business models are crumbling, and they understand that to forge a career in journalism they will need to come up with new ways for news entities to be profitable, or at least sustainable — whether they go to work for an existing news organization or create a new digital news enterprise from scratch using today’s and tomorrow’s inexpensive or free digital publishing tools.

At the Digital News Test Kitchen, I’m working with two graduate students this semester who have business-model projects and research under way: one focusing on collegiate news media, the other on niche (music/entertainment) news media. One Journalism master’s student just asked me for a recommendation letter to support her application to CU’s MBA program, so she can work on dual master’s degrees while she’s here in Boulder. (That’s fantastic; I only wish that another 10 students would announce similar intentions.) A journalism student and Test Kitchen researcher who received his master’s degree in December now works for a national non-profit news service based in Boulder, serving as a digital-media and business-model strategist.

Looking elsewhere, we’ve seen a growing number of entrepreneurial journalism programs, like the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, run by Jeff Jarvis at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism; the Missouri School of Journalism’s interdisciplinary Entrepreneurial Journalism program; and at Arizona State, the Cronkite School’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship.

At many journalism schools and departments that lack that kind of commitment and devotion of resources, entrepreneurial journalism courses at least have been added. That’s the case at CU-Boulder, with a course called “Adventures in Entrepreneurial Journalism,” which has been co-taught by faculty from Journalism and the Business School’s Deming Center for Entrepreneurship.

I have to believe that today’s crop of journalism graduates will embark into the world of news (those that choose to work in journalism) devoid of the attitudes that were instilled in my generation of journalism graduates: that editorial and the business sides of news should be separated by a wall, lest the latter contaminate the ethics of the former. I think that more new graduates will want to build new journalism businesses, because they’ve grown up to see lone bloggers starting on a shoestring build sizable media enterprises (TalkingPointsMemo, PaidContent, the Drudge Report, etc.). And they’ve been exposed to the notions that entrepreneurship and journalism now do mix; you don’t have to start with a big pile of money to start a media enterprise; and it is ethically possible to seek both truth and cash.

Can older journalists who’ve crossed from print and broadcast into digital become successful capitalists? Of course there are the exceptions, but I’m less optimistic about my age peers than about the students I encounter daily. For every Nick Denton (a British former newspaper journalist who built the Gawker empire and is every bit the successful capitalist) there are probably a hundred former old-media journalists scraping by with their own news websites covering their communities and still doing the work they love, but not having much of a chance that their small media businesses will grow beyond small.

That’s not to denigrate smaller online news entities that have emerged and are filling the holes left by the many layoffs of journalists from old-media organizations. We might call those local news websites (the ones that are for-profit) capitalism with a small “c”; they can serve their communities well, create some but not large numbers of new jobs for journalists, and give their founders a non-extravagant earnings level.

But my suspicion and my prediction is that it will be the next generation that will include journalism entrepreneurs who, for the lucky ones, will create journalism-based enterprises that grow to be represent Capitalism, with a capital “C.”

Next month’s Carnival: Hosted by me, Digital News Test Kitchen

I’ve been wanting to host a Carnival of Journalism, and head organizer David Cohn has agreed to let me do it for February 2012. So watch for the announcement soon of next month’s question, hosted by the Digital News Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder and me.

If you are a journalist, what would be the best present from programmers and developers that Santa Claus could leave under your Christmas tree?

I’ll overlook the pro-Christian slant (hey, what about under the FSM tree?!) and play the game.

What I’d like to receive is a written contract from some developers and technologist friends committing to spending a year of their time working on projects that are purely related to the betterment (or perhaps resurrection is a better word) of journalism and informing communities, utilizing the latest in technology developments and know-how.

Not to be too restrictive, they can work with me, my colleagues and students in the Journalism program at CU-Boulder, and/or journalists of all kinds in a variety of areas: New crowd-funding systems for news. … New forms of and platforms for crowd-sourcing. … New forms of storytelling that better engage news consumers, and that support making money from readers or users. … New algorithms to identify quality and credibility in news content, and filter out the best stuff (not just the most popular). … New systems to not only entice online and mobile users to pay for news and/or news-related services, but also make it easy and frictionless to make payments. (Could you build a Spotify for news, please?) … New algorithms to better mine the social-media stream (or more accurately, raging torrent of a river) for news which can be personalized to individual readers’ locations and/or interests. … Well, I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you.

The point is, developers, programmers, and technologists are in high demand. On my campus, our Computer Science Department is hammered with requests for partnerships and collaborations not just from Journalism, but from all manner of disciplines. If I could get a half dozen CS students to work with the Digital News Test Kitchen for a year, I’d be in heaven.

