VIENNA — In August 2008, two wars unfolded in South Ossetia. Georgian newspapers and television stations reported an aggressive, unprovoked Russian invasion of their country. Russians, meanwhile, watched images and read tales of Georgian troops committing genocide.

For a brief period, Georgians could flip between TV stations to watch both versions. Soon, access to the Russian media ended. (Russians could not access Georgian TV and few Russians would be able to read Georgian print media.)

Margarita Akhvlediani, a longtime war correspondent and editor in chief of Go Group/Eyewitness Studio, studied the coordinated PR campaign by Georgia, the ensuing media coverage of the conflict by both Georgian and Russian media, and the role of NGOs in the information cycle. She presented some of her findings and related research at the Milton Wolf Seminar on the future of news and NGOs here in Vienna this morning. Her conclusion: International NGOs are critical to the dissemination of information in war and crisis zones.

Akhvlediani described a tale that came to symbolize the conflict for many Russians. According to the war story, dozens of Georgian villagers, seeking safety in a local church, died when Georgian soldiers burned the church to the ground. Human Rights Watch looked into the story, spending three months traveling to villages throughout the region looking for the church. Eventually, Human Rights Watch concluded: “…numerous Ossetian villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch in [the] village said they never heard about, let alone witnessed, such an incident.”

Akhvlediani argues that this independent research serves as an important fact check on one-sided reporting happening by both sides of the conflict. Local NGOs, Akhvlediani explained, found themselves in a similar situation as local media — unwilling or unable to report a rounded look at the conflict, instead presenting a single point of view.

Western media, which parachuted in to cover the conflict, by and large provided a biased take, too, especially at the start of the conflict, according to fellow panelist Andrei Zolotov, editor-in-chief of Russia Profile (and a former Nieman Fellow). Many journalists seemed happy to latch onto the underdog narrative the Georgia government had pushed, he said. (Two dozen press releases went out in the first few days of the conflict, seeking to shore up Western support for Georgia). “It’s a very easy story to sell,” Zolotov said.

The work of Human Rights Watch, which took three months, is an unlikely project for any outlet, even the best-off newspapers. It’s an example of an ongoing theme we’ve covered this week: How can NGOs be newsmakers?

Remember “David After Dentist,” the YouTube-tastic viral vid? It’s earned David’s family $$ in the “low six figures” http://j.mp/93N0zy »

Online-only for a year now, Seattlepi.com checks in with other local news ventures (ht @niemanreports/ML) http://j.mp/dzdAP7 »

“I hear it’s something people use to talk to each other”: BBC’s moving narrative of digital divide http://j.mp/9IKhcj »

To just describe their database via FOIA, U.S. immigration needs ‘861 man hours.’ Cost: $111K (via @propublica) http://j.mp/d5EgOc »

“In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.” http://j.mp/hSmLK »

“Cyber-bodyguards”: the Pentagon, to combat cyberattack, trains military computer experts in hacking http://j.mp/bOuLaF »

Reuters offers a new subscription service–customizable, print-ready financial infographics–to newspapers http://j.mp/azgvps »

24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute http://j.mp/c6kRcc »

Jimmy Wales questions cost of NYT opinion columns: “I don’t see the added value there” (via @NewspaperWorld) http://j.mp/9PtrHM »

Reuters AlterNet keeps humanitarians and reporters up-to-date on crisis around the world http://j.mp/bljGF #MWS2010 »

In 2010, China’s mobile web users will outnumber the entire population of the US (via @techcrunch) http://j.mp/cI6Fwa »

Viacom-YouTube “secrets” to be exposed today as judge releases docs in copyright dispute (via @iwantmedia) http://j.mp/csTTZl »

Good morning! The Pentagon adds WikiLeaks to its list of “enemies threatening the security of the United States” http://j.mp/bHKvBd »

The New York Times. Video. Three years ago, that seemed like an oxymoron, save the Times’ occasional forays into TV experiments. Now, Times TV pops up in front of us on airplane TVs and news video has become an emerging feature of Times sites. As Apple and NYT staffers plot behind closed doors in the Times building, we can expect that Times video will be a key element of the iPad NYT launch.

Behind what we see, though, are some critical developments in processing of digital video, the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting that often determines time-to-market, and business failure or success.

We can get a glimpse into that with the Times’ recently announced deal with Thought Equity Motion (TEM). Founded in 2003, the company now has an impressive list of customers: BBC, CBS (the current NCAA Vault, a March Madness-related product was co-produced with TEM), NBC and Japan’s NHK, among more than a dozen top brands in total. The New York Times, importantly, is the company’s first newspaper client.

Before we look at what TEM does for these companies, consider two big numbers here: 10.5 million hours and 10 percent.

The 10.5 million hours is the number of hours of video content contracted by TEM, under its management. The 10 percent: that’s all it has been able to get to, so far.

So, look at how early we in this news video business. Most of what will be out there in the digital world — on our phones, tablets, desktops and laptops — isn’t out there yet, but will be over the next several years. It may take mid-2011, robust 4G networks to power our daily video usage, but it’s clear where this movie is headed.

What TEM does for content producers is make their assets more easily usable in the digital world.

It’s no surprise that broadcasters have lots of moving pictures, but the “film” has not been easy to make readily accessible for web use and monetization. First off, there are formatting issues — TEM does transcoding and digitization here. Then there are issues of knowing what’s in the video: Try finding video through search now, and it’s still far more limited than finding text. That’s a matter of tagging and metatagging, categorizing content to harvest the many keywords within. That takes some speech-to-text technology, a still-evolving art. Then you’ve got rights management and all the little things you have to do to make video commercially, contextually, and instantly available. All of that is what TEM calls “Managed Services.”

For the Times, it’s not a matter of harvesting decades of archived film; it’s about making the most of its last three years of a video push. The Newsonomics are these:

• Make more licensing income off the video. The New York Times Syndicate has long been a high-margin revenue source for the company. Now, with a growing stockpile of video content, it can better manage a new line of licensed content. Think PR usage, think ads, think movies, think other news websites. The key here is having the news video accessible and discoverable. As TEM CEO Kevin Schaff told me, “We’re going after speed-to-context.”
• Better usage of companies’ own produced video (and partnered video) on their own websites, apps, and tablets. Video still produces among the highest effective ad prices, well into the double digits for premium brands. If a site can present more of it, relevantly and prominently, that’s more good inventory to sell. With video keywords more available — TEM is now testing ad matching with Google — more targeted advertising means more revenue.
• Put your content into new marketplaces. There have been numerous attempts to create first-generation video syndication marketplaces (Clip Syndicate, Grab Networks, Mochila, and more), some of which were too early for the technologies and viewer adoption curves. New ones will develop — TEM is among those developing one — and whichever get traction off new commercial opportunities for those companies that are ready to exploit them.

