I’m fortunate that my boss, Ray Heacox, is fully digital, a former tech entrepreneur and as forward-thinking as they come in the rarefied air of the big office. You’ve never heard of him because he doesn’t care about making the industry blogs and trade publications. But I can attest that he is on par with any of those CEOs making headlines these days for “digital first” thinking. He was on board with the hackathon from the beginning and even offered the idea of making it into a TV show; we’re a TV station, he reasoned, that’s what we do. Cool, I said.

With his support and the assistance of several key people in the Seattle tech community and at KING 5, we staged a very successful event over 48 hours last weekend called Hacking Seattle News. Adobe provided an excellent space, power, wifi and whiteboards, Amazon provided AWS gift accounts and food, and KING 5 filled in the rest. It was a small event by Seattle standards with only 30-some people, which was surprising to me given the fact we were offering $10,000 as first prize. But quality trumped quantity in this case: 10 teams pitched ideas on Sunday and almost all of them were substantial and included working prototypes. One team traveled from San Francisco and several other people came to simply assist the teams with knowledge, dropping in when they could to help shape the ideas that were in development.

The winner, Team Dimensions, produced an HTML 5 website and mobile experience that allows customized news feeds based on location, interest and time (presentation slides here). (In the spirit of hackfests, most of the team had never met one one another before the weekend.) We have already met with the team and are working on developing the prototype into something the public can use and enjoy. Our vision is to launch it as that “homepage for Seattle.”

Selecting one project was a difficult decision, but thankfully we had an all-star cast of judges to make the final call. (Team photo here including my son as “honorary judge.”)

The goal of the hackathon was to solve the thorny problem of producing one-stop shopping for local news and information in a way that other cities could use. It is an open-source project and the code will reside on Github, as will the bug and feature requests as we move forward.

We presented the “problem” on Friday: I showed a quick deck (and a metaphor for touring NYC with my niece and how, unless you know someone who lives there, you never see the real NYC) and Ben Huh chimed in with his Moby Dick Project. Then Shauna Causey, who came up with the original idea for this hackathon, brought it all together with her amazing command of social media and a compelling story of a shooting down the street from her beach volleyball game.

The event offers several lessons, including:

1. How tech folks can teach – and learn from – news professionals about the persistent problem of filtering the fire hose of news and information in a community.
2. How a big media company can harness the knowledge and talent of the local community to help solve a problem. Yes, crowdsourcing at its best!
3. How news organizations can shape their view of technology by interfacing personally with smart and talented people in the local tech community.

It’s the last lesson that my boss was most interested in. Whether the project we launch with Team Dimensions is a big hit with the public or not, KING 5 gained valuable knowledge and relationships by hosting this event. It is likely that the true payoff – the ROI on our $10,000 prize money – will come in some unexpected manner, even if the project that Dimensions built doesn’t work quite as well as we hope. That is the spirit that so many tech companies thrive on, yet it’s something that media companies struggle with.

We need to live in an agile world. Agile, as in the software and startup methodology, and in our daily priorities. Hosting a hackathon helped expose others at KING 5 to a new way of thinking and adaptation and problem-solving. It’s hard to put a price on that.

As my boss had recommended, KING 5 documented the weekend for an upcoming TV special. When we were cleaning up Sunday night I asked one of the photographers what he thought of the event. He just shook his head and said to me, “Man, I learned A LOT this weekend.”

Priceless.

The question was appropriate since my session’s title was based on the “bright future for journalism.” I did an updated version of the talk I gave at SXSWi in Austin the spring and, thankfully, several people who didn’t raise their hands in the beginning confessed to me later that I had changed their mind. Nice.

Journalists, for better or worse, or so good at romanticizing the past that many of them have spent years now trying recreate it. That energy would have been so much better spent building the future for journalism – business models or not – and thankfully it seems the tide is turning. Though this was my first SPJ national conference, I got the sense from talking to several people that the mood was much more upbeat than it had been in previous years.

Perfect. The first step toward innovation is optimism.

I met college students determined to launch their own startup journalism venture instead of looking for a job. I met some great people from CNN who are killing it with innovative journalism on a global scale. I heard from a professional storm chaser who sells his coverage, a farmer’s wife who launched a newspaper years ago that’s never been published online but is successful and a woman who works at a community news operation that is growing fast in Texas.

