Today, a history lesson from some research I’ve been doing for my new book, because if you want to see the road ahead, take a look at the road behind.

More than 100 years ago, the newspaper industry was dealing with technological change on a scale comparable to today. In the 1890s, telephone service revolutionized reporting, while “one linotype operator could do the work of five men,” according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism, dramatically increasing the speed of printing.

This led to an explosion of newspapers – and newspaper readers – that I see as emblematic of what we’re seeing today with online journalism startups and mainstream news organizations.

Just look at the landscape of the Progressive Era, according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism:

* The number of English-language daily newspapers grew from 850 in 1880 to 1,967 in 1900 to 2,200 in 1910. An additional 400 of other types were also published that year.

* Daily circulation totals grew from 3.1 million in 1880 to 15.1 million in 1900 to 22.1 million in 1910.

* Chicago and Boston each had eight newspapers in 1900. New York had nine.

* Newspapers began charging (one cent) per issue in 1833 and it wasn’t until the 1880s when advertising slowly began to replace sales and subscriptions as the chief source of newspaper revenue so that by 1914, 66 percent of newspapers revenue came from advertising.

* By 1911, some newspaper critics began to fear the influence of advertising on journalism, “One proposed solution, which had little success, was to create an ‘adless’ newspaper supported by subscribers. Another was to create a non-partisan, adless newspaper funded by city government.

If journalism and the business that supports journalism can evolve that quickly before, what makes you think it won’t happen again? The technology that allowed the number of newspapers to grow 123% in 20 years is similar to what we’ve seen this decade with the Internet and free publishing platforms like Wordpress.

In January 2009, the Los Angeles Times announced it was making enough money from online advertising to cover its entire editorial workforce (though drastically reduced it was).

Five years from now we will look back on this development as the beginning of the new era, when news organizations made the switch from print to online ad dollars for financial support.

College journalists: take heart in these trying times.

Transformation and evolution are messy, emotional processes. When they produce advancement for society and business, they are seen as healthy and worthwhile, but not necessarily to those on the front lines.

Because the digital transformation started 15 years ago for news companies and the web, those who are about to enter the field benefit by having missed the early mess. Newspapers, especially, have learned that their vision for a digital future is not viable, as Slate’s Jack Shafer noted recently:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

But the game isn’t over, for mainstream news companies or independent journalism startups. It’s just getting started and, since those in college today inherently “get” the internet because they grew up with it, they have the opportunity to shape the future of journalism online like no generation before.

Further, they will find a more experimental culture at news organizations today. In “Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate,” author Michael Schrage illustrates how technology allows companies to rapidly and inexpensively test products, services, and business models before unleashing them. This is the new model for news, and one that the next generation will lead.

Rather than confining themselves to the road traveled before them, today’s college journalists have the opportunity – make that obligation – to chart their own course.  

If you’re editing a news site, are you publishing what users want or what you have?

Assuming you have what users want, are you organizing it the way your users would want it organized? Or is it organized based on some legacy notion like print sections? Or worse, is it displayed based on the org chart?

Startup news sites are fighting an uphill battle against established media brands. But one advantage they have is the ability to put the user first in their content and layout decisions, without the burden of prior procedures.

Om Malik recently posted some quotes from Matt Thompson that illustrate this point:

“When you ask, ‘How do you support news organizations on the web?’ it looks completely daunting,” Thompson said. “But many successful journalistic enterprises on the web started out the other way. You had a few individuals creating enough value to be supported, and then building on that value.”

That has been the case for many a tech blog: starting out with a single author or two and adding in staff. There are signs the model is catching on, as sites that report on citywide communities, politicians and courts are starting to take root as well.

From Politico to Techcrunch to West Seattle Blog, the new journalism focuses on what the users want first. Then the journalists arrange themselves and their actions and their energy in whatever way will best support that focus. 

It sounds simple, but if you’ve worked for a corporate or legacy news organization (large, medium or small), it’s not. But it’ a worthy goal, one that should be first and foremost as you plan your MBOs and project goals for 2009.

Tom Peters has been telling businesses, industries and organizations about innovation and evolution for more than 25 years. I came across a PDF deck on my hard drive that I downloaded a few years back and found it just as insightful and instructive today as it was the first time I encountered it.