Lastly, the outsourcing here is essential. News companies are in learning mode — what is it they do best?; what do they leave to others. In this case, the Times and others are applying my Newsonomics Law #9: Apply the 10 Percent Rule, the heavy lifting of journalism can be aided and abetted by smart use of technology.

Video is in the air — C-SPAN’s release of its volumimous archives reenforces that notion — but as usual, it’s the less-glamorous, behind-the-scenes work that will separate the winners from the companies stuck in text mode.

Two weeks later, most media had left. But there was still an audience around the globe, particularly in the United States, hearing stories and getting information because a handful of NGO workers, many of them former journalists, were still tweeting and blogging about what was happening on the ground.

This anecdote, recounted by Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group, was the first we heard today at the Milton Wolf Seminar on the changing role of NGOs and media. The opening panel, “NGOs as Newsmakers in a Social Media Networking Environment,” laid out great questions to start people thinking about how the Internet, social media tools, and the mainstream media’s shrinking capacity are reshaping relationships between NGOs and journalists. There are pitfalls the panelists agreed, but the potential is exciting.

Abbott says that those tweeting and blogging NGO workers are not journalists in a traditional sense, but that they have the potential to help fill gaps in coverage. “As mainstream media is cutting back, the digital revolution is making it such that the public doesn’t have to take what the media serves up — they can be the curators of their information,” Abbott said.

Thomas Seifert, a foreign correspondent for the Austrian daily Die Presse, jumped on the idea of NGOs as news producers. When he was covering the Afghan elections, the personal blog of a UN field worker had an impact on his own coverage: “During the election phase, [the UN worker] wrote wonderful pieces on his personal blog,” Seifert said. The UN’s press releases were not, he hesitated to explain, quite as helpful.

Seifert sees social media and the connections it lets him forge with NGOs as a great tool for journalists; field-workers-turned-Facebook-friends have brought him great leads on stories in India and Afghanistan. But he also warned about the pitfalls. An NGO has to have “credibility, experience and proof,” Seifert said, quoting fellow panelist Franz Küberl, the president of Caritas Austria, a Catholic charity. “That’s a very good compass for us.”

Seifert described hopping a flight to Sudan with a Christian NGO. The story he saw unfold was the NGO freeing slaves who’d been kidnapped. “Henchmen” with cash bought their freedom. “It looked wonderful on camera,” Seifert said. “They came in with huge bags of money…it was great pictures.”

Two weeks after the story ran, he and a colleague at The Boston Globe started to think, “Come on, this is really too perfect.” The New Yorker eventually did the same story, raising questions about the motivations of the NGO, writing a more nuanced look at slavery, NGOs and the relationships with the government. NGOs have plenty of interests themselves, Seifert noted. In unstable places, they may prefer to work with one faction of the government over another.

Simon Cottle of the Cardiff School for Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies offered a broader perspective on how NGOs struggle with the new media world, based on interviews he’s conducted with Australian NGOs. Cottle argued that social media isn’t the future, but just a piece of a much larger galaxy of media that NGOs must operate within.

His presentation, which included points he’s written about for the Lab, touched on how competitive the new landscape is. NGOs fight to build up a “brand” and bend what they do to get media coverage.

“It may occasionally be possible for NGOs to lead rather than follow prevailing media logic,” Cottle concluded.

The original version of this story incorrectly reported the date of the earthquake in Haiti. We regret the error.

EveryBlock, everywhere? Hatari.co.ke uses Ushahidi to crowdsource crime info in Nairobi http://j.mp/ccLNuF »

Big news from @nickbilton: Google partners with Intel, Sony, Logitech to develop Google TV http://j.mp/bYzJjU »

Currently streaming live: @jeffjarvis speaking at Journal Register Co. conference (via @jxpaton) http://j.mp/9uGdmw »

Magazine web editor on social media: “We’ve found that Twitter acts like a stock and Facebook like a bond” http://j.mp/9CEPcU »

“The Participatory Museum,” full of insight for journalism, is now posted–in full and for free–online (ht @juliaxgulia) http://j.mp/a3koR0 »

Chatroulette, per @TechCrunch metrics: 89% male, 47% American, 13% pervert http://j.mp/95DRtu »

This American Infographic builds data visualizations of each episode of This American Life (via @ethanz) http://j.mp/6oCVPN »

Interesting. @Newsweek tells @jayrosen_nyu http://j.mp/acRYXm: to determine Twitter’s broad traffic impact, triple the number of web refers »

Proposed: “Facebook will rule the web during the next decade.” http://j.mp/dyS8DV Thoughts? »

Now streaming live: FTC forum on privacy challenges in the 21st century http://j.mp/bGsh8b (Thx, @digiphile!) »

When indie bands partner with YouTube, they can make money off videos embedded on external websites http://j.mp/cGID5O »

Wondering where healthcare stands in the House? Check this incredibly useful @nytimes visualization http://j.mp/ddfJEG

CPI and the Sunlight Foundation celebrate Sunshine Week by crowdsourcing FOIA info http://j.mp/c4FsRa »

Good morning! Yahoo News fills its ranks as it prepares to expand its blog network http://j.mp/ag5nOT »

[Our friend Michael Skoler wrote this post for Mizzou's Reynolds Journalism Institute, where he's currently a fellow. It's on deal brokering — sites like Groupon or Woot that connect sellers to buyers by offering time-limited deals. He thinks it could be a big part of news organizations' financial future, and we thought you'd be interested in seeing it. —Josh]

How does this sound? A million-dollar revenue stream that requires only a salesperson or two, some web support and off-the-shelf e-commerce and newsletter tools? It caught my eye. And I’m suggesting you steal the idea for your local news operation fast before national competitors own the market.

The idea is deal brokering. You use your knowledge of the local scene, your brand and your contacts to negotiate group deals with local businesses from bars to restaurants to dry cleaners. The businesses offer big one-time discounts to attract new customers, your audience gets access to great deals, and you broker the deal on your site and get a substantial cut of the money. It’s already happening around the country.

Online startups like Groupon and Living Social offer one local deal a day, which is conveniently pushed to you through e-mail or cell phone.

Each deal is usually 50 percent off or more, good for just one day, and specific to your city. I’ve seen deals on organic food, massages, hair styling, dry cleaning, acupuncture, dental checkups, online book printing, gym memberships, belly dancing classes, and much more. Yet the most common deals, and probably the best sellers, are restaurant, bar and entertainment gift certificates. I have yet to see a deal repeated.

The beauty of the model is its simplicity. It is easy and fun to see one deal a day, presented with humor or sparkle. I dislike lists of deals provided by groups like Travelzoo.com or Restaurant.com that require combing through offers to see if any are relevant. And the new deal services make it easy to buy the day’s deal and share it with friends. They also provide incentives to get people to share the deals through their social networks.

