Although the "literature on a deadline" aesthetic of journalism is not hard-wired for nostalgia and hasn't often the leisure for back-patting, several individuals, stories, and websites stand out for their achievements in the field and their contributions to our collective knowledge and engagement this year. Read on for the list of honorees and our assessment of their contributions.

Journo/reader collaboration site Publish 2, which focuses on news curation, received $5,000 as the first Gannett Foundation Award winner for technical innovation in the service of digital journalism. The Gannett Company, an undisputed titan of news media, aims to use foundation funds to ensure the future of journalism and contribute to other charitable causes.

The Gotham Gazette, an NYC-focused civic resource, was recognized with a Creative Use Award in 2004. This year, the outlet was given an award for its contributions to the microsite category. Well known for its hyperlocal focus, it's essentially the Batman of the Internet, an arm of the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York, which itself is an NYC-focused government watchdog group.

In a coup of navel-gazing, the organization awarded a project entirely devoted to investigating the death of a journalist. The Chauncey Bailey Project was an investigation by more than 24 journalists into the murder of an Oakland Post reporter. The project took home two awards, receiving $5,000 for the Knight Award for Public Service and OJA's award for investigative journalism in the small site category.

Also of interest is the Guantanamo: Beyond the Law endeavor. Spearheaded by McClatchy journalists Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield, the project was honored by ONA for investigative journalism for a large site.

As large sites of general excellence, ProPublica, the Las Vegas Sun, and The New York Times were also honored.

Of course, we can't wait to hear your personal picks. We were disappointed that journo-source matchmaker site HARO was left out. What was your favorite news site this year, and why?

Traditional news services once had a monopoly on breaking stories. Not anymore. Just as blogging seems to have displaced longer features in traditional media, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are racing against (and often beating) news services to the scoop.

Does this make for better-informed citizens? Maybe.

The tweet tsunami has hit the whole world. It's still moving, and it promises to evolve as journalists dream up new ways of working with Twitter.

Some of the places where journalists are practicing their trade are raising eyebrows, too.

Take courtroom reporting, for instance. Wichita Eagle reporter Ron Sylvester makes ample use of his Twitter account (upwards of 10,000 tweets) to report on a range of trials. In Sweden, warbling over the Pirate Bay case grew tumultuous. The Ottawa Citizen's Glen McGregor used twitter.com/obrientrial to document Mayor Larry O'Brien's fight against charges of bribery and influence peddling (and illustrated a best practice of devoting one stream to a long-running news story).

But is Twitter better than traditional media for broadcasting news from a courtroom? One camp holds that tweets don't do trial reporting justice. Another maintains that Twitter promotes judicial transparency and helps citizens stay abreast of trials.

Admittedly, the latter argument falls short should people try to make heads or tails of a three-month-long trial based on tweets from days one and two. But interested parties who can't attend in person can benefit from the contributions of trained journalists, even if deep analysis can't happen 140 characters at a time.

"Trained journalists" is an important caveat. While interested citizens armed with BlackBerrys can document a trial, their varying levels of skill elicit the Mark Twain-worthy quip, "I trust citizen journalists as much as I trust citizen surgeons."

Imperfect tweeting should not pose a problem, though. Excessive inaccuracy and bias - and commentary discrediting them - appear quickly in a real-time world replete with news sources. Expect those who produce slanted streams to quickly lose followers.

For all this, the whole debate may not be worth the pixels they're displayed on. The cat is decidedly out of the bag, and Twitter will probably carry blow-by-blow accounts of many future trials.

Will this help or hinder the ever-evolving fields of journalism and justice? Let us know what you think.

We love to debunk myths and prick bubbles as much as the next set of pundits, but we think the real-time Web is for real. Financial traders have lived in a real-time world for a while, but only within the confines of the trading floor. When they left work, they entered a batch world. Most other people work in a batch world. That is changing. We are all entering the real-time world of the trader. Some of us are getting there faster, but we are all heading there. And relax, there is an "Off" button!

