My poor blog gets neglected, but fortunately there’s the monthly Carnival of Journalism thought-fest, which I try to participate in every month, if possible. At least the Carnival prevents me from completely ignoring my blog!

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

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.”

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.

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.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of David Cohn, a.k.a DigiDave, the Carnival of Journalism has been resurrected. Somehow I missed participating the first time around several years ago, but with a name like that it must be fun, right? So I’m in this time.

The Carnival revolves around a monthly topic, with a bunch of smart people in the journalism field presenting varied points of view, usually on their own blogs, but republished and/or linked to on the Carnival site. David chose as this month’s topic: “The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community.”

OK, I’ve got some strong opinions on that, especially now that I work at the University of Colorado Boulder running its fledgling Digital Media Test Kitchen program, which I founded.

David asked us to ponder a Knight Commission recommendation to “Increase the role of higher education … as hubs of journalistic activity.” (He also wrote: “No box here to write inside of.” … Good, otherwise I’d probably go outside of it.)

It’s all great that some university journalism programs are putting students to work as reporters in new forms of news media. Their work makes up for some of the journalism that’s been lost in recent years as mainstream news organizations laid off thousands upon thousands of professional journalists. And students get to learn in a dynamic, innovative new news environment, rather than a depressing old-media newsroom in decline.

Some students at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, for instance, work as interns for the non-profit Bay Citizen news website in a joint partnership which also includes an innovation initiative. The City University of New York (CUNY) Journalism School is collaborating with the New York Times and has students producing neighborhood (or “hyper-local,” if you prefer) news for The Local. Fantastic.

However, I want my university and others to go further — or more specifically, to look further into the future.

My focus of late has been on identifying emerging technologies that will or might have significant impacts on journalism and the news industry. Actually, the most fun part of my current job is scanning the horizon, spotting some fledgling technology or oddball Internet or mobile start-up, and thinking, “That could be really useful as a journalistic tool!” or “There’s a business model that might work in the news field!” Often, the technologists and entrepreneurs I run across do not have news or solving the news crisis on their radar screens.

At CU, I’ve been lucky to have the student-run news website (nope, there’s no print edition) to work with in experimenting with new technologies on both the editorial and advertising sides. The CU Independent’s editors have been eager (or at least willing to be persuaded) to try new experiments. (Since they make the decisions, it’s the editors’ call whether or not to try what sometimes may seem like crazy new ideas.)

They’re trying things like website and mobile social gaming tied to news to increase reader engagement and news awareness. … The editor-in-chief is starting a video channel where she’ll answer student text questions with short video answers, as a way to better interact with the campus community and put a human face on the CU Independent brand. … A couple of graduate students are working with me to develop a premium membership model for collegiate media, and the CU Independent is going to try it out when it’s ready. … And more.

The student editors also are encouraged to innovate by their staff media advisor, Gil Asakawa, a news and new-media veteran who joined the CU Journalism School last fall after most recently working for MediaNews Group.

Gil and I talk and collaborate a lot, and he recently remarked to me how refreshing his new job has been in terms of trying new innovations. Where implementing a new technology at MNG more often than not took months of meetings and deliberation, in the university media environment, you just do it. Now.

I think that’s where university journalism programs — and especially student media — can push old news organizations forward. We can run with ideas that a prudent and more conservative newspaper publisher would put off. And in fairly short order, we can tell that publisher and the rest of the news industry how it turned out, and if others should follow our lead.

Bless university student journalists, but their work in covering their local communities is often not as good as that of experienced professional journalists (many now in other careers, unfortunately). That’s not an insult, just a fact.

But I think that beyond producing community journalism, where student journalists and Journalism Schools can best serve their communities is by innovating (dare I say) radically where the traditional media serving their cities or towns innovate too conservatively or hardly at all.

Communities need better information, as the Knight Commission has concluded. Journalism schools and journalism students can provide it, in a roundabout way, by teaching professional news organizations (old and new) how to leverage new and emerging technologies and techniques to create a better-informed citizenry (and perhaps make enough money to afford to cover their communities adequately).

The Knight Commission is correct in urging universities and their Journalism programs to do more for their communities in these tumultuous days of media transition.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, during a Democracy Now interview:

“We have clearly stated motives, but they are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation’s politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.”

(Hat-tip to Peggy Holman of Journalism That Matters for pointing this out.)

Hmmm, a slight variation would sound like a worthy goal for … the news media!

As we begin another year of media transformation, I can’t help but feel a bit depressed about the state of the (mainstream) news media here in the U.S., and the American reaction to Wikileaks’ action is a big part of the problem. As the federal government and many politicians line up for the scalp of Julian Assange, support for Wikileaks seems to be coming mostly from overseas, and American journalists’ support is far weaker than I’d like to see.