Here’s how a single deal with a local restaurant works from the customer’s perspective. After registering for a daily email or text message, one day I see a $65 gift certificate for a restaurant I’ve been hearing about — price is $30. I click it, buy it with Paypal or a credit card and receive a certificate with a unique deal code. I go to the restaurant, show my gift certificate on paper or cell phone, and have a great meal (since food always tastes better at a 50%-plus discount.) I can only use the certificate once, so I order a little more than its value and pay tax, tip and the amount over $65.

Now, here’s the value from the restaurant owner’s perspective. I pay nothing upfront for marketing to thousands of people in my area. I receive half the money collected by the deal-brokering organization. Typically, I can count on maybe 25-30 percent of the people who buy the certificates to never show up. The money I receive should cover my actual costs for food and drink for the 70-75 percent who redeem the certificates. Any spending over $65 gives me income at my regular prices. My restaurant is busy, word-of-mouth buzz rises, my serving staff get tips on the full bill and some of those new customers come back again at full prices.

Now, here’s how it looks from your news organization’s perspective as the deal broker. I have a valuable new service to offer that can bring people to my site and get them registered for a daily e-mail list. I have a valuable new service to offer businesses in my area — risk-free marketing. On top of that, I get half of the money that comes in on each deal (a percent that can be negotiated up or down.) As we’ll see in a minute, that money can be huge. Plus, I build loyalty and traffic for my site, as folks spread word on the deals through their social networks. And my costs are reasonable – one salesperson or two to manage the program and some IT support for the email newsletter app and ecommerce page on my site. My fulfillment involves sending a receipt with a unique deal code to each buying customer (a feature of e-commerce tools) and sending a list of names and deal codes to the restaurant so the owner can check off codes as they are used. (Don’t want those codes used twice!)

And what’s the income? A restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota offered the deal described above through Groupon and 860 people bought it. The deal earned a total of $25,800. The restaurant got $12,900, Groupon got $12,900 and the deal buyers potentially saved over $30,000. According to Mark Desky, vice president of marketing for Groupon, deals have ranged in cost from $3 for quick food restaurants to $450 to rent an exotic car for a day. He says one deal for tickets to the Chicago Auto Show attracted 15,000 buyers.

The businesses that I spoke with loved this deal experience. They received actual money, rather than being asked to provide free gift certificates in exchange for ad spots or radio mentions of their businesses. They immediately see the results of the promotion. And they say some customers are coming back again.

If your news organization can average a deal like the restaurant example above every weekday excluding holidays, you can earn over $2.5 million annually ($12,900 x 200 days). For a small organization in a small market, maybe you average 86 sales a day (one tenth of the volume) or $258,000 annually before expenses. And, of course, you get the added benefit of building your online community and extending your relationships with local businesses.

I’ve described one system. But you can be a deal broker in many ways. Ask your audience what they want to buy and then go out and cut a volume deal with a computer seller, a broadband provider, an airline, a theater, grocery stores, events… anything. You get closer to your audience and learn what they want, which is helpful in selling other advertising. Or ask local businesses if they bought too many goods and want help clearing the inventory fast. For local startup news organizations, even occasional sales like this might add desperately needed cash and a new revenue stream.

There are many online or mobile coupon services, from Yowza to Coupon Sherpa. But deal-brokering is different. It is about community and buzz and that means strong local news organizations potentially have an advantage over national startups. They know their audience and their market, have relationships with local businesses, know which businesses are high-quality and buzz-inducing, and can promote the deals and the brokering service on their media platforms, whether in print, radio or online.

In fact, Living Social partners with The Washington Post, placing its deals on the paper’s online “Going Out Guide.” Living Social CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy says his company is interested in local news media partnerships. And he argues that companies like his have an advantage in deal brokering, since Living Social produces some of the most popular Facebook applications and knows how to serve online communities. O’Shaughnessy says deal brokering involves customer service — something he feels is thin for local news outlets. (Folks interested in exploring partnership should contact Jake Maas.)

Groupon says it has a patent pending on its model. But patents must be for products or processes that are unique and it’s hard to see how Groupon can claim to have invented group buying or online sales of discounted products and services. While executives at both Groupon and Living Social agree the model seems straightforward to copy, they point out there is an advantage to being the first to build a deal community in a town. Businesses and buyers like to participate when they see many people in the network. And both companies offer incentives to people to sign up others in their social networks.

Groupon is already in 40 cities; Living Social is in 9. Both are moving fast to enter others. You could offer one advantage to businesses by paying them faster — Groupon pays in three chunks over 60 days. Living Social says it pays within 10 days.

Instead of watching startups take over yet more of the advertising that now goes to news organizations, let’s move fast to seize this opportunity. I would love to hear your thoughts on what it would take to implement this for your news site and what other forms of deal brokering might excite your audience.

The seminar is put on by the American Austria Foundation, the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna and the Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, which is sponsoring my trip.

The seminar builds on themes from the series we ran here at the Lab, in partnership with Annenberg, on the changing role of international NGOs in the media ecosystem, with newspapers and TV cutting foreign bureaus and coverage abroad. As the introductory post asked:

What happens when news making and journalistic functions are increasingly outsourced or claimed by other actors with no original training in this field and its editorial standards? How central are new media to the alterations and growing distortions of the traditional journalistic sphere and how, if at all, can they be harnessed?

One session at the conference will address that issue directly, looking at how large NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins sans Frontieres are using social media to produce and spread an incredible amount of their own content. One of the panelists, Simon Cottle of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies wrote an essay in our series on how NGOs bend to the needs of new organizations in the battle for coverage:

NGOs have become increasingly embroiled within a “media logic” that is far removed from the ideals and aims of humanitarianism. This is demonstrated in how aid NGOs seek to “brand” their organizations in the media in response to an increasingly crowded, competitive and media-hungry field; how they pitch and package stories in ways designed to appeal to known media interests, deploying celebrity and publicity events; how they regionalize and personalize media coverage of humanitarian work in the field, marginalizing if not occluding local relief efforts and the role of survivors; and also how they expend valuable time, resources and energy to safeguard their organizational reputations and credibility against the risks of media-led scandals.

It should be an interesting couple of days — keep reading.

