This month’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Michael Rosenbaum, asks the provocative question: “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”

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.”

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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.

I missed the last couple Carnivals of Journalism, but it’s time for me to get back into the groove. This month there is a question each for journalists and for technologists. My question is:

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.

I recently participated (well, sort of — via a remote Skype presentation) in the University of South Carolina’s “Journalism, Sustainability, and Media Regeneration Conference.” Its organizer, Professor Augie Grant, sent a survey to everyone who attended that opened with a couple questions that I should not answer but cannot resist:

“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.

 

This month’s “Carnival of Journalism” asked the question: “What does Google+ mean for journalists, today and tomorrow?” Of course, I don’t have all the answers; I’m not sure yet that I have one really good answer. Google+, Google’s first serious threat to Facebook in the social-media space, is so new that we’re all grappling with how to best leverage it.

(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!

I just renewed my subscription to Wired magazine. $12 for another year of the print edition, plus I get the tablet edition for free to read an enhanced edition on my iPad. What a deal!

Alas, I don’t want the print edition! I’d prefer to receive only the iPad edition and reduce my carbon footprint a bit by causing one less copy of the magazine to be printed, shipped around by trucks, and so on. Also, I prefer reading on my iPad over print magazines, the latter which tend to get lost in piles of paper and books around the house. But for the $12-a-year renewal offer, I have to get the print edition.

Sure, I could opt for paying for just the digital-tablet edition with no print delivery, but that would cost me $19.99 a year. (That also happens to be the price advertised for new subscribers on the Wired website for print edition and tablet subscription. The site doesn’t offer tablet-only for that price, as far as I can tell; you can pay $19.99 a year and avoid the print edition by purchasing a digital edition via the iPad app.)

If I was truly committed to avoiding the extra resources consumed and pollution created by taking the print edition, I could of course just pay the extra $8 a year. It’s not much, right? I considered that, but I’m on a meager university salary and my wife is a public-school teacher, and in this economy we’ve had to watch expenses and cut back on some things (bye-bye, exorbitant cable-TV bill!), so if I have a chance to save money, I do. (I’ll donate my printed Wired magazines to my wife’s school library.)

Besides, what logic is there to charge subscribers more for getting less (i.e., digital-only subscription), and charging more for subscribers who want to do the right thing environmentally? It’s stupid.

Well, it’s not stupid from the publisher’s standpoint, of course. Wired and its parent company want me and others to continue to take the print edition, whether we want it or not, because those colorful print ads that fill up the magazine bring in lots of money. It won’t do to encourage or support subscribers giving up print in favor of digital only, because the print ads would then bring in less money.

I get that. But it pisses me off that in this media transition that we find ourselves in, print publishers resort to discouraging the digital transition and encouraging subscribers to continue receiving a product that consumes physical resources (trees) and pollutes the environment (trucks and delivery).

It’s not just Wired. Making the cheapest option for newspaper and magazine subscriptions be print + digital is a current major trend in media business models.

In another few years, perhaps we’ll be past such stupidity (I mean in an environmental sense, not a business one). For now, all I or any magazine or newspaper subscriber who wants a publisher’s product and are caught in such a situation can do is gripe, or be altruistic and pay more.

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism (Twitter hashtag #jcarn), Lisa Williams is leading the show, and she has this question:

“Right now, nominations are open for the Online Journalism Awards. What qualities should awards like this endorse in an era of such tremendous change in the news industry?”

I’m a bit late, so I’ve had the opportunity to read some of the earlier entries. A common theme is that good, solid, hard-hitting journalism is a must for receiving OJA recognition, and where new technology comes in is for journalists to select the right (digital) technology to best communicate the story in innovative ways. It’s a consistent, logical message: Balance strong journalism with digital innovation. I can’t argue with that.

But I also picked up some disdain about ONA — indeed, about technology-focused and forward-thinking journalists — obsessing too much on “the latest shiny new thing” and downplaying the serious-journalism part. So here I get to veer off the common path and praise shiny new digital things that can be useful in the practice of journalism.

