If you’re in Southern California next week, I encourage you to take a look at the 2009 Entrepreneurs Conference hosted by the UCLA MBA program. I’m honored to be moderating a session at the conference, but am equally excited to attend the other sessions, including the contest where entrepreneurs will be judged on their 90-second pitches.

I also have some discount codes that will save you 15 bucks on a ticket, so if you’re interested shoot me an email.

Here’s the skinny from the conference organizers:

The theme of this year’s conference is “The Entrepreneurial Road Less Traveled.” Conference highlights include keynote speakers Richard Rosenblatt (Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO of Demand Media) and Greg Waldorf (CEO of eHarmony), a fast pitch competition, and 11 panels/workshops including:

* Journalism in the Digital Age: Creation, Distribution and Monetization of Content
* Entrepreneurs, Entertainment and the Future of Advertising
* Women in Entrepreneurship: How to build an A-team
* Marketing Makeover: Moving Out of the Basement and into the Board Room
* Cleantech Entrepreneurs: Leading Los Angeles in the Green Revolution

Academia, meet industry. Industry, meet academia.

Last year I had the honor of participating in a symposium in Chapel Hill, N.C. (in honor of the retiring Phil Meyer) that featured two days of discussion on the topic of journalism education in the digital age. The final conclusion was clear: in these uncertain and disruptive times, universities and professional news organizations must join forces in order for either of them to make the transition.

That was talk. It’s time to walk.

Walter Robinson’s recent Neiman Reports article, highlights the opportunity. “Journalism schools are brimming with fledgling reporters convinced that career opportunities in the news business are boundless,” Robinson wrote.

How about newsrooms? I haven’t visited any lately that could say the same thing.

So Robinson, who spent 34 year at The Boston Globe and shared in a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, is taking that energy and infusing news operations with the hustle, moxie and idealism that young journalists trying to break in still have today. (Actually, they probably have more.) The results reported by Robinson are impressive:

At Northeastern University in Boston, where I joined the faculty in 2007, students in my investigative reporting seminars have produced 11 Page One stories for The Boston Globe in just 20 months. What’s more, the university’s School of Journalism has started a regionwide First Amendment Center to fight for public records for news organizations that no longer have the money to wage those battles.

It’s long past time to bury old hatchets. News organizations need to forget about that one bad intern who screwed up years ago. J-schools need to forgive the internships that have been cut or granted to students from outside the area. We don’t have time for these games anymore.

Working with universities is something I’ve done for years and it has always been a truly win-win situation. At The News Tribune I helped form a partnership with Pacific Lutheran University to have students shoot video for the newspaper’s Web site. Now with Serra Media, I’m working with schools from around the country, from Carolina to Stanford to Western Washington. We’re offering technology and tools for students to experiment with new forms of journalism and local reporting. In return, we’ll get great feedback and hopefully some interesting case studies. Win-win.

In addition to supplying multimedia stories or investigative reports, university programs, courses and classes (including those outside journalism) can help news organizations in other ways, including:

• Design: As more newsrooms cut back (or cut out) designers, is there a class that could take on longer-term assignments? They’d love to see their work published.
• Online community: Lots of news sites struggle with cultivating a community of commenters or user participants online. New entries into the job market need these skills. Why not let curents students cut their teeth on a real audience and help elevate the quality of a site’s discussion in the process?
• Web analytics: Is there a class that would jump at the chance to go through your Web traffic reports and make recommendations and provide analysis?

So pick up the phone and call across town. Find a local partner. Have a pizza party in the newsroom and allow the student journalists to meet the pros. They have much to learn from each other.

Steve Buttry posted the complete – and I mean complete – details of Gazette Communications’ plan to revolutionize its business yesterday. It’s worth a glance if you care about the evolution of local news and worth a full read if you’re responsible for running a local news business. (Sorry, but suing Google is not part of the plan.)

In the interest of full disclosure, Gazette is a partner of Serra Media, the company I co-founded last year, so I’m not an objective bystander. I’m very much cheering for them. That said, there are several things that make this plan worth taking a look at, but the most striking to me is the ambition. (Mark Potts has a good overview and analysis of the tactical points.)