Launched today: MyNews, @NewsTrust’s customizable social news aggregator http://j.mp/96xUZu »

NY Observer to relaunch its Media Mob blog…as a reporter-branded product (via @fishbowlny) http://j.mp/cLLAm2 »

We’re enjoying this conversation between @ryansholin and @10000Words: chock full of win http://j.mp/awInG1 »

Still images used to be the bedrock of visual storytelling. What will they become? Experts weigh in @NiemanStory http://j.mp/csgY0k »

Today marks the debut of A.V. Club Undercover, a cover-song-based web series sponsored by Starbucks http://j.mp/99hGSV »

Lots of useful info here: @JLab’s “Citizen Journalist’s Guide to Open Government” http://j.mp/16MSd »

Of news/media sites, HuffPo got the most Twitter traffic last week–followed by CNN, NYT, People mag, Google News http://j.mp/958A0h »

Audit Bureau of Circulations modifies its definition of “digital magazine” in preparation for the iPad http://j.mp/aYF4eq »

A new London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own 12-page newspaper (via @donohoe) http://j.mp/b9ylKe »

What would a midday TV news broadcast look like? ABC News considers the possibility http://j.mp/9Ae3zV »

Wonk paradise! C-Span uploads its video archives–160,000 hours of footage–to the Web (via @brianstelter) http://j.mp/9EracS »

Now streaming live: @FCC’s presentation of its National Broadband Plan http://j.mp/7Di3iT »

Facebook passed Google–just barely–as the most visited web site in the U.S. last week http://j.mp/cj7xJu »

Last year, the WaPo killed its business section. This year, it’ll launch a subscription-only biz weekly http://j.mp/9I0sFl »

Google exec predicts mobile ad prices could surpass what companies pay for desktop ads now http://j.mp/a04eSg »

Good morning! A Chinese registration page for Twitter is “just a matter of time” http://j.mp/9Vd7Kr »

I am running late. My prototype should have been live and locked on its URL by now. March was supposed to be the month I began meeting with potential partners and investors, refining the project’s design and business model, and going public with the name and exact nature of the website. But the past four weeks have decidedly not brought me from my planned Point A to Point B. It has also been an incredibly busy and potentially very fruitful phase for my project. Credit and blame can both be pinned on that rock’n'roll tech startup concept: iteration.

I don’t think I’d ever said out the I-word out loud in my life before six months ago, though any hack worth his salt and barstool is used to iterating on a regular basis. It happens when you’re just about to wrap your daily story, and a big break in the news suddenly arrives; or when your month-long in-depth piece is just coming together, and the big interview you’d long since given up on finally comes through. In such a moment, a major reset is in order on something that had been going perfectly well, thank you very much. And so you curse through the hard work of integrating/revamping the best of the old with the fresher (better) material. In the end, however, the kick-ass hack is always thankful because she knows her article will necessarily be much richer in its new, updated form. And responding to events is, after all, a big part of what this nutty job is about.

As a first-time (would-be?) entrepreneur, iterating doesn’t come quite so naturally. That create-destroy-repeat ethos suddenly feels radical, a well-executed pivot being always harder to pull off when you’re still getting your bearings. With that said, you’d have to be more than a bit dim not to see that the lightning pace of change in media and technology right now means that the only straight line from Point A to Point B is where B is failure.

The iterating for me lately has mostly been around the question of audience, both how to identify it and how to grow it. Let’s start with the latter.

Building an audience and the birth of a one-man news bundler

I’m still finding my tweetin’ voice, but we MSM folk are starting to grasp what the real-time feed may mean for the news business. Based in Europe, and with most of my followed-and-followers in the U.S., I’d started to see how my geography and language skills position me to get some breaking news into the Twitter stream ahead of the crowd. Still, I’d been content to treat it like an ongoing mini-exercise in improving my speed and range and eye for news that would be useful when launch time arrived.

Yet, there I was one morning last month about to retweet some bit of French burqua-ban news when another interesting story popped up from Germany, and I thought: Hmmm? Let me try to squeeze these two world news items together into one tweet. But with 140 characters to work with…well, good luck. So I put the two links aside into a Word document. And then it hit me: Why not expand the two links into five…and bundle them into a “Top Headlines From Jeff” post? I could post it on my blog, and link to it once a day. But then it hit me again: If timing is everything, that’s doubly true on the real-time web, which is bound to create new niches in the ways and whens of how we consume information. With my time-zone advantage and news biz experience, I could bundle and deliver a story list early, like at 7 a.m. Eastern, composed solely of news that has broken since 11 p.m. Like Slatest, but more time-specific, and aimed specifically at helping to sort through the endless stream of news flashes coming across your Facebook and Twitter feeds. I would take the established practice of aggregating from everywhere, and combine it with what seemed the novelty of a bundled selection of the news that has broken since Americans logged off last night. Exactly three weeks old, this has become whileUslept.

Unfortunately, coming up with an idea — half or fully baked — is no more than one-third of the battle in building an audience. You gotta get it to them, spread the word, go viral…and keep it going. I began posting the daily link on my own personal accounts, and in the last few days set up While U Slept pages of their own on Twitter and Facebook. It definitely did not catch on like wildfire. After two weeks, I had exactly three email subscribers, and a best-day grand total of a whopping 56 pageviews. (The daily average was 23.) Still, the webbiness of the web means that you are potentially always just one Link or Recommendation or Follow away from exponential growth. A private boost from one new-media guru, and then a retweet from another with the word “useful,” and my daily hit count suddenly spiked to 400-plus. Then a couple days later, it topped 600 after a link from a former colleague who has since transformed himself into the epitome of the 2.0 one-man news brand.

At such peaks, you sit there watching the views come in and start to dream that you too can build an audience all by yer lonesome? But the numbers that really count are still a long ways off from major mojo: 38 Twitter followers, 109 Facebook fans, 16 email subscribers. Perhaps I will need to hop on the shoulders of a major website? Iterate the iteration, making whileUslept richer and/or feed it at multiple points in the day. It will have to grow (and sustain) exponentially if I want to reach the kind of audience that actually helps me both pitch and execute the bigger project I am aiming for. Still, what started as an exercise on Twitter to prep myself for the big launch has actually become the beginning of the soft launch itself.

Perhaps just as important is the fact that some new ideas are flowing into my old media brain. This one I will dub the Baby Moses approach to aggregate realtime news: bundle the best content and drop it in the moving river of information at the right time and place.

The crowd and the core audience

The immediate collateral damage of this mini-project are the brakes it’s put on short-term progress of the Big Project. While I have essentially begun the “link to the rest” half of the famous Jarvis formula, I’m no closer than I was a month ago to actually establishing the “what you do best” part. And what will I do? Here too there is iteration to report. Without going into details — both because I still prefer to speak here in general terms about the product, and because the details of the new feature simply don’t yet exist — I will just describe it as crowd-source related. Though I do not plan on changing the entire product around this idea, as this very smart fellow startup dude vigorously suggested, I still think there is much room to integrate it in a way that could give the project some extra watts of glow in the eyes of potential investors. Crowdsourcing addresses two key questions that arise at different stages of the startup: identifying our core audience at launch, and giving the enterprise a vision of how to scale it up.

