New media, extinction, gridlock: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

It's the weekend. Time to wrap your brain around these ideas:

"New Journalism Ecosystem Thrives" (Investigative Reporting Workshop): The iLab, as it's called, a part of American University's School of Communication, set about chronicling the new nonprofit news operations that have risen as Old Media has declined. Charles Lewis, founder of the group, calls it a "living resource" in that it is a first pass at a list, with additions and corrections expected. One interesting finding: "Of the 60 nonprofit organizations profiled here, 38, or 63 percent, were begun just since 2006," he writes. And another: some two-thirds of the people who work full-time for these organizations once were employed at commercial enterprises. Be sure to click on the interactive map and the link to the detailed list of the nonprofits, complete with head-count and budget information.

Music video interlude: Because my daughter and I couldn't get far enough into the crowd at the Stewart-Colbert rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to see anything via JumboTron or hear everything we wanted to (over the constant chanting of "Louder, louder, LOUDER!" from those behind us.)

"NBCU: Old Is the New Young" (Mediaweek): Boomers, rejoice. You no longer are irrelevant once you hit the far side of the 25-54 demo. Now, says NBC Universal, 55-64 is just as important for advertisers as 18-34. And the company has even given the group a new name: AlphaBoomers. W00t!

"Launch of Newspaper Extinction Timeline for Every Country in the World" (Trends in the Living Networks): In case you want to keep track of how soon the newspaper (the ink-on-dead-trees variety) will disappear, futurist Ross Dawson has obliged with a color-coded map and graphic outlining "key factors" in their extinction. For the U.S., he predicts they'll be irrelevant by 2017; Canada isn't far behind at 2020. Unfortunately, some of the countries where newspapers are likely to hang on longer have also been identified as among the most dangerous for journalists, so moving there might not be a good career decision.

"10 Things I Wish I Knew about Freelancing a Year Ago" (Adam Westbrook): Westbrook, a radio broadcaster turned multimedia journalist, offers lessons from his 12 months as a freelancer. You'll need to click over to a French site to get the actual list, but the tips are in English. (Is it just me, or do some of them sound more negative than positive: "Being underpaid sucks"; "Cold-calling does not work"?) Words to the wise in any event.

Bonus video: Last week, I attended a day-long program in Washington, D.C., put on by the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, a group that offers free training to business reporters. (Disclosure: I've taken several of their courses in the past year; I'm a fan.) Our lunch speaker was Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, who coordinates Wonkbook, a blog about economic and public policy. His talk, pre-election, focused on how partisan Congress had become -- particularly the Senate -- and predicted "less and less will get done" with a new Congress in which each party controls a house. The Reynolds Center taped his talk. Listen for his discussion of the predicted gridlock beginning at about 3:50.

Object lesson: Save a journalist

When my daughters were younger, perhaps in middle school, I used to paint for them a grim picture of what would happen if they didn't read a newspaper.

Never mind offering pearls of wisdom on the importance of being an informed and involved citizen in a democracy. No, I had a more object lesson: "If you don't read newspapers, I won't have a job."

Well, now the joke's on me as I and many other newsroom orphans form a long unemployment line. My kids' failure to pick up the newspaper-reading habit has cost some 15,000 journalists their jobs this year.

To be fair, it wasn't solely their fault nor their generation's. I remember being in college, yearning to be a journalist, and a friend telling me she had no use for newspapers. I was appalled then, too.

But like their Boomer parents, Millennials are a demographic force to be reckoned with. Newspapers just haven't figured out how to serve them.

Part of that stems from the Millennials' belief that if something is important enough to be news, it will find them, rather than them having to seek it out.

Don't believe me? Check out this blog from Carol Phillips at Brand Amplitude, a brand research firm in Stevensville, Mich., a Lake Michigan community not far from South Bend, Ind., where Phillips is an adjunct professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame: "Social media offers a way for Millennials to control and shape their news by filtering it through friends or reporters they trust."

I used to think that was pretty self-centered and presumptuous of Millennials, believing they were so important the news would come to them. But a passage in Harper's, in a long, long ode to the San Francisco Chronicle, finally offered some perspective.

In it, a friend of the author explains how he consumes news, unfettered by a newspaper's ties to its native city and vice versa: " 'If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.' " (emphasis added)

And, in fact, I do that too: In addition to reading newspapers in print and online, I sign on daily to an iGoogle homepage populated with RSS feeds from journalism blogs and news sites I don't want to miss. Via email I get alerts of breaking news, new entries from favorite blogs, and daily summaries of industry trends and talk. And those daughters, who never developed the habit of daily reading a newspaper, send links to things they want me to enjoy.

But how do you create from this seemingly chaotic consumption pattern a sustainable business model that can re-employ all of us laid-off journalists? I wish I had the answer.