I also met a woman who recently resigned her stable newspaper job to pursue … something. She doesn’t know what it is yet, but she knew where she was working … wasn’t working. That’s optimism. That’s how the future gets built.

I also heard from students who thanked me for providing a positive outlook for journalism. Their professors apparently spend class time bemoaning the downfall of “the way it was.” What the hell are professors teaching? Oddly, a John Mellancamp song was playing while I walked past the fountains at Bellagio and one of the lyrics should be posted in the teachers’ lounge at every J-school:

If you’re not part of the future then get out of the way.

In all, a good conference that will help spur the innovation needed to push evolution in journalism. I’d encourage anyone interested in playing a part to join a local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists or the Online News Association. Roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty. The future of journalism will be what you create.

Unfortunately, evolution in journalism schools has often moved slower than in the professional industry (which can be glacial itself).  It is somewhat understandable, since tenured professors who are experts in their fields suddenly found their field to be less desirable and less relevant than it was just a few years ago. As the demand for new media curriculum has risen over the past decade, many of those professors turned up their noses and discounted new methods, new technology as fads not to be taken seriously.

The best professors, meanwhile, rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty with new technology in an attempt to find the best ways to use it for journalism. They’re the ones who will be most interested in this new PBS series. Learning new tricks isn’t as easy as relying on past successes, but it’s the only way to help students build the future for news in a digital world.

The same technology that brought Google Maps to so many websites – the Application Programming Interface (API) – is now enabling NPR to become a distribution juggernaut. The news organization distribute the same content in many forms to many destinations with hardly any extra effort. This is the scale that publishers have longed for: create content once and see it published anywhere that can be imagined.

The NPR API delivered more than 1.1 billion stories last month and almost 5 million total in the past six months, according to a blog post today by NPR Director of Application Development Daniel Jacobson.”The big jump in total API requests from July to August are due to the launch of many new products in July,” Jacobson wrote. “Among them are the new NPR.org, the NPR.org Flash Player, the NPR News iPhone app, WBUR’s new web site, and Minnesota Public Radio’s new site.”

“While some media companies, such as News Corp, attempt to block their content from distribution, the NPR API seems to be making access to its content widespread,” Mike Melanson wrote on ReadWriteWeb.

Indeed, this strategy and execution is impressive. The combined reach through all the different channels that NPR content flows does nothing but build audience and brand loyalty, critical pieces of the NPR model.

Jacobson also posted an amazing slideshow (embedded below) that illustrates the life cycle, distribution and some key metrics for an NPR story. This is the way all new publishers should be producing their content and organizing their workflow.

Candidates will be slinging their share of tall tales and fudgy facts at tonight’s GOP primary debate in the Texas governor’s race. And on the real-time Web, it’s more challenging than ever for journalists to sort the truth from the spin.

Tonight, as Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison trade barbs on live TV, their staffers will spin relentlessly on social media sites while also using their own campaign sites to host live blogs and chats to “fact-check” (ahem, spin) the debate. Dark-horse candidate Debra Medina will chime in, too, with up-to-the-minute texts.

Journalists trying to give readers a balanced picture of the debate have their work cut out for them. Especially in real time.

Two weeks ago, I was part of the press corps covering the first Texas GOP debate at the University of North Texas in Denton. As my attention bounced between the debate itself and its resulting Web chatter, I became transfixed by how ferociously the Perry and Hutchison campaigns were using the Web for real-time rapid response through tweets, a “Debate Central” live blog and even a CoveritLive chat.

Once the debate was over, the post-debate action in the actual Spin Room was a lot more sluggish than I expected. Why waste time spinning individual reporters in person when you can bypass the filter and directly shape your message online?

Perhaps my expectations for the Denton debate were too quaint. I hadn’t been in a Spin Room since the 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate in Austin, when spokespeople and surrogates crowded the floor to declare their candidate the winner. Compared to two short years ago, campaigns seem ever more determined to circumvent the mainstream media during live events.