But before that, all this iterating risks sapping some of the vital big ‘mo from the Big Project. On the prototype (which I keep saying is just a week or two away), we are now rejiggering all the current pages and adding a brand new page or two. Meanwhile, the business plan will have to be overhauled. Completely. Again. Blessed be the iterationists, I and I: In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.

Looking for Mr. Right

All of this upheaval is further reminder that what I am missing most right now: more than audience, more than money: a partner. He or she would have the tech and business background that I lack, while having a natural interest in the news business. Last week, through a mutual friend in Paris, I set up a rendezvous with Mister X, whose resume features all what I am missing and more. But looking for a partner truly is like dating: “On paper” means nothing. We met at the Mabillon Metro stop in the Latin Quarter and found a nice café to chat over a beer. Though it was a relaxed conversation, a back and forth, I was also effectively pitching him my project as best I could. Talking to a potential partner is different than pitching other people. It starts out much more casually. But you are all too aware that if it goes well, really well, the project becomes his as much as mine. So in some ways, you must actually tread a bit more lightly on your first encounter. He needs to like me as much as my project.

As with the search for a life partner, timing is key. In this case, I am single, and looking, but I couldn’t know for sure what his status was. A couple of times in the past few months, I’d met people who might have fit the partner profile, who had the right skill set, and even interest in the project, but simply were not at a place in their life/work to commit to me. Though Mister X seemed to react positively to the project, and explained that he was finishing up a master’s degree this spring, he wasn’t giving any indication of his plans for the future. And then, about 40 minutes in, I finally said: “I don’t know if you might be interested…??”

He paused about two seconds, and said: “Hey, so long as I can be running a business, I’m open to anything.” My heart skipped a beat. Later, as we walked toward the metro, and I told him I’d send him all the working docs, we even talked for a moment about what the first steps together might actually look like. Then we shook hands, and said we’d be in touch when he got back from a long planned two-week hiking trip to Morocco. Perhaps for my next update here, I will have something (good) to report from our second date…

They’ve paid for the privilege. The store charges its consignment authors according to a tiered fee structure: $25 simply to stock a book (five copies at a time, replenished as needed by the author for no additional fee); $75 to feature a book for at least two weeks in the “Recommended” section; and $125 to, in addition to everything else, mention the book in the store’s email newsletter, feature it on the Local Favorites page of the store’s website for at least 60 days, and enable people to buy it online for the time it’s stocked in the store.

And for $255 — essentially, the platinum package — the store will throw in an in-store reading and book-signing event.

“Most people will come in at one of the higher fee amounts,” Arsen Kashkashian, the store’s head buyer and the architect of the program, told me. “That surprised us.” In fact, when the store first began charging its consignment authors back in 2007 (the fee-structure idea emerged when the store’s employees found themselves “inundated with self-published books, and there was a lot of work involved and not much reward”), its staff “thought people would grumble and complain” about the charges. But authors, Kashkashian says, have been generally grateful for the opportunity to sell and promote work that might otherwise be seen and appreciated only by their friends/spouses/moms: “‘I want the marketing, I want the exposure. I worked so hard on this project, and you guys are the only ones who could help me with it.’”

And the books are selling. Not flying off the shelves…but sauntering off, steadily. In the first week in March, Kashkashian told me, the store sold 75 consignment books — which, given the store’s 40-percent cut of those sales, and the authors’ fees, accounted for 3 percent of the store’s total revenues for the week. Part of that number, Kashkashian believes, is attributable to the authors’ efforts at self-promotion, which amplify the store’s own marketing strategy. “Some are blogging, some are on Twitter, some just trying to get out there by word of mouth,” he notes. “They’re working their networks, whether it’s online or offline. They’re kind of learning how to do it.”

The networking takes place offline, as well. The readings and signings are proving particularly popular, says Liesl Freudenstein, a buyer at the store and its consignment coordinator — not only among authors, but among Boulder’s residents more generally. “It’s great community involvement,” she notes. “These are mostly local people, people within 50 or 100 miles, and they bring their family and friends.”

It’s that kind of outside-the-box-store thinking — building and fostering engagement around unique content — that independent booksellers “need to do right now to survive,” Kashkashian says. They need, above all, to find ways “to tie themselves into the community.” Sound familiar?

Indeed, bookstores are like news outlets in more ways than the simple fact of their existential endangerment. The world of book publishing is experiencing a restructuring that is similar — and in some ways parallel — to the power shifts taking place in the world of journalism. Bookstores themselves don’t just facilitate access to information; they also provide an editorial filter for that information. Just as The New York Times is a curator of content as much as it’s a creator of it — assigning significance to news stories via (web)page placement, story length, headline size, etc. — bookstores curate their own content via in-store placement, “Staff Picks” sections, and all the rest.

If you’re an author whose book has been placed on a bottom shelf in the back corner of a store — that sad little no-man’s-land beyond Self Help, right next to the bathrooms, where the lighting is bleak and the odor bleaker — your book, however brilliant it may be, probably won’t be selling too well. You might be better off bypassing the middleman, the bookstore itself, altogether: using print-on-demand and then self-marketing, publishing direct-to-Amazon, embarking on a DIY book tour, etc. In short, taking advantage of the kind of hybrid marketing the Boulder consignment model represents — for bookselling and beyond.

That model hints at something authors often don’t have much of: recourse. Another route to attention/money/impact — an apparatus that bypasses entirely the publishing house’s traditional infrastructure. It suggests, in its way, editorial and distributional independence for book authors — the kind enjoyed by, for example, bloggers. Transform the distribution model, and everything else transforms along with it. In the past, to be a successful author, you generally had to be a published author, with everything that title suggested: an author whose book was determined to be worthy of publication costs (printing, distribution, marketing, etc.) by editors who knew enough about market appetites to make the determination. In publishing’s increasingly DIY world, though, the Boulder model — one that charges authors for, essentially, microdistribution of their books — makes increasing sense. “In the last few years, a professional-looking project has become much more attainable for people,” Kashkashian notes. “And once authors have a professional-looking book to sell, the selling itself becomes more feasible.”

Even published authors, Freudenstein says, are availing themselves of the store’s consignment service. She points to a Boulder-area author who’s signed to a local imprint…and yet, in the DIY style, also sells her books on consignment at the store. “She’s out there hustling,” Freudenstein says, “trying to make it happen — rather than relying on the publisher to make it happen.”

Photo of Boulder Book Store by Jesse Varner used under a Creative Commons license.

