Reading Wired.com’s 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now, I wondered what the list would look like if tailored to journalism. As the Wired article admits, some great technologies that are critical today have been around longer, but rose to prominence in ‘08. All are important for Journalism 2.0, some more than others.

1. Identity management: Journalists, and anyone who publishes online, should have an easily identifiable online persona. This is especially important for younger journalists who need to have something of substance return when a prospective employer does a Google search on their name (besides MySpace party pics). Are you on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Many journalists and news professionals found these social networks in 2008.

For site developers, are you using OpenID, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect? See Newsmixer.us for an excellent example of how to implement this game-changing opportunity.

2. Lifestreaming: Online audiences are now comfortable with a “drip, drip, drip” flow of information from people they trust. Journalists should recognize this and work to connect with networks of informed readers and provide them with short updates – call it “newsstreaming.” Beatblogging emerged as a proven model for this strategy in 2008. And hordes of newspapers jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, realizing the potential for connecting with an audience with a new form of writing (microblogging).

3. Location Awareness: As you might expect, I see a huge opportunity here. Most local news sites pride themselves on being more local than anyone else. But there’s a lot more to being local than covering a council meeting, especially for a new breed of information consumers armed with location-aware mobile devices. Can they access your news, information and advertising based on the neighborhood they are logging in from? Are you producing the right mix of news and information for this new medium? If not, are you planning to in 2009?

Honorable mention: Wired also listed HTML 5, Google Chrome and Firefox 3 in its list of 6. Suffice it to say journalists should be using Firefox (with plug-ins and add-ons) for web browsing, using cloud computing for collaboration like Google Docs and online calendar tools (Chrome’s strength) and be aware of changing web design standards like HTML 5.

LostRemote pointed me to Diane Mermigas’ excellent Pragmatic Media Predictions for 2009. It’s a sobering depressing forecast for the year ahead, with dire predictions like ”TV and newspaper properties will collapse under the weight of an advertising recession and legacy costs” and “a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.” Yikes.

But I’m a “glass-is-half-full” kind of guy, so I found something to be excited about. 

Local is the new social

Some local TV broadcasters and newspapers will begin to monetize enough to stay in business. Some Internet players will begin to dabble more in this huge void. Relevant local information, social sharing, retail coupons, school and community data, sports scores, car pools, etc. remain a big missed opportunity. It will be delivered to Internet-connected mobile devices, including smartphones. A new player will emerge and do for local content and services online what Craigslist did for regionalized classified advertising.

As I’ve said before, the Internet is a connection platform, not a publishing platform (as most news publishers have used it for). Local media can still win the local ad revenue game if they execute on the opportunity to create value through collaboration and connection and leverage their brand value before it’s too late. 

Who is going to be the “new player” that Mermigas envisions? I see it as a new role that individual news companies and hyperlocal news blogs will fill, with help from technology from companies like Second Street, Publish2, Pluck and Serra Media, the company I co-founded to attack this opportunity. When an audience connects to a brand they can trust for news, information and community and is encouraged to collaborate with the brand, that audience will happily welcome relevant commercial messages like local coupons and special offers. Then you have effective ROI to sell to local advertisers and you’re back in the game.

Connect and collaborate. Inform and empower. That’s the recipe for true transformation of the local news business.

But they need to move faster. 

Still, the findings of a recent Bivings Group report analyzing the web sites from the top 100 U.S. newspapers (by ABC ranking) are encouraging. Among the highlights:

• 58% of newspaper sites now accept some form of user generated content, although it’s mostly just photos. Only 15 percent accept text, showing that the distrust of the audience by mainstream newspapers continues.

• 76% of newspaper sites display “most popular” lists of content, including most visited and most emailed stories, compared to 51% in 2007 and 33% in 2006.

• 75% now allow comments on articles, compared to 33% in 2007. That’s a significant jump, but is about four years late.

• Just 11% of newspapers now require registration to view content, compared to 29% in 2007. This is definitely heading in the right direction.

• All newspapers feature some form of contextual advertising and 43% accept interstitial ads. I’m skeptical that interstitials are a long-term, scalable solution, but it shows willingness to experiment.

Despite the positive figures, the report’s summary delivers a sobering analysis:

Speaking generally, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and aggressively experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.

Can you say “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?” That’s what this feels like despite the fact that the iceberg is in sight.

