“There are three ways to look at how society is informed. The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. The second is that most people require an informed intermediary to tell them what is good, important or meaningful. The third is that people are pretty smart; given the means, they can sort things out for themselves, find their own version of the truth.

The means have arrived. The truth is out there.

Throughout history, access to news and information has been a privilege accorded to powerful institutions with the authority or wealth to dominate distribution. For the past two centuries, an independent press has served as advocate for society and its right to know — an essential role during an era of democratic enlightenment.

It feels like a new era has been thrust upon us — an era of enlightened anxiety. We now know more than ever before, but our knowledge creates anxiety over harsh truths and puzzling paradoxes.”

Still rings true. The moment and the movement have overtaken the forecast, but We Media (300,000+ downloads) continues to serve “as the reference point for any serious discussions of this topic …” David Weinberger, the visionary technologist-commentator-author wrote back then.

Didier Editions asked to republish the intro in a collection of English textbooks called Password Terminale for French students 17-18 years old.

We said oui.

If you live in Washington, DC, and can offer a little bit of your time, sign up and check out the project details. You can go down into the subway to see how long it takes to escape, or assist with mapping data and other text, photo and video tasks.

Sign up and share this link to invite your friends:

http://newsit.net/assignments/454

I’m rooting for team NewsIT, and I’m biased. NewsIt won our 2010 PitchIt Challenge, and we’ve been advising the project since then.

A few elements of the DC Metro investigation are innovative and notable for those who care about the future of journalism. First, NewsIt is doing its work in public. That’s a departure from the traditional cloak of secrecy that shrouds investigative journalism until the work is done – followed by the traditional “big reveal.” NewsIt has told us exactly what they’re working on – and they’ve asked for help.

Second, they’ve asked for help in a manner that should be appealing and practical to a broad network of individuals who care about the investigation and its results – whether or not they care about or want to call themselves citizen journalists. This rips a page out of citizen science – built around volunteers who collect data to contribute to large-scale research projects; and from the world of micro-volunteering pioneered by services such as Sparked and SeeClickFix. (Both of those also launched as winners of our PitchIt challenge).

This version of collaborative, volunteer-powered investigative journalism curated and produced by a commercial, professional hub also offers an alternative vision for the future of local journalism – compared, for instance, to AOL’s Patch, which is building out a network of local sites built around volunteer bloggers. You don’t need to be a dedicated or good blogger to make a meaningful contribution to NewsIt.

Finally – this project is an important test for NewsIt, a startup from Washington founded by journalist Melinda Wittsock (@cncpundit). NewsIt needs to prove its model to prospective investors and industry partners.

Techies and newsies greeted last week’s big reveal of the new subscription paywall at The New York Times with explainers on how the paywall works, analysis of what it could mean for profits at the Times, instructions on how to get around the paywall and speculation about privacy-busting evils the Times could unleash to stop cheats.

Canadians got the first taste of the Times paywall last week; the rest of the world will see it March 28.

“Which gives me the chance to say: one great newspaper site will remain free,” Washington Post chairman Don Graham posted on his Facebook wall.

So there’s the line in the sand, to pay here or not pay there, which, for now, only the most loyal and obsessive New York Times readers will be asked to cross. How’s that for a loyalty program?

If, like 85 percent of its web readers, you view fewer than 20 links on the Times site each month, you’ll continue to get in for free. Or if you arrive through a search engine. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.

At TechCrunch, MG Siegler wrote that “The barrier is always met with huge backlash.”

But really, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

When Digg’s users abandoned the link-sharing service in 2010, to protest a new design, that was a backlash.

But when the Times of London limited web access to paying subscribers, and its web traffic fell by 62 percent, that wasn’t a backlash. It was predictable, passive, routine economics. It was a shrug. We’re all used to digital dead ends. It’s no big deal to turn around and find another link to follow instead.

A backlash? The New York Times should be so lucky. Will we see street protests outside of the Times HQ in New York, or a Facebook campaign to persuade Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to change his mind – like we see, routinely, when fans try to revive a canceled television show?