In an era of layoffs and budget-cutting, the temptation to go into “bunker mode” and try to ride out the storm is strong. But it could also be fatal. The ability to make quick decisions and move on many fronts is what will allow those local media companies to make the transformation into the digital age. The others will be left behind.

The Gazette has the audacity to believe it can launch new projects at the same time it overhauls its model away from one-day consumption. They don’t have time to worry about the culture; they’re too busy creating a new one on the fly.

It’s ambitious – and risky. Both are elements in the equation of most successful start-up businesses, which is exactly how the Gazette is operating. (Given the uncertainty for most local news companies today, more should follow suit.)

I’ve spent the past few months presenting the idea of Newsgarden as a product/service that can be licensed by news companies. I’m impressed by the organizations who act quickly; the Gazette is one of a handful that have made a decision the same day as the demo.

It speaks to their ability to be productive in testing new ideas during these uncertain times.

It shows they are committed to moving forward.

I heard one entrepreneur say recently that success in business comes down to productivity. Whomever can conceive, test and launch the most ideas wins because it’s very difficult to come up with the perfect product on your first try.

So even if other news organizations don’t take a page (or five) from the Gazette plan, I hope they take a sense of the ambition and apply it to their own operation.

In baseball, a 5-tool player is someone who can hit for power, hit for a good average, runs well, is good defensively and has a strong throwing arm. Basically, this is who you want on your team. It describes a “complete ballplayer.”

I thought about this yesterday as I was speaking to a journalism class at the University of Washington. The instructor, Kathy Gill, asked me at the end of my presentation what 3 things the students in the room should know as they embark on their professional careers.

My initial response:

1. Start a blog on something you’re passionate about and can write authoritatively about and try to grow the readership. Nothing will teach you about the power and responsibility of being publisher as fast or as well.

2. Think about, and begin to study, the business, markets and entrepreneurialism associated with news and journalism in the digital age.

3. Master social networking for professional gain, either as a way to network yourself into a job or as a way to cultivate sources for reporting and journalism. Prospective employers will expect this of you.

But then I remembered the concept of a 5-tool player in baseball (once a sportswriter …) and came up with a quick list of 5 basic tech skills that college journalists should possess to enhance their chances for career success. In other words, if I were still a hiring manager, these are the skills that would make a job candidate a “complete journalist.”

1. Blogging (demonstrated ability to grow an audience)
2. Social networking (to collaborate with others and network professionally)
3. Audio (know how to capture and edit)
4. Video (know how to shoot and edit a basic story)
5. Photography (know how to make good pictures and build slideshows)

Note, these are only tech skills and don’t replace the ability to report, write, edit and tell compelling stories. Nor do they replace the passion, judgment, values and character that have always separated the better journalists from those who are just in it for the paycheck (if there are any left).

And it’s unlikely you’ll do all of them throughout your career.Once you find your niche, you’ll probably be able to specialize some (not as much as earlier generations, of course). But, in order to get going, having a complete array of skills will open more doors than being really good at one or two and oblivious to the others.

Additional reading:

Mediashift: NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry

Charles Apple: Thirty-one college students to watch for 2009

If you’re a serious code master (I’m not, but I know several) you probably already know about Stack Overflow, a handy place to find answers to specific programming questions on everything from Visual Basic to Flash. (And if not, you should check it out.)

I was listening to Joel Spolsky, one of the site’s founders, talk about it on a podcast interview recently. The site uses community voting and wiki features to improve the quality of the responses. All very cool, but what was intriguing from a news perspective is how they chose to architect the community ecosystem. From the FAQ page:

Here’s how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers: you gain 10 reputation points. If you post something that’s off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down: you lose 2 reputation points. You can earn up to 200 reputation per day, but no more. (Note that votes for any posts marked “community wiki” do not generate reputation.)

Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:
15 Vote up
15 Flag offensive
50 Leave comments
100 Vote down (costs 1 rep), create new tags
200 Reduced advertising
250 Vote to close or open your questions
500 Retag questions
750 Edit community wiki posts
2000 Edit other people’s posts
3000 Vote to close any questions
10000 Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools

At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don’t run Stack Overflow. The community does.