One reason you see so much news about Twitter is that it is a news business, and journalists love to write about their own business!

Calling Twitter a news business may be a bit limiting. It is more than that. But it certainly is affecting the news business dramatically:

• As a source of stories. One of the millions of just-in-time stringers twittering away may witness a revolution at any second;
• As a backchannel for other media, replacing the dial-in line used for TV and radio;
• As a traffic source;
• As a source to check stories. Traditional journalists can tap into their Twitter network faster than using their Rolodex or speed dial.

Twitter makes it much easier for journalists to tap into real-time news sources. Mastering Twitter is part of new journalism school.

Traders have always worked in a real-time news business. Information services such as Bloomberg and Reuters compete to deliver news a few seconds faster, and that time difference is important to traders.

Okay, so traders and journalists live in a real-time world. What about the rest of us?

Advertising Exchanges

A friend who runs a financial trading systems business told me that Google was constantly trying to poach his best engineers. Why? Because those employees were very good at real-time engineering, and advertising is also a real-time market.

Advertising markets are just like financial markets: available space is matched by available demand. Today, we have two totally different worlds:

1. Very personal: the "Let's do lunch" style of selling, with long-term commitment. This is a batch world.
2. Totally automated: no messy humans. Machines negotiate with machines in real time. This is the world of automated ad networks and exchanges, typically for sales of either remnant or long-tail inventory.

These worlds get more interesting as they move closer together and we see the gray areas in between where humans make quick judgment calls, inserting themselves into the real-time flow to, for example, approve creative or simply optimize (choosing one advertiser or publisher over another).

Buying and Selling Digital Goods

Anything that can be sold in digital form is becoming part of this trend towards real time. We are simply matching supply and demand. Information (or code or images or songs) that was not worth very much yesterday is suddenly very valuable. Or the opposite: its value suddenly drops. No matter what the digital artifact -- writing, spreadsheet numbers, code, design, images, music -- matching supply and demand is critical to realizing value.

You may be selling a digital artifact that costs money to create, but the marginal cost is zero, so you are quite happy to optimize supply and demand in real time and take whatever price the market offers at the time.

Or you may want real-time markets to help manage your spare work capacity. This is what ventures such as Turn Here focus on.

Real-Time Supply Networks for Physical Products

Dell revolutionized the PC industry by using a real-time supply chain to eliminate costs. Inventory risk is the biggest pain point for most businesses that trade physical goods. The real-time Web can have a similarly revolutionary impact on Main Street for businesses that no longer need multi-million dollar supply-chain systems. We are already seeing straws in the wind of this massive change with very simple uses of Titter, such as:

• The bakery that tells its patrons/followers that "The bread is hot and fresh."
• The Korean BBQ truck in LA that has 39,000 followers who want to know when it is going to roll into their neighborhood.

One can imagine this for anything that is either fresh or scarce: when your local farmer has freshly laid eggs, for example. These tools can be used to sell inventory, matching actual customer demand with bargain offers in real time.

Relaxed Concentration

Human beings naturally operate in real time. Anyone who has children knows about the "real-time interruption machine."

We also need our batch time, our quiet time for reflection and creation. We need to know when to switch off... literally switch off the devices that constantly ping us. Filtering tools and techniques have become critical. As Clay Shirky famously remarked: "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." But we also need to master the ability to deal with a lot of real-time information in a mode of relaxed concentration. In other words, we need to study how great traders work.

Photo credit: artemuestra.

The shift from facts to data is subtle and makes perfect sense. You could that say data are facts, with the difference that they can be computed, analyzed, and made use of in a more abstract way, especially by a computer.