Clearly, no one (including me) is going to advocate ignoring or downplaying the great-journalism piece. But I like the shiny new things that today’s technologists foist on the market, especially those that have interesting and potentially powerful applications for journalism and storytelling.

Of course, I’m biased. My digital-media program at the University of Colorado Boulder serves, in part, as the horizon watcher for the Journalism & Mass Communication program. So it’s my job to take a look at all the shiny new digital things that come along and assess whether or not they might be useful to journalists (and non-journalists doing journalism-like things, like recording disasters and news events when they find themselves as eyewitnesses holding a phone capable of recording audio, video, taking photos, and sharing any of that instantly with the world).

Having done this for a good long time, I like to think that I can identify the new digital toys (um, I mean tools) that have the potential for significantly impacting how we practice journalism. Likewise, I can usually spot the ones that aren’t worth my enthusiasm. Of course, I’m not always right, and neither is anyone else who calls him/herself a media geek.

Again, I’m biased because of the work that I do, but I really wish that more publishers, editors, and journalists working in news organizations would take a more adventurous path and try (the most promising of the) shiny new things. Ditto for professors in journalism programs (and that includes the one where I work). Too many, in my experience, view it as a waste of their time and prefer to wait for others to prove that the latest new technology is important to journalism — then maybe they’ll climb on board.

Oh, Steve, I can hear the skeptics mutter as they read this, you’re just a gadget freak; you enjoy this, but we don’t! … But let’s think about why being a student of “emerging digital technology” is not just an idle pastime for those of us concerned about the future of journalism.

Consider the news industry. Newspapers have died, are dying; journalists by the thousands have been shown the door, and those jobs aren’t coming back. There’s a (small but) thriving new news landscape shaping up, but it’s still dwarfed by old media, and too often funded by foundation and philanthropic money because this new wave of news organizations is not yet sustainable without charity. On the former, slowness in adopting emerging digital technologies is one of the major reasons that the news industry is in such a mess today.

Consider journalism education. Sure, there are plenty of digital innovators teaching tomorrow’s journalists. But they remain the minority. If most journalism educators at colleges and universities focused a decent portion of their time on digital innovation, perhaps the “answers” to resurrecting a failed news industry would have been discovered by now — by faculty, students, and researchers in the higher-education system!

Consider, too, this old Apple TV commercial, “Think Different,” celebrating the innovators and the risk-takers:

Since I first moved from old news to an Internet career in 1994, the ones who “thought differently,” became fabulously wealthy, and invented new industries (thus disrupting old ones) have been in the technology sector, primarily. Journalists mostly “thought the same” about the digital revolution swirling around them, or “thought a little bit differently.” It’s little wonder, then, that our profession still struggles to find its way.

It’s not realistic to believe that journalists can suddenly “think different” to such a degree and achieve as much as the founders of Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, et al. But more modest and doable is to take risks and try out promising new digital technologies right away; experiment now, not tomorrow. Accept failures as part of the deal, and run with the successes.

Which leads (finally) back to the Online Journalism Awards. I’d like to see OJA’s organizers recognize and honor the risk takers in the profession. Such an award might not be given to an individual or organization that has yet chalked up a big success. But it is these people and companies that will lead the news industry through this rough digital transition and to success on the other side of the chasm.

I’d like to see OJA reward the misfits and the tinkerers within journalism. Without them guiding the news industry forward, there will be little great journalism on which to bestow awards.