Where’s the passion? Where’s the love?

You could argue that a paywall is the perfect measure of love. Those who love it, pay. Those who don’t, don’t.

The quieter, sadder reality is that most of us don’t and won’t. Pay? For what? Our news is already a strange fog of links from here and there – atomized bits that find us as much as we find them.

The New York Times may be the best newspaper in the U.S. Or it may be the most over-rated. It may be among the handful of English-language, upper-income agenda-setters that still command at least some attention from business, political and cultural leaders. Or it may be an elitist relic of a crumbling empire. It may reach and influence more people online than it ever reached in print. Or it may be neck-and-neck with The Huffington Post, Gawker and dozens of other digital upstarts who each day render the old order ever more obsolete.

It may be all of that. But it ain’t all that. It’s still a click here, a click there.

I haven’t seen anybody speculate on how many new journalists the Times might hire, or how many investigations it might publish, or how much tougher its reporting will be, or how much more daring its writing, photos, videos and story-telling might become, if the paywall “succeeds.” But here’s one number we can crunch: At $15/month – $180/year – it will take 51,000 annual web subscriptions to cover the $9.2 million the company paid its top two business executives last year.

Who wants to subscribe to that?

Until it becomes something else – something worthy of a genuine, heartfelt, passionate backlash – The New York Times, like all the faded newspaper companies that still dream of thriving in its nation-leading shadow, will remain a story that no paywall can re-write, no matter how porous or protective it may be.

“It’s often written: “HuffPost does not pay its writers,” Mr. Linkins who claims to be one, writes. “I assure you, they do!” He says he goes to work just like a real journalist, sometimes at strange hours because of news. “Somehow, I always seem to have money for food and shelter and stuff.” That explains it.

Mr. Linkins is a proud, paid employee of The Huffington Post. He’s got a name that works at a time when many skilled journalists are out of work or have settled for a pittance driving down the price of content for AOL. Whatever. “You can start a blog tomorrow and pay the AP or Reuters to do the same thing, if you like!”

Or you can become a celebrity, politician or activist and blog for free. “Now, people often wonder: why would anyone blog for free, at a place that pays other contributors? Please note, that part of what “free” entitles you to is a freedom from “having to work.” No daily hours, no deadlines, no late nights, no weekends. You just do what you like when the spirit moves you.”

God help us.

You may be asking: What’s up with all the exclamation points? Mark Twain, a pretty good writer, said that “one should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” The joke’s on us; Mr. Linkins prefers the exclamation point to the period. You’ll find them at end of complex, expressive sentences from him such as “Let’s begin!”

Oh, let’s not!

Now we know how The New York Times brought journalism to WikiLeaks and how it handled the rogue leaker and evil computer-hacker Julian Assange. Bill Keller’s long, long essay for the New York Times Magazine is a rare, insider’s account on how the newspaper went to extremes to legitimize hundreds of thousands of documents that its executive editor says didn’t contain any new information.

For those who have never worked for a news organization, that’s code for somebody-else-broke-the-story-first. But Mr. Keller offers several explanations why The Times published so many stories and filled so many pages with a documents deluge it didn’t regard as newsworthy.

“Ninety-nine percent of news doesn’t greatly impact our understanding of the world,” he wrote. “News generally works by advancing our knowledge by inches.” Perhaps that explains why The Times missed those weapons of mass destruction that weren’t really there. Or arrived late for the real-time, social media revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Covering the news of a complex, volatile world should make you humble. It makes Mr. Keller smug. What he is really saying is that something is news when The New York Times says its news.

“I don’t regard Julian Assange as a kindred spirit,” he says. “If he’s a journalist, he’s not the kind of journalist that I am.”

Actually, he is. Mr. Keller and Mr. Assange both have book deals. Mr. Keller gets there first, which helps explain the timing of his Times magazine essay. The Times’ first ebook – Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy—goes on sale today at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The ebook includes many of the leaked documents as well as expanded stories and essays about the issues that Keller says weren’t newsworthy.