There is nothing new about pointing out the importance of public data being made available. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has discussed at length the importance of governments and institutions putting their data online, making it accessible and useful. His TED talk and interviews with ReadWriteWeb and Talis (disclosure: I am a blogger at Talis) all explain his belief that by publishing linked data we can begin to solve many of the problems the world faces. Innovations in medicine, science, and development could all be achieved if only currently hidden data were made available. Data-driven journalism could be the first step in realizing this dream. The best stories would then come from innovators who read about trends reported in news media and are then able to draw new conclusions and solve bigger problems. In his recent discussion with BBC, Berners-Lee said that the next step is to go for low-hanging fruit by just getting the data out there.

Thus far, this has made a lot of sense to me, and I have been tracking the publication of linked data and increasing access to public knowledge as emerging trends over at Talis. But my perspective has shifted a bit in the past few weeks.

First, there was data.gov and President Obama's call for more access to government data. A sitting head of state (and one of some significance) was clearly calling for public access to government data: this was news! But the idea has been discussed, praised, and debated for a while since then and may have lost some of its luster.

Then about a month ago, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made it part of his digital strategy to prioritize the publication of government information. He asked Sir Tim personally "to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming months" and appointed Berners-Lee an official governmental adviser. By now, neither of these stories is news and comparisons between the initiatives have been made.

The Guardian newspaper recently launched its own Data Blog, with the intention of letting readers access, mash up, and reuse much of its information in the form of data, which could in turn drive stories.

What is perhaps not as explicitly recognized is the voracious appetite for data that has been apparent for months. It is less about turning good ideas into stories and more about seeing how data informs our understanding of events happening right now. Each new initiative is another piece of low-hanging fruit picked.

Access to data is important: it drives innovation and even social change. Governments that publish their data have to become more transparent. Humanitarian organizations that make their findings known could spark bigger projects and source innovative solutions from their communities. Scientific findings and raw information could be used to solve bigger problems than the result of a single experiment or trial could ever manage. Even the simple comparison of two or more facts can lead to new insight, and all of these things happen only when the walls around an institution become porous.

2009 could become known as the year of data, the year of open access, or the year of the semantic Web (see links above for how this relates), and it may also be the first year when it becomes news that data wasn't published in a story when it should have been. That a government body isn't being transparent or is blocking access by publishing its findings in PDF or other non-linking formats would make a very interesting story indeed. We can expect to see more and more organizations and public bodies remove their own barriers through initiatives and legislation. Examples have been set, and seeing excuses die along with barriers is not far-fetched.

Do you know of other data-driven stories? We'd love to hear about any insights that were made through publicly accessible data or where this data might come from next.

Guest author: Zach Beauvais is a Platform Evangelist for Talis and editor of Nodalities Magazine.

Jeff Jarvis does a great job of defining a different way to do investigative journalism, which he calls process journalism. I prefer to call it iterative journalism. Everyone follows a "process," so that word doesn't really define it. Traditional journalists follow a process, and so do blogger journalists. Theirs are just different processes.

"Iterative" is the way of the Web. Create something, put it out there, get reactions, improve. That has to be the future.

But apart from the name, I take big issue with the way some bloggers seize on this as a way to put a respectable spin on what has always been called "yellow journalism" or "gossip rag" material. You can make a ton of money doing that. No, I won't name names here, but the best practitioners of this game have no illusions.

I recall an interview with the editor of one of the most notorious gossip rags, one of whose headlines trumpeted: "Hitler found alive in Afghanistan." I just had to pick it up and scan it while waiting in line at the supermarket. The publication's evidence went as follows:

• Here is a picture of a German Shepherd dog outside a cave in the mountains,
• The cave is in Afghanistan (which looked plausible, if not for Photoshop),
• Hitler liked German Shepherd dogs,
• Ergo, Hitler was in that cave.

The editor had just retired, and the interviewer asked him, "Okay, now that you have retired, you can admit it. You made up some of those stories, right?"

The editor laughed and said, "No, I can tell you with 100% honesty that we never made up a single story. Really. We were simply not that rigorous in checking the stories that people sent to us."

He had outsourced creativity to his readers! Crowdsourcing is not new.