I’m guessing there are pletny of news sites and blogs that wish they would have had this repuation economy in place when they launched comments on stories and blog posts. It’s a positive step toward improved collaboration and conversation that our networked world allows. And it makes me think the dark early days of inanity and insults will be quickly forgotten when systems – and the people using them – evolve into more sophisticated exchanges.

One of the sites I often suggest people check out when looking for free multimedia editing tools is Jumpcut. No more.

Today, Yahoo announced it is pulling the plug on the free online video editing service Jumpcut. Strangely, visitors aren’t immediately notified of this on the jumpcut.com homepage. Only after clicking “Upload” are they confronted by their class-action Dear John letter:

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. Therefore, we are no longer accepting new uploads. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to the email address on your Jumpcut account when the download utility is available.

The message concludes with a recommendation to post videos on flickr, another Yahoo site. But Flickr doesn’t have free editing tools (as far as I know).

Anyone know of a site that does?

(Note: The following post is drawn from research I’m doing for my new book).

UPDATED 4/16/09 11:15 a.m.: Clarified some dates and details on the Dallas Neighbors project. Thanks, Oscar.

The Dallas Morning News launched a print-only community newspaper called Neighbors in 2005 and, two years later, turned it into neighborsgo and launched a corresponding Web site under the direction of managing editor Oscar Martinez.

The idea behind the project: offer readers a place to publish their news on a separate area of the Morning News Web site with the lure of print publication for the best stuff. In addition to the Web site, 18 different print editions were launched, each targeting a separate geographic area.

The readers responded. Editors were inundated with submissions and emails. And, the way Martinez views it, print provided the motivation for most people.

“The innovation of neighborsgo isn’t the social-media aspect of neighborsgo.com or the amount of content generated by users,” Martinez says. “It’s the resulting print product, which is a mash-up of user- and staff-generated content. Print still has an incredible power to validate shared experiences and strengthen community connections. In 2009, this is a great story for newspapers to tell.”

Another great story for newspapers is how the editors at neighborsgo have gone about getting to know their audience. As Martinez says, “Before you can mobilize an audience, you need to know who they are. More important, they need to know who you are.

“Neighborsgo editors display their personalities online and interact daily with readers across multiple platforms – including prompt e-mail and phone replies, and outreach via external social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Once a month, editors meet with readers face-to-face, informally, over coffee. (A recent event featured nine editors ‘hosting’ more than 120 readers at nine area Starbucks.)”

For the Dallas news company, they have turned the concept of “citizen journalists” on its head. “In our world, editors are ‘journalist citizens,’” Martinez says.

MyCommunityNOW is a similar project launched by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 25 neighborhood areas. The basic premise is the same: leverage an inexpensive and efficient digital publishing to allow an audience to self-publish, then use the best submissions for localized print editions. The lure of print motivates the audience while the Journal Sentinel recognizes that its reporters and editors can’t be everywhere, nor can it always cover the news and events that readers want. So MyCommunityNOW provides expanded coverage in each community.

“Let’s face it, if there is a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new grocery store in town, the odds are slim that the newspaper will send out a staff photographer or reporter to cover it,” said Mark Maley, the site’s editor. “But if the chamber of commerce president has a digital camera, we strongly encourage him to take a few shots and post it on the local NOW site. It’s providing a facet of coverage that newspapers — especially in this era of downsizing and staff cuts — often can’t provide.

“But beyond that, we are giving people a chance to actively participate in how their community is being covered and to interact with others in their community through our sites. Just as people like posting videos to YouTube and photos to Flickr, they like to similar tools to interact with other residents in their hometown.”

The lure of print helps motivate NOW contributors, but so does a little friendly competition. So NOW editors frequently send traffic reports to the 130-plus bloggers who voluntarily contribute, with the page views their posts receive and how they rank compared to other NOW bloggers.

“My favorite type of submissions are the kind that surprise the heck out of me in terms of popularity,” Maley said. “Sometimes a small, two- or three-paragraph user-submitted story about a new business in town can get four or five times as many page views as a staff-written story about the city’s budget crunch or a more ‘serious’ issue.