Out in the “real world,” technologists seem to have better things to do than concentrate on altruistic technology projects that serve to better inform communities or help clueless news executives adapt to the digital age. Where’s the potential big payout in that, after all? The promise of big money is everywhere except in the news industry, it would seem. Venture capitalists don’t want to invest in news ventures, for the most part, so why should individuals with in-high-demand technology skills work within a field where money is more likely to come from philanthropists and foundations than VCs?

Yet I know that there are some technologists who “get it” — who understand that journalism is in crisis; that the deterioration in quality journalism is immensely corrosive of our democracy; and that solutions for improving the sorry state of today’s journalism will require the expertise and effort of technologists working with journalists. I meet some such people at our local Hack/Hackers Colorado meetings. I read about them being part of the Knight Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

There just aren’t enough of them to go around. Certainly there aren’t enough technologists willing to pitch in their expertise to help journalists figure out how to get out of the mess we’re in.

So I’d like Santa, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whoever puts stuff under my holiday tree to find a bunch of talented technologists looking for a challenge like leveraging emerging technology to reinvent a floundering industry which just happens to be vital to the future functioning of our democracy. Maybe they can consider it akin to serving in the Peace Corps for a year; they’ll do something important and good for society, before returning to the work where the money is.

“Think about all of the possible forms of delivering news and information online. In general, what ‘top of the mind’ ideas do you think ‘online news’ will look like in 20 years?”

and

“Now think about the type of device and where people will be accessing news. How do you think these factors will affect the format(s) of online news in terms of what the user wants?”

Twenty years?! Now there’s an opportunity to make a fool of myself with predictions that have a slim-to-none chance of turning out to be correct. But what the hell, it’s fun to try. And when I’m 74, I can chuckle at my prognostications while relaxing in my solar-powered rocking chair as my digital assistant finds this old blog item, reads each prediction, and explains where I went wrong (or was right).

[Note to future self's information assistant: Find this and bring it to my attention 20 years from today.]

1. We won’t call it “online news,” but simply news. Even today, I think “online news” is an outdated term; I prefer “digital news” in order to encompass news consumption whether online on a laptop or untethered on smartphone, tablet, or other wireless device.

2. News — my own personal version of “the news” — will be everywhere I go, and available on any device that I may encounter. Laptop (will they still be around then?), personal tablet, phone/communicator/personal assistant: They’ll all know what I’ve read or viewed (including how far into a story or a video); what important news and events I don’t yet know about but should; and know my preferences from having tracked my every bit of info consumption for years and offering choices that are for the most part spot on. This same personal data profile will be available on any media device that I come across. My (electric) rental car’s media device will identify me (and know me intimately) by communicating with my phone, and its screen will show my relevant news: the map to my hotel and driving time; photograph of the sunset at home from my wife; the soccer score of this afternoon’s game that my grandson played in; the top news stories in the city I’ve arrived in; local weather forecast; the top news headlines from my home city, national and international headlines. When I start driving the car, the media system will switch to audio, and respond to my commands.

3. What we call “news” today will have a different meaning in 20 years. As alluded to above, it means everything from what my wife and I are having for dinner, to the next-door neighbor’s cat was killed by a coyote, to today’s movement of my investment portfolio, to the more traditional news items (i.e., what’s happening in the world, near and far). Yes, it will be a lot of information, but I will be able to choose layers to focus on (say, family “news” or “just sports”); or have my stream filtered to show some of everything but at a high interest score based on my info profile. It might tailor what I see based on my mood: “I’m tired; don’t give me anything too depressing or complex.” … Note that 20 years from now this “news” will not be tied to a single news brand, but rather some “news+information system” or “agent” (with a brand) will find and deliver all that’s relevant to me, from many media brands. (Perhaps I’ll pay a monthly fee for this service, which will divvy up my money to pay bits to the various content sources included in my news stream. For “premium” content within my stream, I’ll pay this entity to include it in my stream rather than deal directly with lots of content or information purveyors.) Some “news” will be from friends, neighbors, strangers who are not journalists, and will not partake in the money-splitting; but I’ll be able to “tip” or donate money if I wish to. Their news will flow seamlessly into my news stream alongside professional sources, but I’ll always know at a glance what kind of source I’m viewing.