A couple highlights:

One serious study shows that but a single company on Forbesʼ first List of Giants (the 1917 Forbes 100) outperformed the market between 1917 and 2003. The sole survivor, GE, is marked, not so incidentally, by a powerful, lingering spirit of independence and autonomy. While I admire the instinct to pursue Eternal Glory, I believe the times are better suited for the Ellisonsʼ and Gatesʼ…pursuit of Temporal Glory. (Which may or may not last…but which changes the world permanently.) Put your all into surviving todayʼs tsunamis of change…and let the day after tomorrow take care of itself. Dream big? Absolutely! Aim to change the world? Absolutely! The idea is to set in train events that rattle every cage from here to kingdom come. But as to whether you and yours will be the engineers in charge of that train, circa 2053…who cares?

And …

Visa founder Dee Hock said it best: “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” Burn the boats redux, eh? My take: Every enterprise (and every individual) needs a formal (written, for starters!)…Forgetting Strategy. We must be as forceful and systematic about identifying and then dumping yesterdayʼs baggage as we are about acquiring new baggage.

This is great advice for anyone facing the challenge of innovation and evolution, whether you work for a big company or in your basement. There more here.

Seth Godin offers an interesting suggestion – and a wake-up call – to local newspapers hoping to get more local in a post titled Time to start a newspaper. The twist is that he’s offering this advice to real estate brokers or plumbers or anyone in local business looking to grow their local presence. And he thinks it would be easy to do:

Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day:

    * Interview a local business, a local student or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short and it might take you ten minutes.

    * Get 20 households to ’subscribe’ by giving you their email address and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.

Then simply send the “newspaper” by email and watch the it spread and the subscriptions grow. It will be a “gift to the community.”

The physical barrier to entry for a local newspaper’s competition was erased more than 10 years ago when the web replaced the printing press. But there can still be an execution barrier to entry if a local newspaper owns its market and is already providing the hyperlocal coverage that readers want. Godin’s formula only works in markets where a newspaper’s journalism hasn’t evolved and still considers meeting coverage the highest calling.

The Readership Institute told us 10 years ago to write more about local people. Apparently few newspapers followed the advice if a marketing guru sees a big opportunity for non-journalists to fill this niche with a free email “newspaper.”

“Own your Zip code,” Godin writes. “The next frontier is local, and this is a great way to start.”

You can’t visit Cedar Rapids, Iowa without learning at least a little about the unbelievable flooding that occurred there last year. If you hang out with folks who work at the newspaper like I did, you learn a lot.

I had glanced through their flood coverage online. But only after visiting the area couild I fully appreciate the impact and the damage and fully engage in the coverage.

I also took in the amazing exhibit of Gazette photos at the local art museum and it ocurred to me that online editors face a challenge similar to that of the exhibit designer at a museum when it comes to designing special coverage.

The first priority: grab the audience right away.

Then quickly convey the significance and the magnitude of the event.

An art gallery exhibit has the advantage of walls of space, of course. A web site has the costraints of the user’s browser and computer monitor. But it’s important in both cases to deliver as much impact as possible right away. The Gazette project page does this in two ways: the use of large-format photographs and the essential facts that tell an outsider (like me) how significant an event this was (more than 5,000 homes were lost).

The museum exhibit did this, too, with a traditional introduction panel. It also used a healthy dose of irony when choosing the exhibit’s title: The Year of the River.

In May 2007, the city of Cedar Rapids and Linn County designated 2008 the “Year of the River” to draw attention to the Cedar River, a vital aspect of downtown Cedar Rapids.  No one could anticipate the devastating floods of 2008 that ultimately affected so many communities in Eastern Iowa.  The power and force of area rivers made themselves known in a manner that had never been witnessed before.  It truly was the year of the river.

The next time you are involved in designing a special project online, try thinking like a museum director. Your audience (and your photojournalists) will appreciate it.

What will the year of mass disruption lead to? That’s the question that Peter Krasilovsky pondered recently with his 2008 roundup of the local media / advertising business landscape.

Near the end of his piece, Peter riffs on the hyperlocal opportunities for 2009, suggesting lessons that we learned in the previous 12 months

We’ve learned that hyperlocal doesn’t live in a vacuum, and that there isn’t ready demand for block-by block coverage. But it is a useful add-on. Content platforms have become a commodity, but can be improved with navigation, tagging and geo-targeting.

We’ve also learned that mapping is a feature that can be greatly enhanced with personalization and advertising, and could be the basis for a new portal (but there are lots of new fronts for portals).

Naturally, I’m not giving up on block-by-block coverage yet. (In fact, we’re just getting started.) The trick is the execution. Much of the information that most people want doesn’t readily exist in a publicly available database. It’s in the conversations and community interactions between real people. (This is the key to Twitter’s amazing growth.)