Of the 35,000 companies that build iPhone apps, 7,000 (20%) launched specifically for the iPhone platform http://j.mp/d8DPnn »

A link on Wikipedia’s main page pushes a 20-year-old Time article onto the site’s most-read list http://j.mp/amio0T (via @simonowens) »

What’s better: a wall of iPads or one diamond-encrusted Apple beauty? http://j.mp/dBVrVr (via @redirectny) »

Here’s Twitter’s announcement of the new @anywhere platform http://j.mp/amwfDk »

Conde Nast experiments with funding streams. Teen Vogue readers can pay for beauty consultation with magazine staffers http://j.mp/bXz3RT »

Apple sells an estimated 152,000 iPads in three days of pre-ordering http://j.mp/9yoXzz »

Facebook will open an office in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad (also home to Google, Microsoft offices) http://j.mp/9538dF »

ABC News is hiring digital journalists who can produce, write and edit their own work for on-air and online http://j.mp/aWoo3T »

Digg CEO Jay Adelson discusses the site’s extensive (and five-years-in-the-making) overhaul http://j.mp/9PELM0 »

Hybrid displays: Elle partners with California mag in an attempt to leverage regional ad markets http://j.mp/bx5ljv »

Super Swarm, SXSW edition: Foursquare hits a record-breaking 347,000 check-ins in a single day http://j.mp/aC7qbi »

Good morning! Pew finds growth, unbundling, power shifts in its 2010 State of the News Media report http://j.mp/bGLrbf

HONG KONG — A few weeks ago, Jonathan Stray looked at how news is reported and repeated in the new news ecosystem by tracking a single international story — the revelation that last year’s hacking of Google and other companies had been traced to two schools in China. His finding: 121 distinct versions of the story, but only 13 of which included any original reporting.

But Stray’s analysis only looked at English-language media. I wanted to compare his findings with how their Chinese news ecosystem reported the story. So I applied the same research methods to the Chinese-language reporting of this story; I went through every version of the story listed on the China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan editions of Google News to quantitatively examine the coverage on the Chinese-language Internet.

Here’s what I found: Although the total number of versions of the story in Chinese (151) was similar to the number of versions in English (121), the Chinese web pages were almost entirely verbatim reposts of only six pieces of copy, of which four included original reporting.

When Chinese news organizations follow an important and sensitive event, their coverage reflects state media policies. The coverage of the so-called “hacker-training schools” in China offers several clues as to how the Chinese media system, not known for its press freedom, actually works. Independent web sites are not allowed to gather news, and the vast majority didn’t. It’s also much safer to repeat official reports than write original copy when covering politically sensitive topics — and this was certainly a sensitive story for the Chinese government, which has been not-quite-accused by Google of state-sponsored hacking.

There were 151 items on the topic in the Google News story cluster when I gathered them. I went through each, tracking the original source of the copy and the source of the information, among other things, and gathered the results in an spreadsheet. These are the major findings:

There were only six distinct written stories. Four newspapers, a website, and a wire service offered distinct versions of the story of tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China. These media were, in the order that Google News ranked them, Elite Reference (Beijing), China Times (Beijing), China News Service (nationwide), Dazhong Web (Shandong), Qilu Evening News (Shandong), and Information Times (Guangzhou). These six stories were widely reposted by both commercial websites and local newspaper websites. The story from the China News Service was reposted 68 times, while the least repeated story was reposted seven times.

Four of these six stories were based on significant original reporting: China Times, China News Service, Dazhong Web, and Qilu Evening News. The other two stories (from Elite reference and Information Times) rearranged the facts from other media, adding a few comments from news conferences or netizens.

Out of the 151 web pages, 76 (50 percent) were the online outlets of traditional media. Among them, 56 (37 percent) were primarily newspapers, while the others are the websites of TV or radio stations. Private companies or individuals are not permitted to run a newspaper or broadcasting station independent of government oversight in China, so these figures mean that half of the websites following the Google hacking news are effectively state-run media.

Xinhua, the primary state-run Chinese news agency, did not contribute any stories in Chinese, but offered a report in English.

Essentially every web site that was not affiliated with a news agency reposted one of the six stories verbatim. This differed from the practice of English-language web sites, which mostly rewrote the story (without additional reporting). Depending on how you look at it, this is either blatant plagiarism — or extremely efficient.

Again, this is the result of state policy. In China, independent websites are not allowed to conduct interviews or do original reporting. “By maintaining the strictest control over the right to issue, review and revoke press accreditation, the government can exercise control over the media — and potentially over individuals who dare to practice ‘journalism’ outside the system,” according to Qian Gang and David Bandurski of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. Authorized news sites are fed by licensed traditional media. For all other sites, reposting the official stories protects them politically, both from violations of reporting restrictions and from off-message coverage of sensitive topics.

One website, Huameiwang, wrote a summarized story with hyperlinks to relevant articles reposted on its own domain. Due to the journalistic restrictions in force, this form of aggregation is common for online news organizations when covering important news events.

Linking to sources was rare on the Chinese internet. Overall, 118 websites (81 percent of the 145 total reposts) did not link back to the source of their text, and 15 sites did not mention any source at all.

The four pieces offered by the Hong Kong edition of Google News were reposted or rewritten from mainland media and the NYT, as were the stories in the Taiwan edition. For whatever reason, the Chinese-language media in these much less restricted regions did not do original reporting on this story.

Google News missed at least one original story, from the Chinese version of Global Times. There were also different versions of the copy that were not listed, including some less-known local media and bloggers, such as the Xiaoxiang Morning Post in Hunan province.

To summarize: newspapers still played a dominant role in reporting this story, and websites reposted newspaper content repeatedly both for economic and political considerations. Chinese websites rarely did independent reporting, because it isn’t necessary for the online outlets of existing news agencies, and isn’t allowed for all other sites.

The distinct versions of the story are listed in the following table. More information on each of the 151 items (whether or not linked to source, country of publication, primary medium, etc.) is available in the full spreadsheet.

 
Thanks to Jonathan Stray and Yuen-Ying Chan for their contributions.

How much do you agree with the following questions?

1. The most urgent security threat to the United States is a terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon.
2. Continuous diplomatic efforts are required to produce lasting, sustainable peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
3. Climate change poses a threat to political stability around the world.
4. Investing to increase food production in other countries will ultimately benefit me and my family in the future.
5. The best way to advance a country’s economic development is to empower its women.

We’re not asking; the State Department is. If you go to State.gov and answer the questions (via a ’strongly agree’ to ’strongly disagree’ slider), you’ll see your answers plotted as a single dot on a broad constellation of lighted, white orbs — some static, some pulsing. You’ll see where your opinions fall next to the opinions of others who have answered the questions…people, ostensibly, from around the world.

Welcome to Opinion Space, the State Department’s opinion-mapping tool — a collaboration with Berkeley’s Center for New Media — that launches, officially, this morning. The site describes itself as a “discussion forum designed to engage participants from around the world”; and, fittingly enough, the map it produces — in which every participant represents a point of view — is based more on geometry than geography: Its layout is constantly in flux, with each respondent plotted according to the responses of others. So if you find your own dot on the far right side of the constellation…no need to subscribe to The National Review just yet: The point is to transcend traditional liberal/conservative dichotomies. As the site puts it: “Opinion Space is designed to move beyond the usual left-right linear spectrum to display ‘constellations’ of opinions.”