I didn't buy that paper. I just scanned it in the check-out line. But online, I might have clicked. I would have snorted with derision and left the website quickly, but I still would have clicked. Just as I might click on the headline "Google said to be in talks to buy Apple."

That click is money. And yellow journalism exists online.

We can do better than that.

We have to do better. No matter what bloggers believe, the "man on the street" view is that they cannot be trusted. Well, maybe some can be trusted, but that trust is earned every day, the hard way.

The Fourth Estate's Claim to Public Good

In an earlier post on Journalism 2.0, I posited the question, "Would citizen journalists have exposed Watergate?"

The debate was clearly between traditional journalists ("No way. That required serious investigative skills, time, and money.") and bloggers ("With millions of eyes, the truth will always come out.").

In this debate, I am 100% in the blogger/citizen journalist's camp. My opinion has been forged by seeing what happens in countries where government pressure shuts down a story. The Watergate story was not just about tenacious journalists. It was just as much about the bravery of Katherine Graham, the publisher who agreed to take on the wrath of the government by going with the story. Imagine a different publisher, who gets a call from the White House...

In Asia, I have personally seen tenacious journalists stopped dead in their tracks by government pressure and seen their financial backers ruined and exiled. It's ugly stuff and happens all the time. But now there are far too many ways for a story to get out. That kind of government control is no more, and that is great.

The news from Iran shows that pretty clearly.

But Twitter is unreliable drivel that can be gamed, you say? This is not about Twitter. Twitter is just one piece in a layer in the emerging news/journalism stack.

The Emerging Journalism Stack

The old model was vertical integration. The publisher owned the printing press, bought the ink, hired the reporters, delivered the paper, and sold the ads. As in many technology industries, change begets a layered stack. And like it or not, news is now just another digital artifact.

So, here is the emerging stack:

• Bottom: millions of eyes, with camera phones, SMS, Twitter, whatever works at the time. No media firm can replicate this. When people talk about funding journalism through non-profit foundations, it should be along the lines of: make sure everybody in the Peace Corps knows how to do this, or give Amnesty International money to report on prisoner abuse, or give Greenpeace money to report on environmental issues. In fact, not much else is needed beyond what is already happening; the crashing prices of cell phones is making this available to billions of people.
• Middle: the spotters and amplifiers, people who see the potential importance of a story and do a bit more research online and use their network to push the story out. Many of these people have an axe to grind, which makes them motivated, but one has to take what they say with a grain of salt.
• Top: the final mile of media, the trusted brands. Each has to earn the public's trust every day. When you see a news item coming from multiple sources, which do you click on? Different clicks for different folks; this is no winner-take-all market. Can be MSM, can be niche. But that trust is earned every day. Facts have to be checked, and that takes time, money, and training.

The truly amazing thing today is our ability to cruise up and down this stack at will: to see the raw reports from the million eyes, to hear the impassioned voice of the amplifier, and to see how the story emerges down the final mile of media.

Finding Common Ground

The future will play out as it will no matter what either party says. The only question for individuals involved in the journalism/news business is, how do you position yourself in that stack.

It is time for both parties to accept some truths.

Traditional media journalists have to accept that the economic model of their industry is fundamentally and irrevocably broken. It will not return. Ever. Get used to it. Adapt. Many people have to adapt to change, and journalists are no different.

Bloggers have to accept that readers are looking for the rigor of traditional journalists. We have to figure out how to get enough money to do that properly or else do it much more efficiently.

This year's Knight News Challenge winners were just announced this afternoon, nine winning projects will receive over $2 million total to try and change the way the news world works. All of us should benefit from the results.

None more so than DocumentCloud. The winning project's description continues: "DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets."

Examination of large document sets and the systematic creation of shared cross-institutional memory with public access online? In concept at least, it doesn't get much hotter than that. It reminds us of Infochimps, a similar cloud for large sets of data, with programmatic access and user feedback on data quality. DocumentCloud isn't built yet, it appears, and InfoChimps is going to have a radical relaunch with more complete functionality soon. (We hope not to burst with excitement first.)