“I’ve found that we can learn something about how we cover a community if we pay attention to what kind of news people are submitting to us – and what people are reading online.”

How easy can digital video be? It is estimated that 13 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

The low cost and ease of use mean anyone can participate. The quality varies greatly, of course. Both in journalism and in the greater video ecosystem.

This debate about quality has strangled many news organizations. Unwilling to publish what they see as an inferior product, editors and photographers painstakingly edit and produce high-level work that, while great, simply takes too much time and effort. Then, when the pageviews are modest (at best), journalists start blaming video as a format and retreat to what they know best. (When was the last time an editor suggested dropping the education beat because the latest story only saw a couple hundred hits?)

Meanwhile, the quick and less polished video content on news sites often draws bigger audiences. This discovery has led several news organizations to start broadcasting video with cell phones from the scenes of news events. They should do more.

YouTube,  Seesmic, Qik and others have changed the perception of what’s acceptable, even for news. When non-broadcast news organizations first started doing video, it was assumed that each project had to look as close to a standard evening news broadcast as possible. Those days are gone and it’s become acceptable to offer varying levels of quality from one news organization to another.

Just take a look at two very similar video features, one by The New York Times and one by The Wall Street Journal. Technology columnists David Pogue of the Times and Walt Mossberg of the Journal offer their product and service reviews in video each week, but the quality and production values of the Pogue videos are significantly higher than Mossberg’s.

And that’s OK.

Pogue is a former Broadway accompanist and his personality drives the video reports with humor and creative story angles. He also has the benefit of producers from CNBC through a corporate partnership; the segments also air on the cable TV network. Characteristics to note:

• shot in several locations
• other performers appear in the segments to help act out the story
• heavily edited with dramatic production values
• lead-in (opening credits and music)
• lead-out (ending credits and music)
• music throughout
• title overlays and grand transitions

Mossberg, meanwhile, turns on a webcam in his home office and records his 5-minute review seemingly in one take. Characteristics to note:

• lead-in (opening credits and music)
• lead-out (ending credits and music)
• product screenshots edited in
• little to no other editing (when Mossberg stumbles on a word, he apologizes and continues)

One looks like a TV show – because it is – and another is just a guy sitting at a computer. So why does the Wall Street Journal allow its content to compete with the New York Times on such a seemingly uneven playing field?

One reason is that the audience for video has become extremely forgiving and is now open to all levels of quality. Another is the bargain Mossberg has established with his audience. He is an authentic voice, having written a column in the Journal since 1991, who produces his content in video as a way to provide a different format and as a better experience than just text, since he can hold a device in his hands and show the viewer the product.

Unedited video streams from cell phones would have been unthinkable a few years ago in many newsrooms. They’re slowly becoming common practice. This shows how far some journalists have come in understanding their online audience.

They can strike a different bargain on the Web. They can provide video that isn’t perfect and in some cases isn’t that good. But if it’s authentic, if it takes a viewer to a news event or behind the scenes of somewhere important, it works.

Drop what you’re doing and take 30 minutes to listen to Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Lee Rainie for the latest edition of On the Media. The two discuss the results of the Pew Center’s latest survey on the future of the Internet.

No, not even 600 “experts” can predict the future. But the discussion of the trends, implications and opportunities that will evolve in the digital age is insightful and, at least to an optimist like me, inspiring.

Among the highlights:

• The Internet will become completely ubiquitous. Half the survey respondents think that’s a good thing, half think it’s a bad thing.
• No matter which side of the fence you’re on, Gladstone and Rainie end up agreeing that human nature is what will be revealed. We can’t blame technology.
• Digital connectivity among people is an additive function. It does not replace offline networking. In other words, people are not more lonely or spend less time socially in the real world because of the digital connectivity.
• We’ll become ridiculously mobile.

If you’re thinking about the future of journalism, here’s the place to start. How do you add value in this world of tomorrow? What can you provide that no one else can?

The answers to these questions are based largely on your experience, expertise and the opportunity around you (geographically or topically). Take a look around you, then take a look ahead of you (into the future) and see what opportunity presents itself.