New ways of generating input

That display, however, is only half the goal. The other half is more open feedback via a comment box asking for users’ responses to a specified question. (The inaugural query: “If you met U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, what issue would you tell her about, why is it important to you, and what specific suggestions do you have for addressing it?”) The site asks its users to rate each others’ comments, Digg-style, with the hope that the most insightful contributions will rise to the top. After Opinion Space has been up and running for a month, its coordinators plan to cull the hundred highest-rated recommendations and present them to Secretary Clinton and her staff.

The site’s immediate aim, says Ken Goldberg, a new media professor at Berkeley and the Center for New Media’s director, is to “find some good ideas that the State Department can act on” — diplomacy meets the wisdom of crowds. But it’s the approaches underscoring the project that may prove more meaningful. One of those is to find new ways to leverage the Web’s connective power to overcome the dilatory effects of Web-enabled scourges like cyber-polarization — and to re-imagine opinion itself as something that can be shared and even quantified. There’s information overload; but there’s also opinion overload. Too often, Goldberg told me, we “simplify things down to extremes where your position gets reduced down to ‘for’ or ‘against’” — to the extent that nuances, the atomic units of opinion, get lost. “It’s not that people are stupid,” Goldberg says, “it’s just that they’re overwhelmed.”

Opinion visualization suggests the same benefits that data visualization does: comprehensiveness, comprehension. And, yes, complexity. Simply to see “the sheer idea of diversity out there, on one plane,” can be eye-opening. And not just visually. “If you find someone far away from you who you find insightful, that means a lot,” Goldberg says. In rating comments, users are asked to separate agreement-with-argument from validity-of-comment: “How much do you agree with this comment?” is the first question the site asks in its feedback request; “How insightful is this comment?” is the second. That disaggregation — sympathy on the one hand, validity on the other — is a core premise of Opinion Space. As Katie Dowd, the State Department’s director of new media, put it to me: “Talking over the coffee table, we can agree to disagree but ultimately learn from one another.” Opinion Space, she says, is a test of whether that same tolerance can be leveraged online.

Mapping opinion in multiple dimensions

The project has its roots in Eigentaste, the eigenvector-based collaborative filtering algorithm that Goldberg and his colleagues developed in 1998. Back then, they applied the algorithm to Donation Dashboard, a tool that provided users with customized portfolios of charities based on their ratings of particular non-profits. They started thinking about how the algorithm could be used not just for recommendations, but for visualization — to map a range of opinions.

One challenge for such a map that lives on a State Department web page: figuring out which opinions to solicit in the first place. “It’s very delicate, as you can imagine,” Goldberg points out, “because there are so many issues, and protocol is everything — if you just phrase it wrong, you can create an incident.” At the same time, range is required, since “it works best when there’s a real diversity of opinions.” The final five questions were selected, Dowd notes, with the goal of “taking a breadth of issues” — and with the Department’s primary foreign policy objectives in mind.

Those questions will remain the same for the foreseeable future — “we really want to see how we keep people coming back,” Dowd says, and static questions make for a nice control factor in the Opinion Space experiment — but the open-ended discussion question will change every three to four weeks, meaning that the tool will test two different forms of user engagement over time. “Test” being the key word. As TechPresident’s Nancy Scola put it, “At this point, Opinion Space looks very much proof-of-concept. But what’s striking is that it seems a lot more like something that you expect coming out of the MIT Media Lab than the United States State Department. It’s a redefinition — or, really, one more tweak in a continuing redefinition — of the mission and means of U.S. development and diplomacy, and it’s been happening under the purview of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a pretty quick pace.”

At this point, indeed, it’s hard to know whether Opinion Space will redefine diplomacy or turn out to be another of Politics 2.0’s bright, shiny things. But the ideas anchoring the experiment are sound, and the goal inspiring it — comprehension, not just for world citizens, but for the people attempting to quantify their viewpoints — is a worthy one. “We really like the potential for this to scale,” Dowd says. For the State Department, the aim is “to reach a bigger audience and increase our transparency.” But opinion-mapping is a tool with applications that could extend far beyond statecraft. Through the project, “we’re hoping that we’ll understand these kinds of dialogues better,” Goldberg says — “and that we’ll be able to develop some new tools from them.”

During the first two hours of its pre-order period, Apple sold an estimated 51,000 iPads http://j.mp/bpgr3R »

NPR buys a toxic asset so you don’t have to: another fantastic @planetmoney explainer, via @jayrosen_nyu http://j.mp/bWcCqj »

Multimedia murder mystery: Who rubbed out a muckraker…in 1945? The latest from @niemanstory http://j.mp/cAysVQ »

The number of unique viewers of online video increased 10.5% between Feb 2009 and Feb 2010 http://j.mp/czpIJu »

When wit is the soul of brevity: Forbes mag’s short URL is…http://cptl.st/ (via @marshallk) »

Mobile ads have potential: 36% of smartphone users say they want grocery coupons, 26% interested in any special offer http://j.mp/cBkJa1 »

Users, usage, impact: how the Pew Internet Project selects its research topics http://j.mp/btaVfX »

A distributed network of volunteers could create an early-warning system for earthquakes (via @digiphile) http://j.mp/b7RctH »

Video: Execs of biz-comm platform Yammer talk with @Scobleizer about competition, collaboration, trust http://j.mp/cr1zcD »

A Michigan TV station is up for sale. On eBay. http://j.mp/cXi9pv »

There are 48.81 mobile phones per every 100 people in the US…and 106.45 per every 100 in Taiwan http://j.mp/do3HwH »

Treemap! The world’s 100 most popular websites during January 2010, broken down by topic http://j.mp/9uBtYE »

Internet, freedom, and “regulatory humility”: @lessig’s speech to the Italian Parliament http://j.mp/dCekDb »

FTC likely to oppose Google’s acquisition of AdMob http://j.mp/ahqeBs (via @iwantmedia) »

An “appreciation model” for journ-funding: @bmitch on @ebertchicago’s fan club membership offering http://j.mp/9kMno4 »

The dream: Glee for free in a treehouse on my phone. Reality: Cable giants protect programming for subscribers only http://j.mp/9Tjb90 »

MSNBC extends its acquired @breakingnews account to Facebook, where the “biggest” news links will appear http://j.mp/cx9FMW »

The Times, plagiarism and the link: A few weeks ago, the resignations of two journalists from The Daily Beast and The New York Times accused of plagiarism had us talking about how the culture of the web affects that age-old journalistic sin. That discussion was revived this week by the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, whose postmortem on the Zachery Kouwe scandal appeared Sunday. Hoyt concluded that the Times “owes readers a full accounting” of how Kouwe’s plagiarism occurred, and he also called out DealBook, the Times’ business blog for which Kouwe wrote, questioning its hyper-competitive nature and saying it needs more oversight. (In an accompanying blog post, Hoyt also said the Times needs to look closer at implementing plagiarism prevention software.)

