Cluetrain told us that markets are conversations. Now Seth Godin tells us those conversations need leaders, that people want to become part of the “tribe.”

How does this apply to journalism?

Practicing “news as a conversation instead of a lecture” was the first step. The next step is to lead the conversation.

In Godin’s new book, he makes several key points that apply directly, in my view, to news organizations.

1. For the first time ever, everyone in an organization – not just the boss – is expected to lead.
2. The very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier than ever to change things and that individuals have more leverage than ever before.
3. The marketplaceis rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services.
4. Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.

There are plenty of examples how leading tribes can be good journalism.

John Cook and Todd Bishop created a tribe and are now attempting to move it. Mike Sando created a tribe of Seahawks football fans and the momentum has carried on even after he left The News Tribune for ESPN.com. The niche sites that news organizations have launched that focus on moms, dads, pets or cars are attempts to lead selected tribes. Bakersfield has been out front creating tribes with projects like Bakotopia. And the Beatblogging movement started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is all about the mixing of journalism and leading a tribe.

Godin writes “leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to avoid it.” This is painfully true in the command-and-control structure of most newsrooms. The staffers in the best position to lead the tribe (reporters and photographers) feel the least empowered.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With a more entrepreneurial mindset, everyone in a news organization can lead at least one tribe (inside or outside the company).

A focus on creating “remarkable products and services” will allow journalism – and news companies – to evolve in the digital age.

The spambots finally found this blog so I apologize if you saw any content vandalism here the past few days. I’ve turned off trackbacks and activated the Akismet plug-in in an attempt to keep it clean around here.

Just wondering: how do you spend your day programming a spambot to spread the garbage I had to clean off the blog and still maintain your self-respect? Is it the modern-day equivalent to TPing someone’s house?

I’m at Western Washington University this week as a visiting professor, speaking to a number of classes in the communications school on the concepts of Journalism 2.0. The core message I’m trying to deliver: tomorrow’s journalism will be whatever you make it.

Sure, jobs at traditional news organizations are disappearing. But opportunities to influence, inform and interact with an audience are exploding.

But you need skills. Digital skills. So I am encouraging students to start a blog on Wordpress, experiment with Twitter, and think about starting a social network on Ning.

If you’re applying for a job, experience with these new tools (and many others) will separate you from the pack of resumes that list Myspace and Facebook as their cheif digital accomplishments.

And if you can’t find a good job to apply for, you’ll have a better understanding of the digital marketplace and, therefore, be closer to new ideas of how to serve an audience with information.

Start your own site? Why not? If you don’t want to fly solo, then look for new opportunities. The cost of entry couldn’t be lower. And that’s another reason why there’s never been a better time to be in journalism.

Recently, Scott Karp asked if algorithms will make human editors obsolete and replace them on the web. It is an excellent question in this age of emerging technology and dwindling human resources at most traditional news companies.

The same group of editors who shuttered at the first look of Google News a few years ago (ahh, robots!) are the same ones looking for more automation to fill the gaps in their layoff- and buyout-ravaged newsrooms.

I say, don’t give in to the Dark Side.

Granted, technology is necessary and important and provides journalism wonderful tools that must be used during this age of evolution. But it cannot replace the judgment and discretion that humans bring to the table (not yet, anyway).

And we’re not talking about just the humans who went J-school. We’re talking about the audience, too, in the practice of collaboration. As Scott notes, this is not in the traditional journalism playbook. True, so it’s time to write a new chapter.

Scott used our Newsgarden project as an example of the potential collaboration and described our concept perfectly:

… their bet is that journalists and community members all posting hyperlocal news as they come across it can do a better job than algorithm-based local sites in judging what news is important to the community.

Our concept is based on the “news” that is important to a hyperlocal audience that is not currently online, combined with the news that is online. It’s information that is worth sharing with neighbors or outsiders who are interested in that neighborhood. It’s noteworthy, but not always newsworthy in the traditional newspaper/broadcast TV model. It can stand on its own, but is most pertinent when combined with other like items from a neighborhood to paint a picture of what life is like there these days. Frequency is a key. Hyperlocal relevance is, too. It is conversational in tone, but not a rant or rave.

Many news organizations have had a bad experience with their own citizen journalism efforts. Turns out there’s a reason that journalism is a profession; it takes a steady paycheck to motivate someone to do it on a consistent basis. But just because there aren’t a number of people in the community who have the time and talent to keep a good blog on your site doesn’t mean there aren’t a host of people who, from time to time, would have something meaningful to contribute.