These kinds of juicy public banks of information are a big part of what the future of content and application functionality will be built with. Right now we're stumbling around online in the dark, with no illumination on all the data and documents around us except for cold-start full text or metadata search of what a handful of search engines can find spread out across disparate locations. Hopefully these upstart projects can pull it all off and all of us will be able to do much more informed research in the future. For updates on DocumentCloud, see the project's Twitter account.

The eight other winners of today's Knight Challenge include Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg's proposal to build a neutral site for the public to discuss reporting errors with journalists, Aaron Presnall's proposal to create an easy-to-use data-visualization tool set, Katrin Verclas's plan to build a mobile media toolkit to turn anyone in the world into an instant mobile reporter and artist John Ewing's virtual street corners - a project that puts full size audio and video displays for real-time conversation between people on two different street corners in different locations. Information about all the winners is here.

Disclosure: The New York Times syndicates ReadWriteWeb.

The emphasis on statistics, the extensive reporting infrastructure that baseball already has built out and the "wow factor" of the iPhone's interface are all things that other established media outlets have an opportunity to emulate.

A photo used to be worth a thousand words, but in the media world these days all but the very best photos are a dime a dozen. A good statistic may be the new "thousand words" in an era rich with piles of data ready to be analyzed. All sports industries, but perhaps baseball in particular, have long appreciated the value that can be added with statistics. Sports stats are probably the best example of numbers that millions of people have long loved to talk about. The MLB.com iPhone app was one of the hottest in the app store before there was almost any video at all - it's been based nearly entirely on serving up stats.

We're entering a new world online, though, where all kinds of statistics are available for anyone to use to add color and context to our understanding of current events. More and more data sets are coming available online, sometimes with Application Programming Interfaces enabling programmatic access for sophisticated ongoing access. Mathew Ingram of the Toronto Globe and Mail says that the Golden Age of Computer Assisted Reporting is at hand. As Paul Bradshaw wrote this week on his OnlineJournalismBlog, every newspaper should have a data store.

At this year's national conference on Computer Assisted Reporting for Investigative Reporters and Editors, the New York Times team stole the show with their jaw dropping infographics and incredible sense of urgency to innovate in order for media to save itself.

Any media outlet that can leverage statistics and data visualization as a central part of its coverage would be well served to put those visualizations in an iPhone app and sell it. The iPhone and Android platforms are brilliant for scrolling and zooming through layers of data in ways that print, TV and radio could only dream of. Mobile, touchscreen and hand-held beats a web page on the desktop computer too for data visualization.

Touchscreen is Still Wow

Paying for web content is just not something that people are excited to do. There's too much free content on the web and too little of it really knocks your socks off enough to feel like you want to pay for it. (Paul Bradshaw offers the best defense of news paywalls we've read here.)

Mobile apps that really rock are something people are willing to pay for. It may be because the expectation was set that way from the beginning but it may also be because they are software with a longer life expectancy than content.

Give me an iPhone app from my local newspaper that's like a combination of MLB.com's stats and live video, Outside.in's awesome hyper local news aggregation and Yelp's reader-user interaction and I'll pay $20, $50, $100 for it, if it's really good at leveraging the platform. For example, there's a couple of hospitals in my town; if the local paper let me scroll through a chart of infection rates and customer satisfaction over the years at both, and compared that data to state and national stats - I would happily pay for an app that brought me experiences like that.

A Great Team of Old Dogs Learning New Tricks

Established media organizations, like baseball, are full of experienced, skilled, well trained teams of professionals. Teach those old dogs some new tricks and get their work available on a new platform. Isn't that the lesson of MLB.com's iPhone app? Baseball can be enjoyed with a stick and an old sock wound with string or duct tape - but media pros covering that activity have found new ways to add compelling new value to their coverage over the years.

That sounds to us like a great model for other news organizations struggling to make money in a new media world.