How do you know you’re a hopeless case of online geekery? When you get your wife a domain name and set up a Wordpress blog for her and call it a Christmas present.

But wait, there’s more. I also gave my son and daughter domain names so they can have cool email addresses. And I installed Drupal on their domains so they can begin publishing online with their new OLPC.

They may never use them, and that’s OK. It’s opening the door that’s important.

I hope you have a great Christmas and enjoy the holiday weeks ahead. It’s a great time to look back on memorable events of the past year and look forward to opportunities in 2009.

For me, 2008 will be remembered as the year I turned the page and set out on my own, leaving my job at a newspaper. Professional highlights include speaking in Denmark, Portugal, San Diego and Washington, D.C. (among others) and meeting great people at every stop.

It’s the people I met that gives me great hope for the potential of online journalism (I’m looking at you!). I’ve said for a long time that this industry upheaval is about people, not technology. And we’re fortunate to have a network of smart, driven colleagues working hard to solve this problem of finding a sustainable model for news and information that leverages the technology and connects markets, information and communities to one another.

It’s safe to say that network is larger today than it was a year ago. And just wait ’til you see how large it is a year from now.

Merry Christmas.

I know it’s the holiday season and people are tired, broke, weather-weary and ready for a vacation. But I don’t know how to explain the collection of wacky ideas and decisions that surfaced yesterday.

• In Twin Falls, Idaho a newly appointed Idaho lawmaker and former newspaper publisher “may introduce a bill in the 2009 Legislature to force people to use their real names when commenting on the Internet.”

Rep. Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls told the Twin Falls Times-News the absence of such a provision “discourages people from participating in civil life” and “cheapens debate.”

My take: I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine how this could ever be enforced. This is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

• On SFGate.com, Stanford professor Joel Brinkley made the case for web sites charging for content as a way to solve the business woes for newspaper companies. Specifically he recommended that “the newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites.” The logic being that “many readers would likely subscribe” if most newspapers in a region went to a pay model at the same time.

My take: Do people pay for a print subscription for access to that news, or for the convenient delivery of a physical product to their doorstep? I think it’s the latter, so applying the print business model to online news is DOA (which has been the case for more than a decade now). Besides, could newspapers really replace as much lost advertising revenue with online subscription revenue? Even in the golden age of print newspapers, circulation revenue was less than a quarter of total income.

• And last but not least, GateHouse Media sued the Boston Globe’s parent (New York Times Co.) for linking to GateHouse articles on the Globe’s new local websites.

My take: As others have observed, this case appears all to similar to the universally panned decision by the AP to sue bloggers for linking to its news content. If it was a total copy-and-paste job, then Gatehouse would have a case. But it appears to be a deep-linking argument, something I told an audience in Denmark last month that U.S. web sites were well past worrying about. Apparently not.

Previously I wondered where did that $2 billion go? Given the state of the overall economy it’s a lock that we will be asking that question following each of the next 2-4 quarters, too. And the $2 billion figure (that newspapers lost last quarter) will probably grow larger.

Some cry out for new business models for news, but many that have been suggested aren’t new. And besides, if newspapers can’t get beyond selling banners to traditional print advertisers without looking scared, an entirely new business model is far too ambitious.

Those missing dollars are largely tied to advertising and, while some of it has disappeared because of the economic downturn, one has to assume that a good chunk went away because advertisers stopped seeing a return on their investment.

Now they are looking for something new. Local publishers: there’s still opportunity here. If advertising works, people pay, no matter what the economy is doing. It drives their business, after all.

One trend that shows no sign of slowing – even in a slow economy – are ad dollars are going to mobile. For local news organizations, what about mobile coupons? And geotargeted advertising has always made sense since ValPak set up shop and started stealing newspaper advertisers.

Innovation from the newsroom won’t make much difference if advertisers can’t effectively reach a target audience.

With the Detroit shock playing out on Twitter and various blogs, one question I haven’t seen is whether college journalism programs should still concentrate on print journalism. And further, should there still be a college newspaper?

Since cutting the delivery days for a metro newspaper is a cost-reducing move that many other newspapers will likely follow in 2009, the focus of a newspaper’s journalism will be primarily digital. And this time, it won’t just be talk.