That’s why we’re building a platform for these contributions. And we think they should breathe the same air as the professionally reported news that does and not be ghettoized to a separate section on a news web site.

It’s time for journalists to add collaboration to their playbook. News organizations will not be able to cut and automate their way to the future and remain (become?) relevant and viable enterprises.

Recently I was part of a strategic content planning session for a traditional newsroom. Given that the newspaper had recently been through a couple rounds of buyouts and layoffs, like most newspapers, I figured there would be some serious reinvention occurring in this brainstorming meeting.

Boy, was I wrong.

The editors, reporters and visual journalists went about outlining the priorities of their current product. Then they discussed which could be grouped together and which were more important. But there was no new thinking.

I suggested that one of the priorities should be content that is “marketable.” This caused some confusion. Since news is an advertising-supported operation (both in print and online) I didn’t think this would be such a foreign concept. Several times I was asked to clarify. Since I don’t think I made my point clear enough, I’m going to take another stab:

Content that is marketable means that the target audience is desirable to advertisers, either because of its size or quality (or, in the case of a site like Techcrunch, both). Local news operations are struggling to find the right balance between quality and quantity.

According to this N.Y. Times piece, and based on anecdotal feedback I’ve heard from site directors, scores of page views across a local news web site aren’t necessarily a good thing. Local news sites are organized based on the print sectioning that was invented because of press configurations (local, sports, business, lifestyle) and has been around for decades. Advertisers can’t put their finger on the demographic they might reach with this format. It’s not nearly targeted enough in today’s digital world.

So smart news operations have launched niche sites for moms, dads, pets, shopping, home and garden and, more traditionally, arts and entertainment. And if not topical, then hyperlocal. These are markets. You can picture an ad rep explaining to a prospective advertiser who they will reach when placing an ad in one of those sections.

Meanwhile, in this strategic planning session, the priorities discussed included “people stories,” “sense of place,” “talker of the day,” and “authority/personality.” Those are fine attributes of great newspaper journalism. But the sad reality is that great journalism is not the same thing as great journalism business.

Also discussed were the cornerstones of breaking news and accountability. These are a news operation’s loss leaders; they don’t form a specific market either. But they can draw a transient audience with their “click candy” characteristics and bring in new visitors who are then introduced to the rest of the content lineup that hopefully attracts a more loyal following.

A newspaper doing what it’s always done, but better, is not a recipe for reinvention. Nor is it a healthy business model. Just look at the newspaper readership data since 1970. It’s time to get away from the mass, generalized, one-size-fits-all approach that made sense in the era of limited publishing capabilities (see Vin Crosbie’s excellent essays for more).

News operations need markets, their own markets, to monetize and fund the future. Most have the tools at their disposal. It’s simply a matter of strategic planning.

Digital technology hasn’t just changed the way we do journalism. It has created a new information ecosystem.

Journalists today need to be navigators in this realm. And to navigate, one has to know the lay of the land and be comfortable operating in it.

I previously wondered what online journalists need to know now. I now wonder why we don’t lose the distinction of “online” journalist. Every journalist, editor, news navigator, media professional needs to know online. And digital. (Because we’re not limited to browsers anymore.)

I’m thinking this way after speaking to the Illinois Press Association’s annual convention. And because I was scheduled to speak at the Pacific Northwest Association of Journalism Educators conference this morning (but, regretfully, I will have to miss).

The topic in Illinois was “evolution and revolution in today’s changing newsrooms.” The topic in Easton was “what do today’s journalism students need to know?”

When you add those together, you get this: if you want to do journalism, you have to be digital.

Mindy McAdams was spot on recently with her assessment of basic skills to teach the next journalists.

But to truly be digital, to be part of this new ecosystem, you need to follow the advice Elizabeth Osder recently delivered to a group of students at USC:

“… be relevant and useful versus arrogant and entitled.”

Too often we are caught up in the technology and skills needed today, when it’s really a mindset that is most important. If you are committed to being relevant and useful in a digital world, figuring out how use RSS and build a Soundlides slideshow comes pretty easy.

Way to go, Elizabeth. Thanks for giving us all a new mantra to pass on.

And a tip of the hat to Amy Gahran for this link. See her comments here.

In an era of dwindling resources, mainstream news organizations are more tempted than ever to retreat.

On Friday, The News Tribune said goodbye to five journalists who spent more than a century (combined) covering their community. On Monday, I led a discussion on how to raise the level of quality for the user comments posted to online news stories.

Looking at the data tells us we have an opportunity here. On a quantitative basis, our story comments, in total, rank as a top 10 section each month in page views. On a qualitative basis, comments on staff blogs are mostly constructive and focused because they are closely managed.

