We pay for value. So I’ve come to the realization that I would pay for Twitter.

I wouldn’t pay for Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed or any of the Ning groups I belong to (and I’ve never been a MySpace guy). But I would pay a few dollars a month to continue using Twitter.

All these venture-funded social networks (plus dozens of others) are searching for a sustainable business model. For Twitter, I recommend a freemium model where new users would get to follow 100 people for free, then pay $5-10 a month for the “premium” version that allows unlimited follows.

I pay more than that for DVD movies in the mail. And I get way more value from Twitter.

It only works, of course, if the critical mass of people who use Twitter (4.5 million in December) buck up, too. But later this year, when their venture funding is drying up, I think they have the best shot at a paid model of all the new social networking sites.

Actual computer code can be scary stuff. I’ve met too many veteran journalists who flinch and recoil when faced with even the smallest amount of computer code.

“I’m not a programmer,” they shriek. “I can’t do this.”

How about today’s college students? Surely these youngsters who grew up with MySpace and Facebook, are much more code-savvy, right?

Unfortunately, I haven’t found that to be the case, either. I’ve met countless college journalism students in the past few years who have no experience – or interest – in how to modify a web page with code, yet they have their own blogs, Facebook pages and more.

So even though it’s possible to lead a digital life without learning basic code skills, it will limit your ability to execute ideas and do better journalism. And besides, it’s really pretty easy stuff to learn.

“If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code,” Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur wrote on his blog. “And the journalism then flows on from that, because you can see so much more clearly.”

The more you understand about how digital content works, the better prepared you will be to work for a digital content operation. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and XML will allow you to see more clearly the opportunities for your journalism in the digital world.

Use the simple lessons here to begin your exploration of these concepts. When you come across a piece of jargon or an acronym you don’t understand, toss it into Google and keep going.

The only limit to understanding how the Web and digital content work is you. It’s all there; you just have to want to learn it.

The people running news web sites have been working on enhanced strategies for video and SEO for a few years now. 

But what about “video SEO”?

That is the focus of a new white paper published by ReelSEO, a consulting company operating in this space. New Business Models for New Realities: The Newspaper Industry’s Video SEO Opportunity is a 46-page primer on a concept that every news web site producing video should digest. 

Here are the primary challenges for newspapers attempting to monetize their video, according to the report:

• Poor performance in search engines: newspapers’ effectiveness at making their video content available in the search engines is “nowhere near their potential.” 
• Poor performance in social media sites: Social media web sites offer good viral “word-of-mouth” marketing, which also can have a strong effect on search engine results. 
• Poor performance with on-site search: The lack of an on-site search engine with capabilities to distinguish, filter, and display video content leads to a “video ghetto.”

Most videographers and multimedia producers and editors are generally disappointed with the amount of traffic their content generates. A video SEO strategy can change that, the report suggests, by improving video search optimization strategy in four areas: regular search, social sites, on-site search and syndication. 

Not surprisingly, the report advises newspapers hire a video SEO consultant to help (it was published by a consultant, after all). While that is probably the best course of action, many companies are going to have to figure some of this out on their own and this report is a great place to start.

The federal government’s new web site at USASpending.gov will be a playground for journalists. Why? Because it was developed with a user-friendly customer-facing interface, but mostly because of the access to its data that is available through the API it offers. (More at On the Media).

The API will allow web developers at news organizations or independent journalism startups to mix and mash all that data, with other information sources, according to their own specific focus. That means new Web pages and database subsets built by industry, geography, voting trends or any other slice of interest. 

It’s info porn that’s customizable.

Data-driven journalists and market research professionals should be salivating over the new census data next year, too. If this is any indication of the information accessibility we are going to see from the new Obama administration, it should come with a fully functional API, too, meaning we will see some very interesting mash-ups. 

(And if you think that’s totally geeked out, check out the countdown clock over at census.gov.)

Keeping up – or catching up – with the tools, concepts and skills of the digital age takes a lot of hard work.

Or is it simply a matter of attention?

The work ethic that powered the Industrial Revolution is giving way to an attention ethic in the Information Age, according to a recent piece by Mike Elgin.

In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention?