• The editor of Spanish newspaper El Pais has written a wonderful essay: “Editor Javier Moreno explains the decision to publish the State Department cables, which expose on an unprecedented scale the extent to which Western leaders lie to their electorates.” … A highlight: “The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.”
• A Romanian news organization has given Assange a Press Freedom Award. Previously, he has won the Economist Index of Censorship Award (2008) and the Amnesty International UK Media Awards (2009). He also won the Sam Adams Award in 2010; that’s a U.S. award granted annually by retired CIA officers to honor an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics (often awarded to whistleblowers).
• Le Monde (France) named Assange its “Person of the Year.” Meanwhile, U.S.-based Time magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg its “Person of the Year,” despite Time’s own website reader poll coming out clearly in favor of Assange as the best choice. (Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel’s statement in an interview, “Assange might not even be on anybody’s radar six months from now,” is telling of how old-media journalists don’t seem to grasp the impact that Wikileaks and its successors have and will continue to have on altering their profession.)
• In Australia (Assange’s home), hundreds of journalists, lawyers, and academics loudly condemned the prime minister for calling the leaks “an illegal act” and suggesting that Assange’s Australian passport be revoked.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer, has been a stolid supporter of Wikileaks and Assange, but as a frequent TV guest on American news programs he’s complained, “From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks — the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy — have been … America’s intrepid Watchdog journalists. … It just never seems to dawn on them — even when you explain it — that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be … what they do.” (Emphasis mine.)

And it’s not just that bizarre point of view that’s a problem. Many of America’s “finest” news organizations (and some global ones) have been guilty of laziness and/or carelessness in their reporting on Wikileaks. Normally, I love NPR, but the latest column from its ombudsman has me losing some faith. Alicia Shepard tells of how NPR was guilty over a prolonged period of misstating the number of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks had published — with multiple reporters and anchors stating that it had published or released “thousands” when the real number is 1,947 or less than 1% of what Wikileaks has in its possession. It took a dogged complainer weeks to get NPR to issue a correction.

Worse yet, Louisiana State graduate student Matthew Schafer has discovered the same mistake being made by the Associated Press, New York Times, Politico, UPI, The Economist, Mashable, BBC, Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. All of those news organizations have implied in their reporting that all 250,000-plus State Department documents obtained by WikiLeaks had been published or released.

What could explain this odd behavior by much of the mainstream news media? Certainly there are multiple forces at play, but I have to think that one of them is the overall decline in the quality of journalism in the last couple of years — a result of a horrible economic climate on top of the digital transition for news companies which has resulted in the loss of so many editorial jobs.

Could it be that those remaining in jobs with mainstream “big-media” companies tread lightly and seem more in tune with government and corporate interests than the “new whistleblowers” because they want to keep those jobs?

Whatever the reason, it’s pathetic.

Perhaps the hope for American news media in 2011 will be the newish wave of non-profit investigative reporting entities that don’t need to behave in such an obsequious manner to those in power.

After writing a column for Editor & Publisher Online for so long (it was my “Stop The Presses!” column that served as the website’s main original content at the very beginning), it feels weird to have the final one published.

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!

Reading the new report by Len Downie Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” today, I kept wondering: Who is this report aimed at?

Commissioned by the Journalism School at Columbia University, the 96-page report offers nothing much new to media geeks. If you follow the news industry and its travails closely, the treatise is just a handy recap of how we got into this mess (newspapers crumbling, reporters laid off, et al) and of all the various small news entities springing up to take over some of the tasks that old news media is shedding (like “accountability journalism,” which saving is a central theme of the report). And then some recommendations; again, nothing particularly original.

But I don’t mean to be negative, because I think the report is great for the right audience: philanthropists and foundations.

As the authors make clear, much of the new news ecosystem — the part doing the serious watchdog and investigative journalism that advertisers don’t especially want to pay for — will be non-profit, or low-profit. For this segment of the news sector to grow (and it must), philanthropic money will be critical. Such news organizations can’t rely on sugar daddies forever, but they’ll need it initially while they work toward and invent a model for long-term sustainability.

(I am not dismissing for-profit enterprises springing up out of the ashes of old media, and neither do Downie and Schudson — though they don’t give a whole lot of time in their report to for-profit solutions to the news crisis.)

I do hope that “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” is widely distributed and read by community foundations, national foundations that have not yet made grants within the news and information sectors, and various other philanthropists. Because this report will serve to educate them on a problem that they should know about, and to persuade them to join the party to find solutions.

Of course journalism has long had its support from key foundations, with the Knight Foundation at the top of the heap. But even that big pile of cash in Miami won’t support everything that needs to be done to make up for the degradation of newspapers and resulting alarming decline in accountability journalism. New players must come into the picture, including more community foundations and local philanthropists. The authors make the case that local accountability journalism is most at risk (and much of it already lost in some communities).

Knight already has been courting community foundations, with matching grants for those that take on local initiatives or programs to keep their communities informed. It’s also reached out to other national foundations, urging them to get involved. After all, if the good work by organizations that these foundations support in other need areas can’t get their messages out because of a dysfunctional and chaotic media ecosystem, then it’s in community foundations’ interest to start spending some money on news and information experiments and solutions.

Entrepreneurs looking to make a profit well may be able to create new news entities that don’t rely on philanthropy to get started and succeed long term. But I’m of the opinion that when it comes to serious journalism (accountability, investigative, watchdog, public-interest, whatever you want to call it), we’re headed into a period where that kind of journalism increasingly will be non-profit.