So, if you are training tomorrow’s journalists, why bother with your own print edition? While I haven’t seen a formal content analysis, my impression is that college newspapers have evolved about as much as their grown-up siblings (not much). Given the amount of time and energy it takes to put out a printed publication on a regular basis, journalism programs could benefit by focusing their students’ energies toward innovations in online journalism, instead of putting a paper out.

As Mark Potts suggested, this burning of the boats in Detroit is the only strategy for true transformation.

The Detroit move is radical, to be sure. It may or may not be enough to save the papers there, as Mutter further examines today. But it simply reflects reality. And if it does drive readers from print to online, then that’s a good thing, because online is where the future is. The sooner the newspaper industry truly understands that–and begins paying truly serious attention to promoting online and working hard to find innovative sources of revenue online–the sooner the transition to the inevitable future will take place. Sorry, print junkies. That’s just reality. Clinging to an obsolete notion of the printed newspaper’s role in information delivery is fantasy.

For college newspapers, it would be a lot less risky financially than a mainstream daily. The risk would be primarily in readership when students can’t take the crossword puzzle to class. But forcing the students journalists to compete for their classmates’ time and attention in the digital ecosystem (vs. Facebook, etc.) would be better preparation for the fragmented professional world they will find themselves in anyway.

In a gathering called The Pitch last night in Seattle, 30 new media types kicked around the following question:

Can an established newspaper provide better hyperlocal coverage than a well-managed neighborhood blog?

The collective answer at the end of the night was, yes, it’s possible for an established newspaper to provide better hyperlocal coverage than a neighborhood blog. It’s just not happening right now in very many places (if any).

Here are some reasons why, in my view:

1. Coverage focus: Layoffs and buyouts mean less “feet on the street” for most newspapers. Most reporters are assigned topics instead of geography, anyway, making a push into neghborhood-level news today even more of a stretch than it was 10 years ago.
2. Business priorities: Advertising departments at daily newspapers are not structured for hyperlocal business. Sales reps are expensive so it’s alwasy made sene to focus on large clients who can sign lucrative annual contracts. Few have anything to offer a small business that wants to spend $100 a month. Long Tail economics have yet to arrive.
3. Audience participation: Online audiences are more likely to participate on a hyperlocal blog than an established, especially corporate-run, newspaper. This is largely the fault of newspapers who spent years building walls around their content. (We publish, you read.) Most are now trying to reverse the one-way communication chain, but they don’t get the immediate benefit of audience collaboration that powers any good hyperlocal news blog.

Each of the above weaknesses is an opportunity for established newspapers, from metro dailies to family-run weeklies. But, as many participants noted last night, it will take a radical shift in culture that is not well-suited to change.

1. Coverage focus: Many newspapers have publicly expressed a commitment to local coverage in the past few years. But few have dramatically changed the way the newsrooms cover local communities. Take a page from the playbook of the hyperlocal bloggers: In order to cover a community, you must first connect with it.
2. Business priorities: I remember having lunch in a taco shop with the director of a metro daily newspaper web site a few months ago who complained that the taco shop had no way to advertise on their site at an affordable rate. Daily newspapers need a new business model that connects local businesses to local audiences (since classified, real estate and auto dollars are gone). Family-run weeklies have always done this and many are still doing OK financially.
3. Audience participation: Dedicate real staff resources to mining, weaving and embracing contributions from readers. This goes beyond story comments. It’s about building community. And it’s not about technology. I can point you to 10 successful hyperlocal blogs that are all using a different platform. It’s about the people who are committed to connection.

For other views, check out the Twitterstream from the gathering.

I asked the Latin American journalists who I’m working with on a distance-learning course whether journalists should be allowed to write with opinion on their blogs, even if the blog is hosted by their employing news organization. More than three dozen responded and almost all said yes.

It’s a matter of testing long-held conventions that are not holding up so well in the new digital ecosystem. And I applaud them for seeing this. As Patrick Thornton recently observed, it’s going to take some “radical thinking” for mainstream news organizations to survive and evolve.

For me, it comes down to intellectual honesty and transparency – as long as your journalism is solid. If the facts you report are accurate and the view you present is fair, then adding your analysis of the situation will only help the reader.

Of course, I feel this practice should be adopted in all media, not just blogs. Objective journalism, in many cases, is too clinical and sterile. It has become a case of he-said, she-said when most readers want to know “well, who’s right?”