Elgin suggests that a person who works six hours a day with total focus on the tasks at hand has an “enormous advantage” over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who keeps up with every email, Facebook and Twitter (and never misses an opportunity to discuss last night’s episode of Lost).

It’s true. Having moved from a busy newsroom to a home office (most days) or small startup office (some days), I have seen first-hand the change in my productivity – and my attention. I used to spend several 9- or 10-hour days a week at the newspaper and wonder at the end of the day what I had to show for it. A lot of meetings and email but not nearly enough projects launched or ideas hatched.

You can remove those distactions (as I have) but you’re still not out of the woods yet. Twitter, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon and all the other digital tarpits are now more of a pull than before (when a boss or colleague could walk up behind me).

But the bottom line is that news organizations are not alone in this shift from a work ethic to an attention ethic. All companies, all industries, all connected people are fighting the same battle.

“It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age,” Elgin wrote. “Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.”

Labels are limiting. Especially when it comes to professions undergoing massive change.

That thought occurred to me at a gathering of some 35 people who shared stories and drinks at the Lucid Lounge in Seattle last night. It was an informal meetup organized by members of the Online News Association and it made me wonder what role professional organizations like the ONA will play as this new information ecosystem turns the old professional classification of “journalist” inside out.

After all, what new label do we give thousands of passionate, industrious people engaging in new media in order to inform an audience, but don’t work for a news company?

What constitutes  journalism in a new age where technology has opened the floodgates for information, reducded resources and erased the constraints of time and space?

A few days earlier at a different bar in Seattle, members of the Society of Professional Journalists held a similar gathering. And a month ago, a local independent journalism entrepreneur hosted a more formal gathering for a group think/discussion on the topic of hyperlocal media. Some of the now-famous Seattle neighborhood newsbloggers attended and the discussion was thought-provoking. And Seattle is home to many other grassroots gathering on the topic of local news, especially in the wake of the P-I announcement.

Whether still working at a mainstream news organization, or working on a startup idea, or making a go of it on your own with a hyperlocal blog, this is a steep hill to climb. So there is still a need for information sharing and networking among people all pursuing the same calling, probably now more than ever.

Seems to me that professional organizations like ONA and SPJ have a decision to make: how do they move forward when the big companies that provided financial support are floundering and yet there is a surge in “nontraditional” journalists who either used to work for a news organization or are performing journalism through blogging?

Here’s what I recommend:

1. Inclusive networking: It is my impression that ONA has benefitted from a recent surge memberships from academics. Next up is the independent news startups and local bloggers, but organizations like SPJ could be going for them, too.

2. Partner with other organizations: ONA, SPJ and other local  and national organizations need to work together to host events. Money is tight for all organizations right now, so leveraging the resources of other organizations will give more bang for the buck. (Consolidation might be around the corner, too.)

3. Workshops and skill training: The demand for new skills training in digital media keeps growing. So does the the supply of knowledgeable practitioners. So why does it seem like there are less opportunities than there were just a couple of years ago? Organizations should be working together to provide local and regional training to anyone and everyone.

Many big news companies – formerly fierce competitors – are coming together to join forces in this new era. Professional media and journalism organizations should follow suit.

Online news editors began using games to create more engaging and interactive presentations shortly after they began publishing news online in the 1990s. But the concept hasn’t really taken off yet, despite some early successes. 

Back in 2001, the newspaper I worked for received a grant from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism to develop an innovative project. I used some of the grant money to hire a Flash animation shop to build the first clickable map for a news project called the Waterfront Renaissance. It won a couple national awards and was copied by a handful of other news organizations, but the development of a Flash-based game was not a native skill to a news organization. And hiring up became untenable as staffs began to shrink instead of grow. So we still only see piecemeal attempts by news organizations to use gaming with the news.

As we near the end of the decade, digital games are flourishing. The Wii at home, Facebook games on laptops, and iPhone apps and other mobile games are surging in popularity and – in some cases – revenue.

So isn’t it time for news companies to take another look at games and see what they can bring to news?

A London-based company called Hubdub thinks so. It recently received $1.2 million in venture funding to continue development on its news predictor platform which it is developing as both a portal and as a service to news organizations.