I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know from this report, but there’s a lot in there that caring people with money to give away to support their communities don’t yet understand. Let’s hope “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” gets on their reading lists, post-haste.

This week I was lucky enough to participate in an Aspen Institute conference, “Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.” The participants were an all-star bunch, including Madeleine Albright (a journalist before becoming a diplomat) for day 1, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Marissa Mayer of Google, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, and other assorted top dogs from News Corp., MediaNews Group, Associated Press, American Public Media, the Knight Foundation, etc. (Here’s the full list; it opens up a Word doc.)

A significant part of the 3-day event was devoted to business models to sustain journalism (legacy news institutions, upstart digital news entities, community bloggers, and non-profit news initiatives), and especially the idea of getting online users to pay for news, whether through force (pay-wall schemes) or persuasion (donation models).

I’ll write more about the event later, but for now I want to toss out one quick impression: It didn’t turn into the jihad over business strategy that I expected going in.

First, some context. … In recent months, some of the news industry’s leaders have made some statements that seemed to indicate that they were gearing up to put a lock on a lot of their online news content (or even all of it) and make users pay for access, that they’d seriously go after people “stealing” their content, and that even headline-and-excerpt news links might be banned. For example:

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. … We can be platform-neutral but never free.”

Tom Curley, Associated Press: “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group: “The content is ours and we can do anything with it we choose to do with it. If it’s in our best interest to give it away, we will give it away. If it’s in the best interest to charge, we will charge.”

But after spending a few days in Aspen, I returned to Boulder feeling more optimistic. While overall the news industry remains in a state of confusion, with no clear immediate solutions to the decline in legacy news organizations (especially newspapers), the outcome of the conference discussions were, I dare say, reasonable. I had feared either that the conversation would become hostile between “paid vs. free” camps, or that the group would come to bad decisions, such as a stronger move toward unity on charging for news online. Rather, I’m thinking that recent statements like those above are mostly bluster.

While it’s not clear that all news publishers will follow the quasi-consensus of the elite Aspen Institute crowd, I got a sense that for the most part, really bad moves like putting up high pay-walls on news websites won’t happen.

Here are a few quick takeaways:

• Most news publishers recognize that many revenue streams will be necessary for digital news. They’re not stuck on just advertising, just paid content, or just both; they know they’ll need more, including new models not yet devised. To quote Clay Shirky on saving the news industry: “Nothing will work, but everything may work.”
• Most everyone wants to charge for some premium content, but few think that any news publisher will be able to get money out of more than 10% of their most-loyal users. That sounds too high to me, since newspapers and other old media have cut back so much on staff and they’ll have a hard time creating content and services that online users will pay for. I didn’t sense any kind of death wish, so for the most part we’ll probably see 90%-plus of legacy news sites’ content remain free.
• That desire to find the right “freemium” model leaves room for implementing other options simultaneously, including allowing users to donate and support their favorite sites via networked donation solutions (e.g., Kachingle, whose founder was an Aspen participant), as well as tracking copyright infringement and making revenue-sharing offers to the offenders rather than punishment being the only option.
• The non-profit news sector will grow quickly, as more foundations, philanthropists, and the public become aware of the “news crisis” and support investigative and public-interest journalism as the struggling private sector falls down on that job.

More later…

I’ve been away for a few days, but when I got back I caught up on some episodes I’d missed of the Daily Show and Colbert Report during the Republican convention. Jon Stewart hit it particularly well by comparing past and recent statements by folks like Karl Rove and Fox News TV pundit Bill O’Reilly.

Rove praising Palin’s credentials in being mayor of a town of 9,000, then earlier trashing Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who had been mentioned as a possible VP pick for Barack Obama, as being too inexperienced because he was mayor of the “small” town of Richmond, Virginia (population 200,000), were priceless! Ditto for the side-by-side video clips of O’Reilly trashing the mother of Jamie Lynn Spears for bad parenting when the teen TV star got pregnant and then praising the parenting of GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin when her teen daughter got pregnant

Politicians like Rove and Fox pundits like O’Reilly seem to think that voters are stupid and will buy this bullshit, so bravo to Stewart for pointing this out. But how about mainstream news organizations going after this kind of political chicanery? Isn’t that the job of the news media?

Newspapers, especially, are in a fight for their lives. Since it’s time to shake things up in that industry, how about if more papers start to be bolder about pointing out politicians’ lies and mistruths? Pointing out blatant hypocrisy with documentation — though without the hardcore opinion that Stewart presents — is within the realm of what newspapers could be doing. It might just go a long way in making newspaper brands relevant again.

As Jon Stewart no doubt would put it, it’s time for mainstream media to get some balls. The public shouldn’t need to rely on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, or be savvy enough to frequent FactCheck.org, to learn when politicians are lying. That’s the job of the news media, which too often shirks it now (or so underplays it that it’s ineffectual) for fear of being branded “the liberal press” by the likes of Rove and O’Reilly.

No wonder Jon Stewart is sometimes referred to as the most trusted newsman in America. At least he gets the job done.

(This item was edited from its original form to fix a factual error.)