I proposed we ask reporters to treat their news stories like blogs and monitor (not moderate) the discussions that take place there, weighing in when appropriate.

“We don’t have time,” was the first (and predictable) response and led to a comment that monitoring user comments does not rank high enough on the priority list.

True, the buyouts that took those five and an overall reduction to 37.5 hours per week for hourly staffers has given the newsroom a reduced pool of human resources for the job at hand (like most other news organizations).

My counterpoint: This is not an option.

If a news organization wants to consider itself an active player in the market for online news and information, it has to cultivate interactivity and develop an information exchange with its community. A newsroom can’t possibly collect all the information it needs without collaborating with its audience (after all, Here Comes Everybody).

When email was first introduced in newsrooms, many reporters said “we don’t have time.” Try to take away a reporter’s email account today.

It’s time to raise the ante. Again.

Previously I suggested that most local news organizations are not nearly local enough, especially considering the ample opportunity provided by the web.

So is that opportunity lost? Not yet, but it’s pretty easy to see how it could be.

LostRemote shows us how hyperlocal blogs are building audience and building a sustainable business in Seattle. And makes a key point that I’ve been echoing recently: thousands of out-of-work newspaper journalists could change the game.

Successful local start-up news sites are usually staffed with experience in journalism and online media. Now that thousands more newspaper journalists don’t have a day job, it figures that a number of them will sign up for a Wordpress account and look to fill a niche in their community for local news and information. (Or maybe they will use Newsgarden?)

It’s disappointing to think that, 10-12 years after they launched local news web sites, many newspapers could still lose first-mover advantage (especially if you think of Internet years like dog years).

The idea that they will get beat by their former staffers makes the irony that much more rich.

Local newspaper web sites have made a lot of progress during the past 10-plus years since they were first launched. Video, blogs, comments, constant updates – the list is long.

But one area that hasn’t evolved much at all on local news web sites is … strangely … the local news section.

If you click on the “Local News” tab on most local news sites, you see the same thing you probably saw in 1998: A list of headlines, in reverse chronological order, that link to stories published in the print newspaper. (I don’t pretend to have done this on every site, only a few dozen.)

At the same time, editors and publishers emphasize their “local news franchise” as the cornerstone of their operation. So why the disconnect from mission to execution?

When it comes to local coverage, readers care about their local, not someone else’s local. A newspaper defines “local” by how large an area it can deliver newspapers and sell advertising in the most cost-effective way. Then editors publish news that is as generally appealing to that audience possible. And that’s the problem: It’s too general.

Most newspapers over 20,000 circulation cover an array of communities that are geographically disparate enough that few, if any, readers actually visit or care about the communities they do not live in. That leaves them waiting for the news organization to write a story about their community while ignoring all the other “local” stories.

Is it any wonder local news sites have such lousy user loyalty metrics?

Crime and sports do well on local new sites because they are generally interesting to a local audience. But actual local news – new businesses opening, road repairs, school achievements – is only interesting to a subset of the local community that lives nearby.

And while newspaper operations have evolved during the Internet age, the fundamental structure of covering local news is still driven by filling pages for the general interest print publication. Meanwhile, the greatest tool for truly covering a series of communities sits under utilized in plain sight.

The web and mobile publishing are perfect platforms for covering local communities because they natively offer four characteristics that should be strengths instead of weaknesses:

Cut: Content can easily be cut — or segmented — to a specific hyperlocal area. Many news organizations do this to a city or town level, but it should be segmented on a neighborhood level so a visitor can quickly drill down to the area of greatest interest to them.

Capitalize: The bar needs to be lowered on what is “news” based on what is interesting to a hyperlocal audience. News organizations have successfully made this transition on topical blogs, but few have made progress on local news content which needs to be published a lot more frequently. Three stories a week from the city council meeting agenda don’t cut it.

Collaborate: Need help getting prolific? Tap the power of the crowd. But don’t ghettoize the content in some other section of the web site that no one will ever find. Fold it into the appropriate hyperlocal section.

Collect: Feeds from other sections of a local news operations like business, features and sports – plus outside blogs and “competing” web sites – should bring links to content that is specific to a hyperlocal area. This is a form of link journalism, but many of the links are already on the news site.

The ingredients are there. (Think of the success many sites are having with niche sites for moms or pets.) Apply the right recipe and a local news organization can live up to its promise of doing local news better than anyone else.

At the same time, it can create new hyperlocal markets that don’t currently exist on its site.

And isn’t creating new markets what it’s all about today?