And consider this recent news from Techcrunch:

Mob Wars – a largely text based strategy game that throws users into a virtual underworld of organized crime – has become a Facebook phenomenon, with 2,680,129 monthly active users and monthly revenues rumored to exceed $1 million. The game isn’t the first of its kind (in fact, similar text-based games have been around for many years), but it is among the first to go truly mainstream. 

The company I’m working with, Serra Media, thinks there is potential in this space. We crafted an application for a Knight News Challenge grant to build a casual gaming platform for local news. It will combine some news predictor activities with user generated content to provide a local news operation an engaging way to capture and mobilize an audience.

If games can bring loyalty and new revenues to news sites, we will figure out how to make them complement the journalism they support.

That is the question put forth recently by a Seattle-based political blog …

Not only are newspapers dying, the type of “news” they purvey — uninterpreted, blandly regurgitated, pre-spun information supplied and shaped by a stakeholder with the intent of policy manipulation — has lost its relevance as well. Just look where the growth in news is — Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Huffington Post — and you get the idea. Journalism today is a process of un-newsing the news.

The flip to un-news has contributed worlds more to newspapers’ decline than, say, Craigslist (the favorite news executives’ whipping post). The news I get from newspapers, especially local, has to do mostly with crime, sports and weather events. It is aimed at some lowest common denominator that probably no longer exists. It’s an approach that worked when news was what newspapers said it was, end of story. In the limitless smorgasbord of the Web, the reader gets to define news.

That is especially true on Inauguration Day, where you can page through dozens of web sites and blogs, thousands of photos and videos, hundreds of Tweets and Facebook updates, to find the angle of coverage you want.

How will journalism survive and thrive in this new information ecosystem?  By shifting focus from a general mass media approach to a more narrow slice of interest or geography. As Dave Morgan recently wrote, “Pulitzers don’t make great newspapers. Local distribution monopolies make great newspapers.”

Welcome to the era of micromarkets. 

I won’t miss the “he-said, she-said, you-figure-it-out” journalism if, and when, it dies. A more transparent, collaborative and interactive form of journalism will hopefully take its place, creating better informed citizens and more scalable business models. As the “News Collaboratory” at the Reynolds Journalism Institute plainly states on its about page: “The Web continues to propel the nichification of news. Hundreds of Web-based news/information sites and organizations have appeared over the last few years and are thriving.” 

Applying the same business model for news products that worked yesterday is one way to ensure failure. Using the same journalism is another.

The iPhone has changed the way I access information and communicate with other people. It has also changed the assumptions I have about what an electronic gadget can do and how I think information will consumed – and published – in the future.

But it can also be a ton of fun. And since I enjoy learning what apps other people consider “must-haves,” I decided to make my own top 10 list from the 60 apps I have downloaded to my iPhone:

Essential:

1. Pandora (It’s like satellite radio on your phone)
2. Facebook (Now I never go to Facebook.com on a computer)
3. SportsTap (All the scores – fast)
4. Jott (Because all that talking to yourself in the car can be useful)
5. Mint (It’s like being having a personal banker in your pocket)

For fun:

1. More Cowbell (Complete with Christopher Walken’s voice)
2. LED Football (Just like the version you grew up with)
3. Ocarina (Turns your iPhone into a flute-thingy)
4. Shazam (Discover one-hit wonders, impress your friends)
5. MotoChaser (Just like riding a motorcycle, but safer)

For the kids:

1. Lightsaber (Fun for grown-ups, too)
2. iChalky (If you like to Elf yourself, you’ll love this)
3. Penguin Lite (Who knew throwing penguins at polar bears would be so fun?)
4. Jumbalu Zoo (Mix and match cartoon animals)
5. iBaseball (Do not allow kids to try this unless you have a protective cover on your iPhone)

Here’s a great idea: a boot camp for digital journalists who have great ideas and may not know how to turn them into a business.

“It’s our attempt to bring some basic business/strategic planning skills to folks who have spent their lives trying not to think about where the money comes from,” according to Vicki Porter, director of the Knight Digital Media Center. “This is not a skills camp. The folks we want have already figured out the technology and that’s why they’ve got great ideas for how to serve community news and info needs in the public interest. We hope we can at least help some folks put together a sustainable business plan and understand how to find funding support (if that’s what they need).”

If that sounds like you, use this three-day weekend to work up an application to the News Entrepreneur Boot Camp.