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

The conversation wasn't high tech, but it was stone-cold realistic. Here are a few videos from that panel; you'll hear on-air NBC affiliate reporters talk about how they've incorporated Twitter and Facebook to engage audiences and get leads on new stories, and you'll hear local bloggers talk about how they fit into the scheme of things.

He inspired a fellow reporter, Rachel DePompa, to start her own Twitter account. Here, she shares how that affected her reporting:

A local lifestyle mag shared how social media affected site traffic:

The conversation turned back to the first NBC reporter, who talked about how social media gave his audience more personal insight and a deeper connection with him:

The panel had some interesting comments on on-air tweets during newscasts:

And finally, the editor for RVAMag told an interesting story about a truly hardcore monetized Twitter account:

All in all, we learned tonight how traditional media are slowly but surely incorporating social media in their reporting, using it both for broadcast and discovery as well as personal interaction. Best of all, this conversation took place within the Social Media Club environment. All parties involved were intent on "getting it right" as all forms of media evolve.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?

According to a New York Times report from March, Link and Lee were arrested by North Korean border guards near the China-North Korean border after interviewing North Korean refugees in Chinese border towns. During the trip, the two journalists must have entered North Korean territory - though it is not clear if they tried to enter North Korea deliberately or if this was an accident. As Slate's, Nina Shen Rastogi, reported last month when the trial of Link and Lee began, we know very little about how the Central Court, which handles all "grievous cases against the state," really works, though we do know that rulings from the Central Court can not be appealed and that legal education is not a required qualification for being elected as a judge.

The (Potentially) Good News

The Washington Post, however, also reports that several North Korea experts predict that the U.S. government (or an intermediary) and North Korea will soon begin talks to negotiate the release. Chances are that North Korea will try to use the two as pawns to negotiate with the U.S.

So far, Current TV has not publicly commented on this situation.

At the same time, Murdoch also dismissed Amazon's Kindle, because he doesn't want News Corp to cede its content rights "to the fine people who created the Kindle." During a Senate hearing about the future of the newspaper industry yesterday, the CEO of the Dallas Morning News announced that Amazon will take a 70% cut of the newspaper subscription revenues from the Kindle. Those numbers do, indeed, seem rather outrageous, though some might argue that the 30% the newspapers will get from Amazon is still more than the zero dollars they are getting from people who read the paper without the Kindle.

Interestingly, though, while Murdoch heralded the return of paid online newspaper subscription, News Corp also proudly announced that the Wall Street Journal's free iPhone application has been downloaded over 360,000 times. And that app, on a device fully controlled by Apple, gives users all of the WSJ content for free without the need for a subscription.

Senate Hearing

Yesterday's Senate hearing on the "Future of Journalism" made it clear that there are quite a few newspaper companies who would like to go back to charging for their content (while lobbying for tax breaks at the same time). Google's Marissa Mayer and Arianna Huffington managed to put some of the newspapers' hyperbole into some much needed context (Huffington's testimony starts at around 58min here). They argued that while the age of the printed newspaper may be coming to an end, journalism itself will blossom in the future, and that online publishers can indeed make money from their online content by smartly monetizing their traffic (and those who don't want their traffic to come from Google can just add a line to their robots.txt file anyway).

It's Not About the Future of Newspapers - It's about Journalism

We also think that it is important to move away from the question of how we can save the newspapers (easy answer: we can't). Instead, the more interesting question is how we can save good, in-depth, investigative journalism. There are clearly no easy answers for how to save the newspapers and still be able to finance good journalism, and we have doubts that charging for online access is a viable model. Users have clearly voted against this, and even if a paper wanted to charge, users could just head to another paper that decided to go with an advertising-based revenue model.

Blogging is open to anyone. You do not need to be trained as a journalist, nor do you need a job that pays you to blog. But many bloggers have created media businesses that employ people, cover the news on a regular basis, and sell advertising. They have created newspapers without the paper. Which turns out to be a fairly good business, with overheads low enough to make a reasonable profit.