Meanwhile, Mr. Assange schooled 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft last night. After introducing Mr. Assange as an anti-establishment ideologue with conspiratorial views, an incredulous Mr. Kroft asked Mr. Assange why he doesn’t play by the same rules as mainstream media. Mr. Assange was, momentarily, speechless.

“>

The 2011 news challenge seeks applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

Learn more and apply at newschallenge.org.

There’s an emphasis on new and innovative technologies, and to show off yours it must fit into one of five categories: web, social media/social networking, entertainment, health or news.

There’s a $150 non-refundable application fee, and the entry deadline is Dec. 10, 2010.

Info and application at SXSWi.

One signal comes from Brave News Worlds, a new report from the International Press Institute and the Poynter Institute. A collection of essays from digital innovators and advocates, Brave News Worlds provides “effective solutions and lessons learned” in the transition to digital media. What resonates, though, is its point of view. Loss lingers and continues, but the publishers offer an agenda of hope. “Is the future really so bleak?” asks IPI’s Lauren Dolezal.

The question captures the irony of the report’s title, a tortured reference to Aldous Huxley’s disturbing, distopian vision of the future in his 1931 novel Brave New World. The metaphor transported me to a 2007 seminar at Poynter where a faculty member warned that technology and empowered citizens would undermine the capabilities of newspapers to organize communities, and thus hurtle society toward distopia. The scenario spooked participants so thoroughly that they were asked to exorcise their demons by revealing what worried them most. Their answers produced a flip chart of fears, mostly about job insecurity and the inevitable demise of newspapers. They were right to worry.

Bill Mitchell, the report’s editor, makes no such mistake. Mr. Mitchell is quick to get past the woe-is-us feeling so prevalent among journalists these days. He acknowledges an epiphany, then does his best to deliver one. He reassures journalists instead of scaring them — smart for someone who heads Poynter’s entrepreneurial and international programs. Practitioners such as Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, validate journalistic enhancements in the digital age. Pop-prophets of media change — the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirkey and Dan Gillmor — spin now-familiar commentary about the expansion of journalism to most everyone. What emerges is validation for journalists to move on.

But moving on presents another irony. In what could have been a powerful demonstration of the capabilities of digital media — interactivity, linking, social networking, multi-media storytelling and design — the report is instead delivered on the platform for journalism that is being replaced: print, 152-pages of it. You can download a bulky PDF from the IPI and Poynter sites, but the print-bomb undermines the publishers’ credibility for espousing the opportunities of digital delivery. It does, however, validate their contention that journalism’s transition won’t be smooth.

I admire IPI and Poynter for the reckoning. The moment is not about the collapse of journalism, but of its reframing. Call it entrepreneurship, innovation or creativity, you must first accept the possibility of a media renaissance. The hard part is letting go.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
— Rudyard Kipling, the Gods of the Copybook Headings

Those expecting “God’s work” — a reference that editor Erik Wemple spins in his opening post — will long for divine inspiration. The Lord works in mysterious ways. TBD is, to be kind (TBK), a work in progress. For now, TBD’s founders are content to celebrate getting the sucker up. The celebration goes something like this: “We’re TBD, a site whose development is always uncertain, forever under construction.”

TBD is not your typical, uncertain startup. If you live and work in or around Washington, D.C., as I do, you’ve heard for a year that Robert Albritton, the Washington media magnate, and Jim Brady, a friend who is the former executive editor of washingtonpost,com, planned to revolutionize local news. Everyone wants a piece of The Washington Post, which is under assault on all fronts. With TBD, Albritton and Brady have the beast in their sights.

In its debut TBD shows off an updated version of convergence — that mind-numbing, inward-looking, mid-90s strategy from control freaks who thought they could combine media assets and control a local market. TBD merges Albritton’s two area TV station sites, WJLA-ABC News 7 and News8.net, with an online staff of 50.