4. In 20 years, I think we will have figured out how to identify quality and credibility among the thousands and thousands of news sources vying for some of my attention. If my friend recommends an article from an author or news source that I’ve never heard of, I’ll see quality and credibility scores for the article and the source, and measures of bias that this source might exhibit. It won’t be enough, as it is today, to read a hot story because dozens of my friends have; I’ll have some better indicators of who and what’s worth my media time, and how good (or bad) they are, to add to my friends’ recommendations.

5. Along those same lines, my news tools will fact-check every news story I read, highlighting mistruths, mistakes, bias, etc., and providing citation links to back up highlighted problem areas in the content. If a news story is analyzed as getting too low of a credibility score, my news assistant will recommend that I skip it. (Perhaps this will develop into an industry of its own, as an important piece of the 2034 media environment.)

6. If you think that there aren’t enough hours in the day, today, just wait 20 years! With exponentially more news and information, I’ll need a killer filtering system that identifies the best media content with little to no effort on my part. I’ll also have at my disposal information tools that will condense the news and information I need or want to consume. “Information assistant: Give me Boulder, national, and technology news headlines of the last 12 hours in 15 minutes, audio format” (the time I have on my drive to the office). “I have 30 minutes to read on this train trip. Condense my book to be read in 30 minutes, text format.” Algorithms will be sophisticated enough that an e-book that normally would be read in 4 hours will in 30 minutes give me a pretty good summary, and likewise select the most important pieces of news stories to fit into my desired, limited time. Much if not most content will be available in multiple formats, to suit my desire to read, listen, watch, or interact with a news story or other information.

7. What about platforms? This one is so difficult to predict, but even 20 years hence I can’t imagine a pocket-size device (today’s smartphone, evolved ) being able to do everything. My future handheld assistant can be my window to the news of the world and the neighborhood; it can be my ultimate communicate-with-anyone-in-any-format device; it can replace my expensive dedicated camera and video-cam; it can replace my wallet (ID, credit cards, cash, membership cards, medical history); and much, much more. But I think we’ll always want a larger screen, both for more pleasant and enjoyable media consumption (especially video and movies) and for getting work accomplished, as well as for reading books, catalogs, and documents. If there’s a popular device today that’s probably toast in 20 years, it’s the laptop computer. I think we’ll see such tremendous gains in tablets that they will replace laptops as most people’s primary work device. This MacBook Pro that I’m typing on today, in 20 years will probably be looked on like we woud a manual typewriter today. … So, two primary personal media devices. That’s my prediction, but seriously, who knows what other grand devices will emerge that we can’t live without.

8. Location, location, location. In 20 years, I expect that just about every physical object in our world will have data attached to it, in multiple layers of information type. Walk past a building: Your phone/personal assistant will know who’s in it (companies as well as people in your friends networks), what recent news and historical events are associated with it; etc. Walk down the street in a high-crime urban neighborhood and you’ll be able to view to physical locations of past murders, assaults, drug arrests. Come upon a statue while strolling a new city and view its story, including a short video documentary; leave a digital “I was here” message to add to the statue’s location data. Walk down the street, unsuspectingly, toward a crime scene, and you’ll be alerted to reroute, and receive what information is available about the incident, including photos and accounts from eyewitnesses.

9. I do still think that we will have, two decades from now, some major, important, well-respected, credible serious-news organizations. They will do the hard stuff — the costly investigative reporting; the constant monitoring of governments and corporations, exposing misdeeds and mistakes. I think that they will be public media entities, mostly, not commercial, because we will have gotten fed up with the mediocrity that news organizations supported by corporate interests gave us for so many years. From today’s vantage point, I see continued decline of “traditional” news media, which will force public media to step up their game. Wealthy technology companies, not with malice but simply by the nature of their businesses having disrupted news business models and not leaving alternative or new models sufficient to fund quality journalism, will steer their foundations to support public news organizations. At the local level, community foundations will have come to understand that low-quality local journalism has a negative impact on many facets of their communities, and they will fund local public media to a degree sufficient to have a strong local media watchdog. Of course, foundations won’t fund all this, and in 20 years public news organizations will have figured out how to sustain themselves with the help of foundations, but not be dependent on them.