And I believe that people want to know what’s happening in their neighborhood. See examples like PegasusNews and West Seattle Blog for proof.

So it’s a social media challenge, not a lack of audience demand. As Clay Shirky noted in Here Comes Everybody, there are three elements to successful social media: the promise, the tools and the bargain. Each is evolving on many different sites and in 2009 I predict we will start to see the right promise, matched with the right tool and the right bargain deliver a hyperlocal market that is commercially sustainable.

Whether it becomes the “basis for a new portal,” I’m not sure. A local portal maybe. But doing hyperlocal on a national scale is going to be a steeper climb.

Are newspapers and magazines more of a utility or merely entertainment? Naturally, the answer depends upon whom you ask (and which publications you’re referring to).

I ask because I’ve been using a nifty online personal finance tool called Mint that allows you to quickly categorize your spending. Newspaper subscriptions (I have two) go under Entertainment. Cable TV and Internet, meanwhile, go under Bills & Utilities.

Here’s the full breakdown …

Bills & Utilities: Home Phone, Internet, Mobile Phone, Television, Utilities.

Entertainment: Amusement, Arts, Music, Movies & DVD, Newspapers & Magazines.

It’s a subtle difference, but I think an important one. A utility is something nearly indispensable, while entertainment is totally optional. Maybe 5-10 years ago, it was the other way around. But now, if you’re executing a “cost-reduction plan” at home (and who isn’t in this economy?), you’re much more likely to discontinue newspapers and magazines than cable or internet. (Personally, I think the most optional item on the list is the home phone. What a waste!)

The folks at Mint appear to have their head on straight, too, since the Food & Dining category also features subcategories for Alcohol & Bars and Fast Food. So there’s no hiding your from your dark side under something general like “Restaurants.”

And there’s an entire category for Kids. So they know where the bulk of my budget goes every month.

It’s good to be digital.

That’s the overriding theme in the exams I just finished reading through for the distance learning course I’ve been teaching for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

The first question on the exam was “why is it a good time to be a journalist?” Call it “forced optimism” if you want, but it’s what teachers do.

In their own words, here are some of the journalists’ responses:

Ulisses Neto: Because we are living in the digital age right now. Today we have an unprecedented flow of information and so many tools to deal with it. This reality allows us to produce content with more accuracy and to keep a closest relation with the audience, feeling what and how the readers want to know what is happening.

Talita Bertolim Moreira: There has never seen such a time with so many – and powerful – tools available to journalists tell stories and interact with the audience – like blogs, videos, maps etc. You can tell stories while they are still going on and know much better what your audience wants. You can also try new methods and technologies.

Gabrieli Chanas: This is a good time to be a journalist because we are living times of great stories, great technology and easy access to new tools. The actual journalist has the power of increase his stories with a bunch of features. We can talk with our reader, we can ask the readers for collaborations, we can make a story gain life by giving it audio or video.

César Chaman: Because now, thanks to technology, journalists have close at hand many tools to tell stories in a complete way and interact with readers and audience. And, also, these technologies let us work without restrictions of time and space.

Bruno Boghossian: Because the current technology offers us powerful tools to tell stories and create content for our readers. The ability do interact with our readers and the disappearance of time and space constraints are very exciting for anyone who really loves journalism.

Silvana Santiago: Because this is a time of change. No one knows what the future will be like. But since this moment is a moment of new technologies being brought to us and there are new  ways to “sew”, “thread”, and –why not- “tell” stories, let’s experiment, create and even have fun!

Valeria Shapira: Because we have new opportunities in our profession. While the essentials are the same it is time of exploring and using those new ways of being a journalist. For this, it’s important to adapt our practices, knowing that we have powerful human and technical methods that we have never tried before to tell stories and to establish a better connection, a better dialogue with readers.

Journalism education needs more public relations and business emphasis, not less. That’s what immeditately occurs to me after reading 10 reasons Why Journalism Schools Should Get Rid of PR. Bob Conrad argues that moving PR programs out of J-schools and into business schools will improve the education for PR students. 

He’s probably right. But such a move would seriously damage the journalism education at the school. 

PR and journalism education need more integration, not separation. Both must now incorporate social media practices and new technology adoption. And both would be well-served by partnerships with business schools, since a journalism needs more entrepreneurs and PR “is inherently a business function in most organizations,” as Conrad writes.

To me, Conrad’s problems with journalism education represent a list of things to fix, not escape from.