Change is the theme of the day. Our president-elect made sure of that with his new web site.

Change can mean innovation. Or it can mean desperation. Many businesses are changing fast, forced to cut jobs and restructure because of the mortgage crisis or general economic downturn. That’s desperation.

Some businesses began the process of change years ago and now bear the fruit of their innovation. In the case of Cisco, the company “went from being the most highly valued company in the world to a cautionary example of the the excess of bubbles” in 2001. The global giant embraced collaboration and opened up the executive bottleneck that slows the process of innovation (and launching new products) at most companies. Today, Cisco is “a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by a central command.”

Journalism is changing, too, of course. But, unfortunately for mainstream news organizations, the business of journalism is not keeping pace. Steve Outing, in his 11 Points to Ponder as “crisis advice” for newspaper CEOs, highlights some of the specific areas of change to the business that will help speed this change, including publishing in print less often, broadening the scope of news and hiring a capable social media expert.

I would add one more: reinvent the advertising sales department as a digital arm of the newsroom. News and advertising should be working together on new product development. Working in silos has led to the imbalance between print and digital revenue. Collaboration is the key, along with a healthy dose of entrepreneurial thinking and willingness to experiment and fail. Fast.

If a huge company like Cisco can do it, surely the hometown newspaper can give it a shot.

An article from the most recent issue of Fast Company, MTV’s Digital Makeover, featured several important lessons for mainstream news organizations.

MTV, which had a nice business providing cable programming for two decades, has been disrupted by the new digital ecosystem just like everyone else. In response it is launching “dozens of new initiatives” to find audience and revenue online as traditional revenues and viewership declines.

If it sounds like MTV is basically spreading bets around the casino to see what hits, that’s not too far off the mark. “The culture MTV grew up in — short form, experimental — translates well to digital,” says (Van) Toffler (who helped develop Jackass and Beavis and Butt-Head). “The great thing about growing up in cable as opposed to movies is that in movies, if you fail, you fail big. Our history is littered with shows that didn’t work, and you probably couldn’t name any of them. You have to take risks.”

TAKE RISKS: While MTV’s culture is naturally more inclined to risk-taking than a newspaper or local TV station, news orgs must get out of the bunker and start pushing out of their comfort zones if they hope to innovate their way into digital viability.

MTV now runs about 50 such vertical sites. The model is to take an idea and run with it using off-the-shelf Web 2.0 technology, then either promote or cut the resulting sites depending on how they fare. The cost of entry is low: Programming vice president Gaurav Misra’s team develops verticals in less than six weeks’ time for less than $50,000, in part by outsourcing programming to Russia, Argentina, Israel, and India. Says Toffler’s boss, MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath: “We don’t always have to swing for the fences.”

EXECUTE: Newspapers and other news outlets are full of bright people with good ideas. The problem is how difficult it can be for a new idea to see the light of day. Institutional inertia and bureaucracy keep good ideas hemmed in. The perfect is often the enemy of the good. But as MTV is demonstrating, a more experimental strategy is needed today. Try it. If it fails, pull the plug or reassess and devote more resources to it and make it work.

In Tacoma, we called this a “Pilot Project.” And that little semantic nuance allowed at least a few projects to get launched that otherwise would have remained only an idea.

And if you don’t have $50,000 and six weeks for a project, don’t worry. With open source technology and an enterprising developer, you can launch projects on a smaller scale with the same model.

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.

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.

For my money, the best session at last week’s ONA conference had to be “Mobilize your Audience!” Poynter’s Ellyn Angelotti led NowPublic’s Len Brody through an insightful analysis of the startup’s “crowd powered media” site based in Vancouver, B.C.

Brody said lots of mainstream news organizations “think” they are doing this, but “it’s a façade.” Why? Because it’s a lot of work.

“Creating a dialogue and engaging them is very hard work,” Brody, who added that for NowPublic’s editors and news staff, the biggest part of the day is working with community; they slap hands, pat backs, and point people in right direction.