However, the imperatives that come with running a real business tend to shift bloggers from the classic blog mode to something else. This has generated a lot of anguish among blog veterans who worry that blogging is "losing its soul." Journalists, on the other hand, face a starker, more existential threat as newspapers close shop.

So neither bloggers nor journalists are happy today.

But my optimistic nature inclines me to the view that some new model will emerge that makes for a fulfilling and reasonably well-compensated career.

Blogging Compared to Journalism

Blogging seems wonderful compared to traditional journalism: anybody can do it; the style is informal, fun, and personal; no editor has control of your voice; you're not tied to a fixed schedule; and you encounter incredible diversity.

But now that many bloggers have morphed into small-media business owners, they are starting to feel pressure to follow a schedule and cover key news stories. This is a world that a traditionally trained journalist can recognize.

But there is a fundamental difference. Bloggers are passionate experts first and journalists second. Somebody who blogs about technology could not credibly switch to politics, and vice versa. The journalism profession is adept at taking somebody from a story on a bank robbery and allocating them to a political sex scandal. Their professional skills enable journalists to be switch-hitters.

This difference is generally advantageous to bloggers. Training somebody in the basics of journalism is easier than creating passionate expertise in a subject.

However, this is where the blog media business is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater

We don't need print or TV to deliver news. Throw out the bathwater.

But the baby is cute. Let's keep the baby. Let's keep all the good things about journalism, the things that inspired me as a kid and that have inspired countless journalists:

1. A really strong desire to find the truth, wherever it may lurk;
2. An assumption that everyone knows more than you, and that your job is to find, cultivate, question, and listen to your sources, and then come to a view;
3. An inclination not to take anything at face value, because everyone has a point of view, and those points of view are usually driven by self-interest;
4. A resolve not to let commercial interests (in other words, advertisers) influence your search for the truth.

I don't know if this is taught in journalism school. It is a personal point of view. I hope that is okay. I did declare up front that this was a personal opinion piece.

Begone, You Self-Interested Tech Cynics

I have always been in the technology business. I like writing about the technology business because I find it fascinating and there are a lot of really smart people to talk to. But techies can spout the most self-interested baloney when it comes to content. The Web 2.0 vision of user-generated content is millions of passionate experts creating content that really clever algorithms deliver to audiences. The people who create those really clever algorithms become rich beyond the dreams of avarice while throwing a few crumbs to the content creators. Don't try paying a mortgage with AdSense or other CPC-affiliate revenue deals.

To a techie, "content" is just something to throw in a software system. Content creators don't talk about "content." They talk about their art or craft. Journalism is a form of art, albeit closer to craft than art. To a techie, art is just content. Which is more important, code or art? If you had to choose between a world without computers or a world without art, which would you choose?

But let's not get carried away with this. Journalism is still just a job.

Would Citizen Journalists Have Exposed Watergate?

Yes, they would have.

We don't need to protect journalism with public money or grants. The greater social good will be delivered by thousands of people on the ground reporting what is happening. That massive flow will be analyzed and edited ("curated") by a small number of experts who are motivated and trained to uncover the truth.

It won't be perfect. But the current system isn't perfect either. It is fair to say, though, that scumbags won't rest any easier. They will still be exposed.

Sacrifices will be made. One cannot imagine foreign bureaus surviving in anything close to their current form. Instead of having a few stringers on a loose contract, media firms will have a standardized deal that applies to anyone who covers fast-breaking news. That way, whoever is on the spot becomes a "just-in-time stringer."

Is that better or worse than what we have now? It's worse for the people working today in foreign bureaus on good salaries. But mostly, it's just different.

Online Revenue Models for Quality Need to Evolve

The newspaper business was fantastically profitable in its heyday. So it has the potential to pay a lot of journalists and editors reasonably well. The online business would likely pay less and employ fewer people because the overall revenue would be lower.