Bringing the project into the decade, it adds a network of community blogs and websites. Social media tools — today’s requisite, must-have connections such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and mobile apps– complete an otherwise familiar formula for news display and access. More shrewd than informative, TBD’s social media are networks for promotion and distribution rather than platforms for compelling news produced by the most talented experts who blog in and around Washington.

Can TBD provide the elusive model for local news in the digital age by competing with The Post’s failed, hyperlocal strategy?

“TBD has all the parts,” Steve Klein, who runs the electronic journalism program at George Mason University, told me at our meetup this weekend with the Online News Association. As such, TBD will likely be the darling of the online news set, the Mainstream Media survivors who are trying to keep outmoded institutions afloat.

But parts is parts, says the huckster who sells chicken pieces. TBD presumes to revolutionize without innovating. There’s nothing that changes your experience, your point of view, your relationship with local news, or the metaphor for storytelling. It doesn’t engage digital audiences in a fresh way or enable them to fully participate in the diverse, exciting flow of content in the nation’s capital.

The revolution is still coming, yet to be determined.

Taking these in reverse it would seem a) TV News would scarcely exist without drawing from the well of news stories from the daily papers b) Younger people ingest the news even more so than in years past, if squeezed through a spaghetti strainer in multiple forms and times from myriad indirect sources – but the birth of that item is still often track-backed to a newspaper reporter, somewhere c) And the Internet? Come on… there is no better way to distribute and receive timely information than on the wired and wireless Web. The rub is in the revenue – or the decreased amount of it. How do we pay for it? Naturally that’s the real story.

But let’s back away from the giant black-hole argument of how news will survive in a world of passionate bloggers working under scale, entertainment trumping what sensible people would define as news, and what now seems like crazy distribution costs for information delivered on recycled trees.

Instead, maybe the focus needs to first turn from all that to what consumers actually want to know about – directed at what is meaningful and necessary to their lives. So what’s that? In my experience people have universal desires unchanged by technology, medium or trend. These are things that matter to nearly all people, or at least are of interest to them, and touch most age groups. That’s because these are things that happen closest to them: in town, down the street, next door, in the dining room. It’s what the Joneses are up to.

And what exactly IS going on with the Joneses? Yep, the focus needs to be on the news next door.

It was 1990 as the greenhorn editor at a weekly newspaper in New Jersey that I wandered into the paper’s musty morgue (where old copies of the paper are laid to rest) to find issues of the very paper I was editing from the late 1890s. And what did I read on the front page of this century-old broadsheet, among stories of festivals and a nasty summer storm? Columns and columns of peeping missives about the comings and goings of people around town: “Mrs. John Beattle called on Mrs. Jack Brown Thursday for tea and discussion of the recent disruption in the primary school,” – or something very close to that – and all I could think of, aside from nosy interest in the school ruckus 100 years before … what could it be? – was that if this progenitor of mine was devoting a third or more of Page One to this kind of reportage then I darn well ought to pay attention to why.

Shortly after that I moved on to a daily paper before having a chance to try a similar brand of micro-local reporting updated a bit for the modern audience. But in 1996 I found myself in a world of experimentation as a “founder” of Digital City, AOL’s attempt at curating and creating local content; it’s latest is called Patch. I quickly realized news was a big draw online, particularly news that happened within a close proximity to our site’s visitors. I’ll spare the details of how much effort went into persuading local and regional mainstream media that this “information superhighway” thing was good for them, and people typing comments on their reportage was also good, and instead jump to the lesson learned: People adding their thoughts about the hot local news / sports / etc. stories (now known as user-generated content) did not just add to the experience but suddenly became the story. The dirty lawyer scandal took a back seat to people’s personal stories and interactions on the street and in the neighborhood with that dirty lawyer.