Angelotti referred to them as “community weavers.”

NowPublic raised $12.5 million a year ago and has seen traffic grow five-fold since. Brody broke down the different types user generators by their motivation and dispelled the myth that people want to get paid for their citizen reporting.

The top categories for user generators on NowPublic, which has 130,000 of them around the world:

1. Those motivated by money (smallest)
2. Those motivated by ego
3. Those motivated by issues
4. Accidental bystanders who didn’t set out to do any reporting (largest)
5. And the “plain old crazy” users that every web site seems to have

Brody said he doesn’t consider NowPublic’s content “journalism” as he deflected questions about verifying the accuracy of the content. He said if someone posts something questionable, the community will “smoke it out pretty fast.”

In my last post, I urged newspaper staffs to pick up the pace. Since I’d like this blog to offer ideas at least as often as it points out problems (hopefully more often), here’s one thing every newspaper can do today to move forward and make some progress during these challenging times (at least on the editorial side).

Run the entire newsroom like the sports department.

OK, I’m biased since I started my journalism career in sports and fully subscribed to Frank Deford’s idea that even the best sports journalist would be seen as the world’s tallest midget. But those shorts-wearing, junk-food-eating dudes in the corner can teach the rest of the newsroom how to get maximum productivity - and maximum impact - out of their work.

Write something every day.

If something happens on your beat - no matter what day or time - personally cover it.

Blow it out. Preseason special sections and postseason tournament coverage almost kills them. But they continue to do them because readers love them. And they still put out the regular section.

Run photos with almost every story.

Blog like crazy.

It’s a long-running joke in sports departments that “every night is election night,” a not-so-veiled reference to the special recognition bestowed on the news side a couple times a year when reporters work off-hours and the editors order pizza to recognize the extra effort.

What if every day were “election day” in the newsroom? (Without the pizza, of course.)

Lost Remote calls it “the same sad song, different sad verse.” I call it “the new normal.”

Staffing levels fluctuate at businesses all the time. Those who work in the newspaper industry and avoided this operational reality for so long should be thankful for their good fortune. But this is how the world works.

I hear newspaper execs often wish to “find the bottom” or wait “until the dust settles.” Sorry. Not gonna happen.

Grab the ball and run with it. There’s no time to wait for more teammates to help out.

I’m not saying this is better. Or fun. It just is. And the sooner everyone still working for a news organization figures this out and picks up the pace, the better off they’ll be.

A bunker mentality won’t get you out of this.

I’ve long argued that the news industry’s current economic crisis is due in large part to a lack of R&D. It’s not in the DNA. For too many decades, the products didn’t change and the profits rolled in.

Now, entrepreneurial journalism is working to fill that void.

In the recent issue of Inc. magazine, William Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business offered this key insight in the overview piece on the Inc. 500:

“Entrepreneurs are the R&D for the economy.”

Hopefully, they will be the R&D for the news business, too. We all know it needs them.

True research and development means painstaking pursuit of an idea. It’s not the try-it-today, ditch-it-tomorrow model that most news organizations are forced to use since the innovators are the same people managing the daily news report.

I think it’s up to them - dare I say “us” - to help save the news business.

I’m officially on “the countdown” with my day job at The News Tribune. If I work through September part-time (as is the current plan) then I have something like 12 days left at the paper after this week.

So this decision to branch out on my own is getting very real. Which makes me excited and a bit anxious. Meaning I love running across great inspiration from one of my favorite bloggers as I did yesterday …

The alternative is to do your best to pick a direction … and then do it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn’t mean boorish. Loud means proud and joyful and with confidence.)

No flitting, no waiting for proof. Just consistent, overwhelming performance in pursuit of a vision you believe in. That’s far more important than which direction you chose in the first place.

Thanks, Mr. Godin, for summing up my new goals so succintly.