As Clay Shirky has observed, one of the most powerful aspects of Web 2.0 is its ability to convene a community. Campaigns, naturally, are taking advantage of this capability, rallying the faithful troops in a friendly virtual venue during high-visibility events.

Texas’ traditional news organizations are reliably performing their watchdog fact-checking duties, as evidenced by the Austin American-Statesman’s PolitiFact and the Dallas Morning News’ Texas Heat Index. Earlier this week, the Statesman’s partner — Pulitzer-winning PolitiFact National — hustled to bring a nonpartisan, fact-checking, real-time(ish) perspective to President Obama’s State of the Union address with its Truth-O-Meter.

But good reporting takes time. Thoughtful, nuanced fact checks of specious sound bites often don’t appear online until hours after the masses have tuned out of the debates. Tonight, if Perry’s followers entrust his campaign to check Hutchison’s facts, and vice versa, how much of an audience will there ultimately be for good, old-fashioned, unbiased fact-checking?

Political reporters and editors, I’d love to hear your comments: How do you deal with this 21^st-century conundrum?

Here’s the deal: My startup company, Serra Media, has me focused on emerging local online business opportunities. And while I still remain passionate about journalism, there are only so many hours in the day. So I’ve decided to try something: I’m inviting you, the best and brightest innovative journalists, to take over for me while I turn my attention to writing about entrepreneurial and local online business opportunities (more on that soon).

I’ve shifted the focus of this blog in that direction recently – with some remorse. I still think there is a need for practical guidance on how to practice “Journalism 2.0″ and how others are doing it right now. So I’m looking for volunteers – yes, we are a non-profit operation here at J20 – who want a ready-made audience for their ideas on what’s next for journalism in the digital age.

Ideally, I’d like to form a team of 3-4 writers who will showcase the best examples of Journalism 2.0 – simply put, doing better journalism with technology – and offer their insight and analysis. Each writer will be expected to write one 300-500-word post each week for 16 weeks. If you’re interested but unsure you can come up with enough ideas, don’t worry. I have a stack of them I haven’t been able to get to and I receive new ones in my inbox almost daily.

I’m also hoping to update the blog’s design so if you have experience with WordPress themes and need a project for your portfolio, I’d like your help, too.

Interested? I hope so. If so, post a 140-character definition of “Journalism 2.0″ to Twitter, then email it to me with your Twitter ID. After all, “Journalism 2.0″ was a category for the 2010 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker and drew 133 proposals. So it’s a concept that has grown beyond my book and this blog and I want to see it live on.

You can help make it happen.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

The challenge – and the revolution – is bringing that additional access and information to average citizens in a local democracy. Independent journalism startups, powered by people whose paychecks used to come from mainstream media companies, are one form that will bridge that gap. But another, possibly more exciting, form is taking shape in the student-powered projects that are popping up all over.

They run the gamut, from News 21, a well-funded and impressive collaboration between eight universities, to student startups like NYULocal, which has 15 staffers and gets more traffic than the school’s newspaper site, according to founder and publisher Cody Brown. (Brown is also launching a project called Kommons.com that is provocative in its approach and will be exciting to watch.)

Now it’s spreading to the high school level with projects like The Foothill Dragon at the Foothill Technology High School in Ventura, Calif.

“This is the first year we’ve had journalism at the school in five years, so the kids are raw and they have a long way to go to learn good writing, reporting, videotaping, etc.” Melissa Wantz told me via email. “But I think we have a good platform to build on (and we got 450 Facebook fans in less than a month, so I guess that’s a good sign).”

Wantz is the journalism teacher who built the site (in Joomla) and recently presented the project at a conference at MIT. The site launched in October and the stuents made an introductory video with a great title: We don’t use paper for this. A former journalist, Wantz wonders whether the students truly appreciate what they have accomplished in a relatively short time.

“I don’t think the kids realize what they have with this site and their new journalism class,” Wantz said. “The influence and reach they now have… this generation thinks nothing of using incredibly powerful tools that are absolutely free.”

Maybe their naivete is a good thing. Getting back to Shirky, he wrote in his last book that digital social tools only become powerful when they were taken for granted. (You don’t ask someone if they have email anymore, but 15 years ago you did.) So if our next generation of journalists understands that the power to publish is in their hands (and if they don’t take it for granted), maybe the negative fallout that Shirky predicts can be limited.