Will there be enough revenue to pay for "quality" journalism. Nobody can really define "quality" journalism. It is a bit like a judge who says, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it."

We can recognize "low-quality" journalism when we see it, and, boy, is there a lot of it online! The free-for-all nature of the Web is bound to produce a lot of junk. The question is, will it let the good stuff float to the top?

Why Pay $2.50 to Buy a Copy of the Financial Times?

Business people pay for quality content. The Financial Times costs $2.50 on newsstands and $99 for an annual subscription. The ROI is massive. Can you imagine a CEO making a bad decision because she neglected to read an article that would have saved her from the mistake?

Even the lowest-paid executive wastes more than $99 a year by not optimizing his cell phone bill.

I repeat: business people pay for news-driven content. If you doubt this, try prying a Bloomberg Terminal, which costs $2,000 per month, from a financial trader!

Consumers don't pay for news-driven content. Consumers pay for entertainment. Reading the news in the form of a newspaper was entertainment, a relaxing thing to do at the end of the day. People will still pay for entertainment. Just don't confuse that with the news business.

Monetizing Quality Online Is Harder

The Financial Times has been the savviest newspaper at balancing free and paid. It has a shot at getting it right because it has a business readership for whom time is money.

But the fundamental reality is that news, and everything that follows from news (opinion, analysis, insight), has to be primarily monetized by advertising; subscription revenue is the icing on the cake. Not much dispute on that score.

The problem is, how do you get an ROI from the additional investment in quality?

In a subscription-based business, that ROI is simple. If The Economist ever compromised its incredibly high standards, I would cancel the subscription I have had for decades. They would have then lost another good-quality advertiser.

But online, the correlation between quality and revenue is weaker. There is some correlation: a site focused on senior managers gets a higher CPM than a site targeting students.

But because the audience for a website is not measured in any way like an audience for, say, a controlled-circulation magazine is measured, there is a large element of faith that the "right" people (i.e. influential people with big budgets) are reading. That need for faith leads to a discount.

Until we as an industry can do a better job at monetizing quality, at correlating quality with revenue, the sensible business decision is simply to go after page views, any page views. This leads to the "aggregator bait" posts (Digg bait, Techmeme bait, Google bait, etc.) that we all deplore. Plenty among us really want to produce quality and have faith that the technology and business models will evolve to the point that quality journalism will be a rewarding profession to pursue.

Some of the numbers in this piece, however, seem more than far-fetched. Penn, for example, argues that it "takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year." Given that Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere, where Penn gets this number from, reports that the mean CPM (that is, the income per 1,000 ad impressions) that U.S. bloggers are getting from advertising is around $1.20.

Actually, once you read the Technorati post, you can see that Penn ignores the fact that this number is based on the average income of bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, and that the median annual income for pro bloggers was only about $22,000 (in comparison, the median income for U.S. households is about $50,000).

Penn also quotes some of our own statistics. Last October, we asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants about their income. While we indeed reported that these top tier bloggers can get $75 to $200 per post, we also mention that the average tech blogger who responded made about $25 per post.

We also wonder if the calculations that Penn uses to arrive at 452,000 pro bloggers aren't a bit off. Penn, for example, says that 1.7 million bloggers 'profit from their work.' This number, however, comes from a statistic on the Blog World Expo site, which doesn't even quote a source for this number, and which doesn't even say that 1.7 million make money from their blogs, but that 1.7 million list making money as a reason to blog.

Some Good Questions

Penn does ask a number of good questions, though, even if they are clearly colored by the current state of journalism as a profession and business:

are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America's Newest Profession.

[...]

But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most, no formal training?

These questions are indeed worth pondering (though some of them could also be asked about newspapers as well). Unlike Penn, however, we are quite optimistic that many journalists will see the light in the long run and that readers will quickly weed out the blogs that have no ethics codes and standards. As for formal training, Penn's selective use of statistics in his piece seems to make that argument for him - and Penn, of course, isn't even a journalist himself.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht