I’ve been reading the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, to my youngest daughter. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi books and I’m enjoying re-reading it. Here’s a quick synopsis from Wikipedia:

“Ender’s Game (1985) is one of the best-known novels by Orson Scott Card. It is set in Earth’s future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the ‘buggers,’ an insectoid alien race, and the International Fleet is preparing for war. In order to find and train the eventual commander for the anticipated third invasion, the world’s most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into a training center known as the Battle School at a very young age.”

While Ender is the main subject of the book, his brother, Peter, and sister, Valentine, also play a role back on Earth. (All are child geniuses.) A sub-plot has Peter and Valentine pretending to be adults on “the nets” and posing as intellectuals capable of influencing masses of people. In Card’s world (the year is 2135), the great debates of the day take place on the nets.

While there’s plenty of time for Internet discussions to turn around, I suppose, I can’t help but think that Card wasn’t terribly prescient with this prediction. In Ender’s Game, “the nets” are democratic and participative — anyone can join them, as long as they have the intellect to keep up — but there’s no problem with too much noise, trolls, spammers, and plain old stupidity.

Maybe Card was looking well beyond 2008 with his prediction of worldwide networked discussions being meaningful and orderly. Perhaps by 2135 we’ll have really good spam filters. But from the vantage point of 2008, it’s hard to imagine the author’s optimism about online digital discourse playing out.

Actually, not necessarily. These days it makes the most sense to post video on Youtube, which has become the de facto standard for web video.

Why? The short answer is: Videos hosted on your own website don’t get nearly the exposure and distribution they’ll get when posted on Google-owned Youtube. When an online user spots your video on Youtube, they’ll be able to grab the “embed code” and place the video on their blog, website, social network page, etc. No, that’s not stealing your copyrighted content; you want them to do that, so their readers will see your content and brand and click through to your site. This is the Distributed Web strategy, and it’s smart.

What should you post on your own site: The Youtube version of your video? Or another self-hosted version? Either one is fine. If you’re willing to go to the trouble (and expense) of hosting and serving up your own videos, it makes perfect sense to have a copy that’s completely under your control. I’d highly recommend, though, that you allow viewers to pick up the embed code from that so they can spread your content around the web.

But really, it’s probably fine to stick with posting your video content on Youtube and using the Youtube-embed version on your own site. There’s no longer any shame in doing that. If you’re a small publisher, given the choice of only one video hosting, I’d go with Youtube. Your video content is more likely to get wider exposure and distribution outside of your website’s user base. Doing only self-hosting for your videos is a negative.

Of course, don’t forget about all the other places your video should appear: MySpace, Facebook, et al. You may be able to simply use Youtube video versions for some sites, while needing to upload new videos for others. The important thing is just to spread your video around widely and intelligently.

The New York Times posts some of its videos on Youtube; anyone can pick up code to republish the video online, serving as a marketing channel for NYTimes.com. On its website, however, self-hosted videos cannot be shared.

This self-hosted video on Washingtonpost.com allows viewers to pick up and share embed code.

The report contained a rather blunt tip: “As one prominent Midwestern editor told PEJ bluntly: ‘For the price of two senior people, who weren’t willing to learn new skills, I can hire three or maybe four young people who can do more new technology where I really need them.’”

Yes, that is harsh. But the reality is that in these challenging times for news organizations, publishers can’t afford to keep on people unwilling or unable to learn new digital skills. Future growth is dependent on making the transition to profiting from digital media. Such draconian personnel choices may be a necessary evil.

A recent article by Miami Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal confirmed the wisdom of allowing user comments. In the Letter to Readers, he wrote:

“In the six months since The Miami Herald began publishing comments at the end of online stories, the response has been like nothing we’ve seen before. Hundreds of thousands of readers are posting comments or following along with them each month.”

Predictably, a large newspaper like the Herald ran into problems with abusive comments. As a way to curb the worst abuses, it (among other measures) began to require that users register with the website before being allowed to post. There are ways to keep things at least somewhat under control, and knowing the identity of abusive commenters is a good start.

The Herald’s experience with explosive usage of user comments points out how important being open to user feedback can be. When a commenting system is that well used, that’s a lot of pageviews, and thus adds to advertising revenue. Let the people speak their minds!

Here’s what you do: Set up an affiliate program that other website owners and bloggers can sign up for, where they market your print subscriptions on their sites in exchange for a decent commission when a sale is made. They’ll post ready-made banner ads on their sites, and you’ll gain some new print subscribers.

Now affiliate programs have been around for a long time, but you don’t often see them offered by newspaper websites. I’m not sure why that is, but they’re useful tools for bringing in new print subscribers at low cost.

Of course, if your website has any paid services, you can use the affiliate program to promote sales of those, too.

Count this as one of the least innovative bits of advice presented here. But affiliate programs have a long record of success. News companies have mostly missed out. Perhaps it’s time they take a more serious look.

There are plenty of companies offering affiliate programs; the largest is Commission Junction. Here’s a list of them.

The concept is a simple one that we’ve seen before, though I think this is a nicely done implementation that’s worth a look. Alltop’s sites simply list the top 5 entries of a bunch of blogs on a particular topic. Mouse over a headline to see a short excerpt. And of course click through to the original blog entry.

Where this is worth a daily tip is the recommendation for news sites to develop something similar for their markets. Imagine creating a bunch of local blog aggregators for various segments of your local market. Local sports bloggers. Blogs about local pro or college sports teams. Blogs by local moms. Blogs by local politicos. … You get the idea.

Of course, this is content that’s out of your control, so you have a couple choices. 1) Search for relevant bloggers to a niche and add their RSS feeds to the page. (That’s what Alltop has done; I was pleased to find my personal blog on the Alltop Journalism page, but they didn’t seek my permission.) 2) Have local bloggers apply to be included on the page.

A key point is that you’re in control of who’s on and off the blog aggregator. While you can’t control what these bloggers write (nor should you even wish to), you do control the on-off switch.

Also, you might exert some editorial control in how the blogs are ordered. Instead of alphabetical order, I’d suggest doing a ranking. Put the blogs you think are best up top, and the dogs at the bottom. That’s a useful editorial service for readers. Or rank them in order of traffic. Or let your uses rate them and use the results for ranking-order.

“Post news, events and photos. Blog, create your own groups, set up RSS feeds, and build your own communities and web spaces. It’s up to you to provide the nitty-gritty details that make your community special. No news is too small — from Little League to college scholarships, professional accolades to pie-baking contests, volunteer opportunities to neighborhood watch programs.”

That’s fine, but I think any local news organization is going to have trouble trying to get community members to drop what they’re doing and start doing reporting on “hyperlocal” happenings (for free, of course). Some people will do it, but probably very few. Largely, such initiatives will attract those local businesses and community organizations wanting to post press releases or announcements (ZZZZZZ).

Here’s a better strategy to add to the more common one described above: Look for people within the community that are already producing hyperlocal or community-group news.

For example, most schools in your city probably get scant coverage from the local newspaper. When something significant happens, it makes headlines, but the large quantity of more mundane news goes unreported. But it’s not actually unreported. Each school has a newsletter for parents, produced by a parent volunteer, a teacher, administrative assistant, and/or principal. Ditto for many community groups.

As the recent Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests, newspapers need to evolve into local information and connection utilities. To serve that task (on top of being traditional news providers), newspapers should start dealing with stuff like news and information coming out of local schools and organizations.

Picking up this information shouldn’t be too hard. Some schools (to stick with using them as an example) will already publish RSS feeds for their newsletters; simply pick up the feed and add it to an expanded local-education section of your website. Others may need to be coaxed into sending you their weekly newsletter, which you’ll need to process and publish.

Another idea is to recruit people from each school (and community group, etc.) to take what they already do and move it up a notch by posting it to the local newspaper website. Offer an incentive: perhaps a free subscription to the print edition; a split of ad revenues generated by the school-news page; or even a small “stringer” fee. It could be as simple as letting these people assign their own Google AdSense account to their page on the newspaper site and keep the resulting ad revenue.

The idea here fits with the Newspaper Next 2 recommendations. A local newspaper needs to be the place where people first think to go to get information that’s important to them. Right now, when I want news about my daughter’s elementary school, I don’t go to the local newspaper website; I go to the school’s website.

By reaching out to providers of broader and deeper local information who are already producing it, a newspaper can move toward being more of a “utility” (that is, more of a local Google) than just a “newspaper.”

Niles urges reporters to promote their content to people most likely to value it. As an example, a beat reporter covering higher education might keep a mailing list of bloggers covering the topic, and e-mail them alerts about new articles he’s published.

That’s excellent advice for the individual. I’d also suggest that it’s good for the company, so much so that company leaders should require that (or at least strongly encourage it) from reporters.