Reuters’ Felix Salmon challenged Hoyt’s assertion, saying that the Times’ problem was not that its ethics were too steeped in the ethos of the blogosphere, but that they aren’t bloggy enough. Channeling CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis’ catchphrase “Do what you do best and link to the rest,” Salmon chastised Kouwe and other Times bloggers for rewriting stories that other online news organizations beat them to, rather than simply linking to them. “The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren’t really bloggers at heart,” Salmon wrote.

Michael Roston made a similar argument at True/Slant the first time this came up, and ex-newspaperman Mathew Ingram strode to Salmon’s defense this time with an eloquent defense of the link. It’s not just a practice for geeky insiders, he argues; it’s “a fundamental aspect of writing for the web.” (Also at True/Slant, Paul Smalera made a similar Jarvis-esque argument.) In a lengthy Twitter exchange with Salmon, Times editor Patrick LaForge countered that the Times does link more than most newspapers, and Kouwe was an exception.

Jason Fry, a former blogger for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Ingram and Smalera, but theorizes that the Times’ linking problem is not so much a refusal to play by the web’s rules as “an unthinking perpetuation of print values that are past their sell-by date.” Those values, he says, are scoops, which, as he argued further in a more sports-centric column, readers on the web just don’t care about as much as they used to.

Location prepares for liftoff: The massive music/tech gathering South By Southwest (or, in webspeak, SXSW) starts today in Austin, Texas, so I’m sure you’ll see a lot of ideas making their way from Austin to next week’s review. If early predictions are any indication, one of the ideas we’ll be talking about is geolocation — services like Foursquare and Gowalla that use your mobile device to give and broadcast location-specific information to and about you. In anticipation of this geolocation hype, CNET has given us a pre-SXSW primer on location-based services.

Facebook jump-started the location buzz by apparently leaking word to The New York Times that it’s going to unveil a new location-based feature next month. Silicon Alley Insider does a quick pro-and-con rundown of the major location platforms, and ReadWriteWeb wonders whether Facebook’s typically privacy-guarding users will go for this.

The major implication of this development for news organizations, I think, is the fact that Facebook’s jump onto the location train is going to send it hurtling forward far, far faster than it’s been going. Within as little as a year, location could go from the domain of early-adopting smartphone addicts to being a mainstream staple of social media, similar to the boom that Facebook itself saw once it was opened beyond college campuses. That means news organizations have to be there, too, developing location-based methods of delivering news and information. We’ve known for a while that this was coming; now we know it’s close.

The future of context: South By Southwest also includes bunches of fascinating tech/media/journalism panels, and one of them that’s given us a sneak preview is Monday’s panel called “The Future of Context.” Two of the panelists, former web reporter and editor Matt Thompson and NYU professor Jay Rosen, have published versions of their opening statements online, and both pieces are great food for thought. Thompson’s is a must-read: He describes the difference between day-to-day headline- and development-oriented information about news stories that he calls “episodic” and the “systemic knowledge” that forms our fundamental framework for understanding an issue. Thompson notes how broken the traditional news system’s way of intertwining those two forms of knowledge are, and he asks us how we can do it better online.

Rosen’s post is in less of a finished format, but it has a number of interesting thoughts, including a quick rundown of reasons that newsrooms don’t do explanatory journalism better. Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls ties together both Rosen’s and Thompson’s thoughts and talks a bit more about the centrality of stories in pulling all that information together.

Tech execs’ advice for newspapers: Traditional news organizations got a couple of pieces of advice this week from two relatively big-time folks in the tech world. First, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen gave an interview with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld in which he told newspaper execs to “burn the boats” and commit wholeheartedly to the web, rather than finding way to prop up modified print models. He used the iPad as a litmus test for this philosophy, noting that “All the new [web] companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

Not everyone agreed: Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin said publishers’ current strategy, which includes keeping the print model around, is an intelligent one: They’re milking the print-based profits they have while trying to manage their business down to a level where they can transfer it over to a web-based model. News business expert Alan Mutter offered a more pointed counterargument: “It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.”

Second, Google chief economist Hal Varian spoke at a Federal Trade Commission hearing about the economics of newspapers, advising newspapers that rather than charging for online content, they should be experimenting like crazy. (Varian’s summary and audio are at Google’s Public Policy Blog, and the full text, slides and Martin Langeveld’s summary are here at the Lab. Sync ‘em up and you can pretty much recreate the presentation yourself.) After briefly outlining the status of newspaper circulation and its print and online advertising, Varian also suggests that newspapers make better use of the demographic information they have of their online readers. Over at GigaOM, Mathew Ingram seconds Varian’s comments on engagement, imploring newspapers to actually use the interactive tools that they already have at their sites.

Reading roundup: We’ll start with our now-weekly summary of iPad stuff: Apple announced last week that you can preorder iPads as of today, and they’ll be released April 3. That could be only the beginning — an exec with the semiconductor IP company ARM told ComputerWorld we could see 50 similar tablet devices out this year. Multimedia journalist Mark Luckie urged media outlets to develop iPad apps, and Mac and iPhone developer Matt Gemmell delved into the finer points of iPad app design. (It’s not “like an iPhone, only bigger,” he says.)

I have two long, thought-provoking pieces on journalism, both courtesy of the Columbia Journalism Review. First, Megan Garber (now with the Lab) has a sharp essay on the public’s growing fixation on authorship that’s led to so much mistrust in journalism — and how journalists helped bring that fixation on. It’s a long, deep-thinking piece, but it’s well worth reading all the way through Garber’s cogent argument. Her concluding suggestions for news orgs regarding authority and identity are particularly interesting, with nuggets like “Transparency may be the new objectivity; but we need to shift our definition of ‘transparency’: from ‘the revelation of potential biases,’ and toward ‘the revelation of the journalistic process.’”

Second, CJR has the text of Illinois professor Robert McChesney’s speech this week to the FTC, in which he makes the case for a government subsidy of news organizations. McChesney and The Nation’s John Nichols have made this case in several places with a new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” on the shelves, but it’s helpful to have a comprehensive version of it in one spot online.

Finally, the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a simple tip for newspaper publishers looking to stave off their organizations’ decline: Learn to understand technology from the consumer’s perspective. That means, well, consuming technology. Niles provides a to-do list you can hand to your bosses to help get them started.