I’m not the most organized person, but I do try. And thanks to some wonderful digital technologies that I’ve discovered, I’m much better at staying organized than in the past. So I do feel qualified to participate in this month’s Carnival of Journalism, where the challenge is:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills, and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

Here are just a few things that I find most valuable:

Omnifocus

While I prefer to do my work and store it in the cloud, Omnifocus is an exception. It’s a client app (Mac only) for organizing projects and your life, and it’s by far the best I’ve found. And I’ve tried LOTS of personal organizers, going all the way back to paper Franklin Planners (failed), to using a Handspring Visor (an old Palm Pilot clone), to Remember the Milk, and loads more that failed me — or more accurately, I failed them. But Omnifocus is great. It takes some time initially to get it set up with your projects and personal behavior patterns reflected, and you need to use it regularly to keep it up to date, but the effort is worth it. Omnifocus also syncs with its iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad apps, but both of those must be purchased separately from the $80 price of the Mac app. (While Omnifocus syncs to the cloud, you’re working on your Mac or iOS device, so I differentiate that from actually working in the cloud, as with something like Remember the Milk.)

Google Docs

This is obvious, but worth mentioning as a cloud-based way to create and store your work and notes. Rather than my old way of taking notes (say, during a phone interview) on TextEdit, I open up a new Google Docs text document and save it to a folder. I also do my writing on Google Docs (unless I’m away from Internet connectivity); I like the security of knowing that if my Macbook’s hard drive dies while I’m writing, my work won’t be lost. (Yes, that has happened to me in the past.)

ActiveInbox for Gmail

I love Gmail, and I’ve loved Gmail for many years. (I cannot believe some people still use Outlook! Yuck!!) What makes Gmail even better is adding on ActiveInbox, which helps you manage e-mail tasks and projects and overall makes managing a massive and active inbox much easier. It works with Gmail’s existing labels, and the learning curve is close to zero. It’s based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles. I love it.

Rapportive

This is another Gmail add-on, and I can’t recommend this one highly enough. With Rapportive on top of Gmail, when you open up an e-mail, say from someone you don’t know, Rapportive looks up the sender on various social networks and displays that information (along with a photo of the person, usually) in the right column, so it’s simple to learn about the mysterious e-mail correspondent. Hover over any address in an e-mail and Rapportive will instantly reveal details on that person, which is great when an e-mail has multiple recipients and you want to find out more about them.

Scrible

Scrible is a browser bookmarklet that allows you to highlight any webpage and add comments to it. You can then save the highlighted version of the page to your personal Scrible.com library and tag the articles for grouping, or e-mail the highlighted copy of the article to someone else. This is a very new product, so it’s not perfect; I occasionally try to mark up or save an article and Scrible’s servers are super-slow or don’t respond. I wish that I could share my personal library of highlighted articles, or groups of tagged highlighted articles, with others, but that’s not possible (and probably would violate copyright law if it was). But I really like the interface of this bookmarklet. My wife insists that Diijo is the best of these types of save-stuff-and-mark-it-up solutions, but I prefer Scrible; it just seems faster that using Diijo. I’m hoping that Scrible will evolve to be even better, but it’s off to a great start.

USAA Mobile Deposit

If you don’t bank with USAA, perhaps your bank has a similar phone app. USAA’s iPhone app allows you to take photos of both sides of a check and deposit it instantly. Thankfully, electronic deposit, Paypal, et al are fast making paper checks go the way of printed newspapers. But just like newspapers, checks will be with us for a while, so it’s a great time-saver to be able to use my iPhone to deposit them.

Zite for iPad

I own an iPad (1), and it’s my favored device for keeping up with RSS feeds (i.e., personalized news). I’ve tried most of the slick RSS readers and personalized-news apps for the iPad, like Flipboard, News.me, Trove, Reeder, and others that I’ve now put out of my memory. But Zite stands out and is the one that I continue to use regularly. Highly recommended.

I don’t want to break my record of contributing to all of the resurrected Carnivals of Journalism, but this month I’m just too darned busy. However, a few years ago, I did write up the lessons I learned from a start-up company where I was one of two co-founders: the Enthusiast Group. It was published as one of my then-regular columns for Editor & Publisher Online. (I’ve also spoken publicly about lessons for the news industry from our experience trying to make a business from niche grassroots journalism and online+physical social networking.)

Since my old columns (15 years worth!) are no longer available at EditorandPublisher.com (speaking of Fail!), I’ll link to a version of the column that I have on this, my personal website:

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media

Harking back to a failure from 2007 does not imply that there aren’t other Fails I could write about and share lessons learned. But those will have to wait.

I’m looking forward to reading about others’ failures (but more importantly, what can be learned from them).

Fail forward!

So, yesterday evening I was at a reception for Tom Rosensteil, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, after he gave a lecture here at the University of Colorado Boulder. His latest book is Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload.

While chatting with Rosensteil about a project that a small team and I are working on for the Digital Media Test Kitchen which fits snugly with the topic of Blur, CU School of Journalism & Mass Communication advisory board member Linda Shoemaker joined the conversation and pulled out a print copy of Blur, asking if the author would mind signing it.

Hey, I had a copy of Blur with me at the time, too! Umm, autograph? Afraid not. It was on my iPhone.

E-book author autographs: There’s not an app for that.

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, ringmaster David Cohn asked something I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer. But I’ve got a solid track record participating in the resurrected Carnival so far, so I decided not to break my streak.

Cohn asked us to give advice to either the Knight Foundation about its next steps (as the 5-year-old Knight News Challenge ends its run, and a new vice president arrives) or the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri about its fellowship program.

Since Knight turned down all three Knight News Challenge submissions from my program at the University of Colorado Boulder (including one I thought was and is damn good and important for the future of journalism credibility and accountability!), I’ll pass on Knight in case any disappointment-inspired bias might spill out in my words. So Reynolds it is!

As Cohn (a Reynolds fellow himself) noted, the program is only four years old. It’s not as big and doesn’t accept as many fellows as, say, Stanford’s renowned Knight Fellowships program. Therefore, the program is still shaping itself. Cohn asked:

1. How would you shape the fellowship to drive innovation?
Because the program is small, I’d narrow the focus significantly. In fact, for each fellowship year, I’d pick a theme and find fellows who all wanted to work on complementary aspects of the theme. Let’s say for the next crew of fellows, select all of them because they want to focus on variations on a theme of “business models for journalism in the digital age.” Next year, I’d pick a different theme. The key would be that the theme is the most important challenge or opportunity facing journalism at the time. Business models for journalism addresses solving a big problem for the news industry and for journalists who want to make a living. A theme that could address an opportunity instead of a problem would be best utilizing emerging mobile technologies in the news realm.

Such an approach is less appropriate for a larger fellowship program, like Stanford’s, which takes on 20 fellows each year.

2. What types of fellows should they be looking for?
If we go with my answer to No. 1, then I’d say find a mix of fellows from multiple disciplines who can work together to address the year’s theme issue or opportunity. If the theme is business models for news, then, of course, bring in a business expert who perhaps is not a journalist but has a strong interest in publishing business models. Or an economist. Or a marketing guru. Don’t invite in as fellows people who don’t know or care about the news industry, but rather individuals who want to engage and can work well with the journalist fellows. One word is key: interdisciplinary.

3. What types of fellows should they avoid?
Pure journalists. I’d much rather see Reynolds recruit journalists who also hold MBAs, or are extremely competent technologists. Avoid one-dimensional journalists. And especially, avoid anyone who doesn’t believe with 100% of their being that in the media of today and the future, digital is at the center of things and is the control hub for any media or news organization.

4. What programs should the fellows go through in order to drive innovation?
Bring in lots of outside experts to get the fellows thinking beyond the confines of journalism. If mobile is the theme, bring in mobile industry leaders and force them to shift gears and think with the fellows about how the news industry can leverage emerging mobile developments that the industry leaders are working on today. Bring in entrepreneurs who may not be focused on news and journalism as a market opportunity, yet who are building digital products or services that have significant potential for news; force them to focus on news applications, and let the fellows lobby the entrepreneurs to put some thinking and resources into addressing news problems and opportunities.

Get the fellows to roam the university, finding partners in other disciplines to assist them in thinking through and developing innovative news-beneficial projects that cannot be done by journalists alone. If any of the journalist fellows come out of the program with any old journalistic dogma still in their heads, the program will have been a failure.