In today’s media-crowded world, no newspaper or TV news show can exist as an island, hoping online users come for a visit. It’s important for journalists at mainstream news organizations to reach out in order to get picked up elsewhere online.

Niles explains:

“Most established news organizations remain clueless about how to promote their work in the social medium of the Internet. Make it your personal responsibility to do better with your work. … Build a list of readers and sources to message whenever you publish a new piece. Facebook and other social networks provide an easy way to start with this. Just create a page and invite readers and sources to become your ‘friends.’

“Give readers easy-to-use tools to forward and share your work. Link to other sources and politely invite other writers and sites that cover your beat to link to you, from time to time.

“When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, a few fellow online editors would hit Google to find discussion boards and fan sites covering people and movies the entertainment section was featuring the next day. We’d e-mail those webmasters links to our stories even before they’d hit the front page of latimes.com. And we often found that those sites sent those stories more traffic than other pages on the Times’ website did.”

Excellent advice. A social media strategy can bring in significant traffic to your website.

Thought Caen won a Pulitzer Prize for his column, it wasn’t exactly “serious journalism.” You read Caen’s daily column for entertaining tidbits about life in “Baghdad By the Bay.” What he wrote about came from letters (yes, the paper kind) and phone calls to him, and from his encounters with San Franciscans and friends on the streets and at parties. No one has quite matched him yet, but I think with the Internet there’s hope that more Herb Caens are on the way.

So for today’s tip, I’d like to encourage local newspapers to create modern-day Herb Caens. Today’s local-happenings and -rumors columnists will be better equipped than Caen was, I think, for getting the pulse of the town. A popular Caen-like columnist will be inundated with tips and rumors via e-mail. He/she will, just as Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub does, track the many local bloggers and establish relationships with them. He/she will monitor local online discussion boards looking for tips. There are so many potential online sources nowadays for a Caen-inspired columnist to dig up new local tidbits.

Today’s Herb Caens will be promoted grandly in print and online, and perhaps do video or podcasts. With a significant marketing campaign, Caen-like celebrity is possible. And so will come online user traffic and ad revenues.

Pardon me for getting nostalgic for a moment, but I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 1993, and part of that time was spent as a copy editor on the features desk. So I was one of the crew who edited Caen’s daily column, which was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter; his assistant keyed it into the paper’s computers before sending it to us for editing. I’m fairly sure that Herb wouldn’t know what to make of all the technology that’s invaded newspapers in the last decade. I doubt he’d be using it.

But Caen is relevant today. Someone just needs to do a more modern version of him.

Universal Hub is an independent website run by Adam Gaffin, who trolls all the blogs having to do with Boston and picks out the best items each day to highlight. (Here’s a story about Gaffin and his increasingly popular site: “Master of Hub Hits.”)

The significant thing here is that Gaffin doesn’t just pull in RSS feeds of blogs; he’s using his personal judgment and considerable effort to find the most interesting stuff out there, then he writes a short item about the blog item, with a link to the original.

He also spends time searching for new sources, since new blogs show up all the time. He is, in effect, acting as a beat reporter where the beat is Boston-area bloggers.

What news publishers often do with non-affiliated local blogs is simply set up automated feeds for blogs that they think might be relevant to their audience. Some hand-pick local bloggers to be included on the news website.

I think where those models can be improved on is in bringing in a human editor to bring out the best of local blogs. Readers of a vetted summary of local blogs can be assured of reading something interesting — and saving the time of tracking local blogs themselves. It’s a great service in that it helps readers who may be interested in what Boston bloggers have to say avoid the dreck and just see the good stuff.

An interesting angle with Universal Hub is that it is open for others to post blog items, but few do (other than post comments, which many people do); the site is primarily a platform for Gaffin, who has become a local news commentator and media critic.

So here’s my tip for the day: Assign someone in your news organization to the “blogger beat.” Gaffin is an excellent role model. While it might be nice to hire someone to do this, let’s be realistic; most news companies today will want to use existing staff. Considering that the person assigned to this task will be significantly enhancing the local coverage of your news website, it shouldn’t be too hard to argue for a sole reporter to make the move.

If you remember the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen, you may catch the similarity between this kind of job and what the “three-dot columnist” did so well for so many years. Where Caen published based on tips sent and called in by readers, Gaffin is serving a similar role on the web with blogs as the sources.

Caen was, I think it’s fair to say, the most popular thing about the San Francisco Chronicle. Perhaps a Gaffin-like blog “columnist” today might fare as well.