10. Finally, I think that in 20 years many of the functions done by human journalists will be accomplished with automation. That’s a trend that’s been happening in most industries for many decades, so it’s a pretty safe prediction. Today, social-media content (e.g., the Twitter stream) often surfaces news events, which get noticed by humans and eventually spread to reach mainstream media. It’s not difficult to imagine an algorithm that automatically identifies significant news events that surface within the Twitter “firehose” (if Twitter is still around and/or relevant in 20 years) and publishes early “breaking-news” reports automatically. It probably will have enough built-in smarts to spot hoaxes. And to hark back to earlier mentions of personalization, this auto-spotted news from the social stream will be delivered to you the news consumer when it matches your interests or is happening in your neck of the woods. A “news algorithm” might monitor the huge network of live video cameras likely to be ubiquitous in cities 20 years hence, identifying and live-streaming news events that it spots (accidents, fires, crimes in progress, etc.). … And the human journalists? This prediction in no way presupposes that there will be fewer employed journalists. Rather, they will be freed from mundane tasks and be able to concentrate more of their time on producing “enterprise,” investigative, and feature reporting. And certainly there will be more journalists making a living covering niche topics that today go uncovered.

OK, enough fun — or is it enough making a fool of myself for even attempting to look 20 years ahead. Actually, looking back over my words above, I think some of this is possible in another five years.

Whatever. The future of media will be what it will be. I just hope to continue playing a small role in shaping it for the next 20 years.

(I have to laugh when I visit the Google+ Welcome page, which still mentions that the service is in “Field Trial” mode. With 25 million users for Google+, and still growing quickly, few companies would continue to call this a field trial — but Google is no ordinary company.)

Since plenty has been written about how journalists are discovering uses for Google+, I’ll pass on retrodding that ground. Here’s my alternate message:

• If you’re a journalist, you SHOULD be using Google+.
• If you’re a journalism professor or instructor, you MUST be using Google+.

Yeah, that’s easy for me to say. My career in large part is about identifying and leveraging emerging technologies that are relevant to journalism, testing them, experimenting, and conducting research. I enjoy checking out all the new digital stuff that our technology friends unleash on the world, and figuring out what’s useful and relevant to our profession — what will advance storytelling, reporting techniques, community, and news business models — and what’s not.

Many a journalist and many a journalism professor will recoil at the thought of trying out yet another social-media service. They want to do or teach journalism, not add on to what already may seem like social-media overload. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Flickr, Digg… — and now Google+! Can’t we just stop already and stick to the basics of producing and teaching good journalism?!

I’m sympathetic to that sentiment, but only to a degree. For many upstart online, mobile, and social-media services that appear to be useful journalistic tools but have not yet caught much traction, fine, leave it to people like me to figure out if they’re of use to the profession.

Take VYou.com, a social-based video Q&A and audience interaction service that I’m very fond of. I think VYou has tremendous potential to be useful to journalists, and I encourage people to use it. At the University of Colorado Boulder, where I’m the program director for the Digital News Test Kitchen, I’ve convinced some of our faculty, researchers, and student journalists to experiment with VYou.com.

But I will not go so far as to suggest that you are a bad journalist or an incompetent journalism professor because you’re not willing to give VYou a chance and try it out. As much as I like VYou and the online and mobile interaction model it represents, the service has yet to prove itself.

Google+ is different. Google has tried before to get it right with a social-media service. Buzz, it is pretty well acknowledged, was a flop. Okrut, Google’s first foray into social media, got popular outside the U.S., but never caught on in Google’s home country. The company seems to have learned some important lessons and has incorporated them into Google+. The reviews for Google+ have been mostly positive — actually, very positive. (Count me as enthusiastic about Google+; I’m likely to be a loyal user, just as with Facebook.) Rapid growth to 25 million users in a matter of weeks since launch of the “field trial” should tell you that Google+ is a compelling social-media experience which poses the most serious threat to Facebook of anything else out there.

For that reason, I can take the view — certain to be unpopular among many journalists who are weary of keeping up with the latest digital-media developments — that journalists have got to become familiar with Google+, just as they must be familiar with and use Facebook and Twitter.

I mean, c’mon, tens and hundreds of million people are using those services, and they’re getting news from them! If you expect to remain a working journalist, you really have no choice but to understand the impact that Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ are having on the news environment. And you can’t understand them unless you use those services.

For those who teach journalism, I will be even more emphatic. If you are teaching tomorrow’s journalists, and you are not up to speed on and using the services with hundreds of millions of users — social-media services that are profoundly changing the way people get news that’s relevant to them — then you’re doing your students a grave disservice.

Does everyone have to try out and/or use Google+, or Facebook and Twitter? Of course not, and huge parts of the population in the U.S. and other countries will continue to sit out the social-media revolution.

But if you are a journalist working today, or a journalism educator, you have an obligation to use and understand these services. I would hope that few reading these words are not already regular users of Facebook and Twitter. If you’re still holding out on Google+, waiting to see if it’s something worth spending some of your time learning and using, you’re late for the train.

Google+: Just use it, journalists!