If you look at pictures of public transit systems in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot of horse-drawn streetcars.

Today, these pictures seem like weird snapshots taken in the middle of an evolutionary leap -- a fleeting intermediary step between the eras of horse-drawn carriages and self-powered streetcars.

Ads in today's web apps are similarly weird. Web apps are our modern street cars. They're the beginning of something big that will be with us for a while. But just like those horse-drawn street cars, web apps with advertising are flawed with an anachronistic power source. Most advertising on web apps is an inefficient means of matching a buyer and a seller. It's an interruption that's expensive for the advertiser and annoying for the user.

Evolution happens slowly. There are a lot of people who own horses, a lot people who like horses, and a lot of people who will resist the idea of putting engines in our streetcars.  But it will happen.

Photo: Wikipedia

I'm looking for somebody to take the HubSpot blog, which we've built from 5,000 subscribers to over 20,000 subscribers in the past year, and make it into a small business media property bigger and more respected than anything else out there.

This would be an amazing opportunity for a journalist. In a world of shrinking headcounts and budgets, this is a utter anomaly. It's an opportunity to build a new type of media company -- and to have the full support of an organization with momentum and resources.

But I'll be surprised if we end up hiring a journalist for the job.

I want to, it's just that I'm worried about three basic problems with hiring journalists for marketing content jobs:

(1) Most journalists don't believe businesses can produce high-quality content. The traditional view is that businesses can only produce biased advertorial content. The idea of leaving a news organization to go work at a company like HubSpot is summed up in two words: selling out. Few can get beyond this dogma to see that businesses now have an incentive to produce high-quality content. Or that the hundreds of thousands of people who consume HubSpot's content love it, and are using it to build their businesses and their livelihoods. (I am proud of that.)

(2) Most journalists avoid the business side of publishing. The news industry tends to keep its business and editorial teams separate. We don't have that distinction at HubSpot. The person we hire to manage our blog needs to be a writer, an editor and a product manager. Most journalists will look at that model and say it's a recipe for biased, low-quality content. In fact, it's one of the few new models of content production that's financially viable. We need a single individual who can churn out thoughtful how-to posts about online marketing -- and assess those posts to make sure they're attracting leads for our paid product.

(3) Many journalists don't understand the physics of the web. Because of the extreme division of labor at big news organizations, many journalists don't understand how content moves across the web. They pump their copy into a production line, then go home. They never see how it drives search engine referrals, or travels across the social web. It's impossible to build a media company today without a deep, intuitive understanding of these forces.

Of course, these are generalizations. I know plenty of journalists who display one or more of these qualities. But as a hiring manager (and a former journalist) with one chance to hire the right person, I'm wary of somebody with a background in news.

Of course, I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong. I'd love for some great writer and story teller who's had it with the news business, to embrace the approach to content we're taking, wrap his or her head around the business of content and develop an intuition for the viral nature of the web.

Maybe that's you?

Department of Stale Media Models: "Biz touts the “cool” factor of being able to read tweets from people in your city or neighborhood to stay updated during an event like an earthquake (or even a cool concert), but the potential for geotargeted ads instantly comes to mind." (PaidContent.org)

Department of Technology & Business Improving People's Lives: "A small business on Twitter could potentially use the location feature to reach out to local customers, or a Twitter user hungry for pizza could search for nearby pizza joints offering specials, for example." (NYTimes.com Bits Blog)

Let me think. As a consumer, do I prefer the restaurant that blasts my Twitter account with ads because I happen to be in the neighborhood? Or the one that reaches out to me with a personal message when I ask Twitter a question?

If you're Children's Hospital in Boston, you know you want to hire the best pediatricians you can find; if you're the HubSpot marketing team, developing a new approach to marketing, it's not clear who you want on your team.

Earlier this year David Meerman Scott pointed out that journalists could be great inbound marketers. I think that's absolutely true. But journalists and employers have to be careful about these types of hires. Inbound marketing requires qualities that not all journalist have.

Specifically, after a year of interviewing people at HubSpot, I think there are six key qualities that inbound marketers should look for new in hires. Journalist can develop these skills, but they do not by definition have them:

(1) Digital Intuition -- You need to understand how the web works. The web is an ecosystem, and if you don't intuitively understand the dynamics of this ecosystem -- how Twitter can drive traffic to a blog; the kinds of headlines that attract attention; the simple things you can do to build blog subscriptions -- you won't be able to help your company attract online visitors.

(2) Propensity to Create Content -- Do you share links? Do you publish photos? Do you have a website? A blog? Do you favorite videos? Companies today must do all of this. If you don't create this kind of content naturally on your own, you won't have the skills and experience needed to do it well for your company.

(3) Content Talent -- It's great if you have good intuition and a propensity to create content; it's even better if you're good at it -- if you write like Hemingway, if you shoot film like Scorsese. Great content stands out on the web, spreads quickly and attracts people to your site.

(4) A Salesy, Social Streak -- The best inbound marketers promote their own content. They build and nurture relationships, and they know how to use these relationships to spread their own content, without abusing them.

(5) Understanding & Acceptance of Content's Place -- This is the one where most journalists come up short. For businesses, content is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Every article, tweet and video is assessed based on its ability to generate visitors, leads and customers, not on any subjective judgment of content quality.

(6) All That Is Important in Any Other Job -- Passion, raw intelligence, creativity, leadership, toughness and work ethic.

If you're an inbound marketer thinking of hiring a journalist (or any other type of candidate), you should consider these qualities. If you're a journalist looking for an inbound marketing job, you should understand that these are the skills required for success.

The answer is unequivocally, no.

HubSpot is an extremely rewarding place to work; we are building something important, and it is filled with people I learn from.

Beyond HubSpot, there's a more fundamental reason I don't plan to go back to the news business: Today journalism is less a career path, and more something people just do. I was a photojournalist last night when I took pictures of the fireworks.  I was a trade journalist this morning when I posted video of a talk I gave last month. I was an editor yesterday when I linked to the Kremlin's video blog.

I got into the news business because I love to create content and help spread information. I can do that with my iPhone and my blog now, so there's no need to endure the spiritual and financial pain of work in a shrinking industry.

As Magdalena Georgieva, one of our many fantastic summer interns at HubSpot, put it in her job interview this spring, "news is always something that will be a part of my life, but not as a profession."

Same for me.

Here's a recording of the talk I gave, broken into two videos. (Special thanks to Ross LaRocco for sending me the files.)

This is a super video, and I'm optimistic about The Times' future, but one comment gives me the creeps.

Explaining his paper's current situation, Bill Keller says, "It's always been one of the higher aspirations in the business to work for The New York Times. Nowadays we're a little bit like the last ship afloat, so, you know, we have all these life boats floating around underneath us and people dying to clamber on board."

No, no, no!

People are not trying to clamber on board. They're not looking for an institution to save them. They're busy building their own boats, creating great content, solving problems and building small businesses on their own, independently.

(Here's the link to the video above for international folks who can't view Hulu.)

The Economist: In contrast to the doom and gloom coming from Europe’s biggest firms, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are cautiously optimistic. The main umbrella organisation for Germany’s more than 4m SMEs predicts that its members’ sales will contract by only 2% this year. The country’s renowned Mittelstand will therefore outperform the economy as a whole, which the government expects to shrink by 6%.