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.

Can anyone advise me on a Twitter feed challenge? See the comic avatar of me in the upper right of this blog page? There’s a talk balloon, and I’d like to get my latest post from Twitter to show inside that balloon. (That is, the balloon is updated with new text whenever I post a new tweet.)

Anyone got any suggestions for pulling that off? Thanks!!

One of the most striking things about today’s media environment is the low barrier to entry for publishing and trying out new entrepreneurial ideas. Open-source publishing systems push the price for competing against big companies close to zero for the “little guys.” They often can add advanced, cutting-edge features to their blogs and websites for free or just a few bucks by using the latest widget or plug-in. The great irony is that those small players often add features before big media companies get around to it.

Online PR guru Steve Rubel made a good point about this in an interview he did for an upcoming book, “Online Marketing Heroes” (PDF link). He was asked: “So it’s leveling the playing field for the little guy. What’s the big guy doing?” His answer: “The big guys, if they’re smart, they have people who are on the cutting edge of all the new stuff, and are able to figure out how to apply it, ASAP.”

As obvious as that answer is, many traditional news publishers don’t even keep pace with what the blogging and open-source communities are doing. For news websites to grow and retain loyal audiences, they must be innovating constantly. In today’s competitive race to grab the attention of online audiences, if you can’t even keep pace with bloggers, you lose.

An important way to grow your news website and digital operations is to have, at the very least, an innovation editor or director on board — ideally with a team of programmers supporting the goal. And as I’ve stated here before, don’t be afraid to dive in to open source.

Many large news companies use expensive content management and web publishing systems. And sometimes, being saddled with such systems is a detriment when it comes to adding new features in a timely manner. I know one major media company that doesn’t even support user comments on its articles, because its web publishing system is too ungainly to easily add it. (Its online editors are incredibly frustrated by this situation.)

Think about that! A major media company is hamstrung from doing stuff that any blogger can do using open-source platforms like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. Indeed, the blogging platforms (which is a misnomer, because these can be full-fledged content management systems; they’re not limited to producing blogs but are flexible enough to host a wide array of website types) are in some ways better than those corporate web publishing systems.

A huge community of programmers and developers are creating add-ons (plug-ins and widgets) that greatly extend the capabilities of platforms like Wordpress and Drupal — and often are cheap, if not free. Not even a deep-pocket media company could afford the programming staff to keep up with what the open-source community produces.

That an army of volunteer programmers are producing functionality that major news companies can’t keep up with is an interesting situation, to say the least.

There’s already a steady movement by newspapers to use Drupal. Wordpress is less powerful than Drupal, but it’s nevertheless great for many web projects that a news company might do.

Open source CMS should not be something that news companies avoid. Especially for smaller news operations, these platforms allow you to produce a full-featured website in a matter of hours. If you’re holding onto prejudice against using open-source publishing systems, get over it.

You may not be ready to dump your expensive web publishing system, and that’s expected. But please consider open-source platforms for specific projects where using what you’ve got will hold you back.

A common criticism of news websites — especially ones run by small and medium sized newspaper companies and TV news outlets — is that they don’t invest enough in programming or web development talent. Perhaps their sites don’t look as professional, or are not as full featured as they could be because not enough resources are devoted to online operations. They’ve not adapted adequately to the new media environment where having enough geeks around is a requirement for long-term survival.

This won’t be for everyone, but there are several related web services that can get some of your development and design tasks done for reasonable, often very low rates. Using them is a way to extend the web development and design staff you have by off-loading some of their work.

Design Outpost is a great site where you post a web design project and have graphic artists and designers bid on it. Candidates will even submit rough drafts of ideas of how they’d complete your job, and you get to choose the winner. I’ve used this site with success, and found that the designers bidding on projects are a mix of professionals looking for new clients and amateurs with web design talent looking for extra money. When my last company needed a new corporate logo, we put out a bid on Design Outpost and offered $150 for the job. Several candidates submitted draft logos, and we selected a winner — who, to our surprise, was a medical doctor in Turkey who loves to do design and uses the website to earn money for his other talent. Try hiring a local designer to produce a corporate logo for you for only $150!

This is the same concept as Design Outpost, but coders and developers bid on programming jobs. You post your job, then programmers bid on it. You see information about their background and experience and select a winner to do your project. I haven’t tried this myself, but know people who have and have been happy with the experience. But of course, there are risks. Step cautiously by limiting these outside programming projects to non-sensitive things.

Finally there’s Audio Outpost. This is the same model as the sites above, but represents an inexpensive bidded-job solution for when you need original music or voice-over audio. Because sound production has now moved into the home with professional-quality equipment being affordable, you can get good, even great work from professional but home-based producers and musicians at low prices.

Again, there may be projects that are too sensitive to put out on a public forum. But if that’s not the case, the Outpost sites are a good way to save some money.