This is not to draw attention to the obvious – that people like to comment on what matters to them in a public forum where the ego can blossom. Rather, it’s about a slightly subtler occurrence. People care about what happens in the geographic proximity of their lives, and particularly how the experience of people near them differs from or mirrors their own interpretations. But how to best satisfy that need? We can fast-forward through our tests of hyper-local citizen journalism platforms – here’s a category, suburb and publishing platform… go! – and jump to today where several entities are looking at the travails of the past and trying to meld together inexpensive ways to report, reflect, curate, aggregate or comment about anything that could possibly be paired with the words “news” and “local.”

It’s fair to say many efforts are focused on some mix of a combo meal of professional journalist + freelance journalists + interested volunteers = viable model to satisfy readers and participants in the local happenings of their geographic sphere (with others trying various similar tacks: ReportIt, Everyblock, Outsidein, fwix). It’s a confluence of events that makes this seem workable: lots of reporters are, sadly, out of work and technology has advanced enough to fill gaps that yesterday would have been bridged by a paid human. Fair enough. But possibly that’s all missing the larger point – the little subtlety I alluded to where people want to know what exactly is going on across the street and what do others know and think about it all. Will these new entrants into ‘nearby news’ provide ways for readers or viewers or experiencers to participate in a form of news that illuminates, with proper privacy, the headlines from behind the door at 123 Elm Street? Will we finally know what the Joneses are into before it’s too late and we’re again playing keep-up?

Arguably newspapers are positioned to use their brands to gain entrance into the home of Mrs. Jones, so to speak. But not with something that rolls off a press. The question is whether they can stomach the likely sacrifices this could call for: No local movie reviewer? No traffic reporter, or food editor? Sorry, those are commodities in this world. Will they hire neighborhood “monitors,” and can those kids who used to deliver the papers be turned into information collectors? The infrastructure is there to move this way, but is the will?

Surely those other guys charging ahead online have an answer in mind.

So we’ll see. But put this in ink: Internet Saves Newspapers (if only the news and lots of paper

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just an elegant aggregator: a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations into a new ditch. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content gets love, that it is curated, redesigned or re-edited with care.

Incumbents are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies a beautiful, interactive metaphor to news access, an alternative to the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war they’re winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page.

Go to Top Secret America. Watch the video, view interactive connections and maps, search the data, weigh in on Twitter, contribute to the project.

Now imagine if newspapers everywhere did this all the time.

Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

“>

Smaller, we said. Formats, staff, revenue, influence, circulation, advertising. Smaller. Much smaller.

That was 2005. We were invited to conduct a session on the future of newspapers — a tired and circular topic even then — at the annual conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. We returned last week on a comp, rather than taking a pass as we had in recent years.

It turns out that the future for newspapers is indeed smaller. So much that I had trouble finding it. Making my way to the bottom of the bunker, I spotted feints signs of life: a registration desk and a cluster of middle-age white guys in bad suits. Eureka, ASNE 2010! But comp or not, there was no badge of admittance to be found. A nice man with very white teeth began to make one for me. “You would be Doctor…. who?” he asked. Doctor, hmmm. Honorary recognition for an accurate prognosis about the news industry five years ago? Then I saw the small sign: American Dental Association.

“I seem to be in the wrong place.”

“That’s happened a lot today,” said Dr. Brightsmile. “I think you’re looking for that newspaper meeting. Their registration desk is around the corner, but I’m not sure anyone is there.”

Actually, there were: about 150 by a quick count. Some were speakers or comps like me. A few editors were still sulking about a pre-conference survey by Pew that found the brethren depressed, distressed, and worried about losing their papers and their jobs. I recognized many of the usual suspects who frowned when we put down an unpopular vision five years ago.

Then came a few surprises, fresh faces like HuffPo’s Arianna Huffington, NPR’s Matt Thompson, Google’s Eric Schmidt, FanFeedr’s Ty Ahmed-Taylor and Paid Content’s Staci Kramer. There was even a Twitter feed.

This year the digital future finally arrived at ASNE. And this year we left with a smile that made editors and dentists alike proud.