One of the bad things I think it going to happen is, I think civic corruption is just going to rise for towns and regions of under about half a million people. Which is to say, I think the old model of the newspaper is going to break faster than the hyperlocal civic reporting can come in its place.

Revolutions are messy. There’s no question that some geographical areas will advance faster than others when it comes to local information and understanding and civic participation. But the potential to create a better-informed society is undeniable.

“I guess this is what it’s like to live through a revolution, the older people (I’m 46) are practically suspended in wonder at the changes and opportunities, and the younger people are just using the new tools like it’s no big deal,” Wantz said. “It’s not like the kids are out in front of me in terms of their knowledge of what’s possible, but in terms of their reaction to what’s possible? I’m not sure it’s possible to get a rise out of a teenager who carries a computer in his pocket. They have no idea when they became (so) connected. They just are.”

If a service or platform or other technological invention connects them and empowers them to inform one another, journalism has a bright future. It will look very different than it does today or has for the past 150 years. It may be viewed as a “social utility” – or “societal utility” – more than a professional craft. But it doesn’t matter what it’s called or who participates in it, as long as we move closer to the rain forest of local information and away from the desert.

So come help Serra Media build interactive digital platforms and communities for local publishers, independent journalism startups and university journalism programs.

My company is looking for smart people who are enthusiastic about local content, collaborative publishing and the future of digital content. We’re specifically looking for budding stars in the areas of community management, social marketing and web development (Drupal experience preferred).

If that’s you, check out the details on Serra Media’s Internship Program. These aren’t traditional news/journalism positions, but will be valuable experience and a good resume builder for anyone looking for work in digital communication.

Why? Because 2010 will be the year of the Independent Journalism Startup. (There’s also the Winter Olympics and World Cup soccer, but I digress.)

Several interesting new initiatives have been announced or launched recently, including the San Diego News Network, Albritton’s new DC-area operation, the Bay Area News Project, Texas Tribune and Peer News. When you add these high-profile efforts to the ecosystem of innovative digital news operations already publishing, it’s logical that 12 months from now we will know a lot more about the future of news than we do today.

Each of these new enterprises will have different areas of focus, both topical and (obviously) geographical. In order to flourish in 2010, and for years to come, every independent journalism startup needs to take advantage of its digitally native birth and commit to a new order, one that legacy news companies have struggled with.

Here are 5 commitments that should be part of the core mission from day one:

1. Innovative technology: Publishing in the digital age requires innovation and agility. The tools are out there, but you need skills on staff to take full advantage. The newly launched Texas Tribune gets this, as about a quarter of the staff positions are tech-related. The Huffington Post is also tech-heavy, which explains how they have been able to grow such a huge audience in such a short time with relatively small amounts of original content. Committing to technology innovation doesn’t mean developing your own content management system or building everything from scratch, however. It means being able to execute ideas as quickly as possible and support the other four commitments on this list.

2. Entrepreneurial focus: Whether a for-profit or a non-profit, every news operation needs to find innovative business models. Yes, plural, because the new ecosystem demands a diversified approach to revenue generation. Advertising is one, and some hyperlocals have more demand then they can supply, so don’t start with an “advertising won’t support news” prejudice. Different forms of advertising mixed with income from other digital marketing services, reseller relationships, local events and maybe even specialized paid content strategies can combine to support a significant local news operation. Just ask the Sacramento Press or Pegasus News. Jeff Jarvis and the City University of New York have been doing a lot of hard work in this area and have built a go-to repository of resources and information.

3. Collaboration: Last month, Next Door Media and its flagship local site MyBallard won the award for user community at the Online News Assocation conference in San Francisco. As much as 90 percent of the stories published on the site originate through tips from readers. A few weeks later, the West Seattle Blog‘s Tracy Record participated on a panel discussion about the future of news sitting next to MSNBC.com president Charlie Tillinghast. Record is a great journalist, but she wouldn’t be the posterchild for independent journalism startups – and MyBallard wouldn’t have won a national award – if not for their audiences. Record often says they don’t have “readers,” they have a community. The first step in launching a new local news startup should be to identify, meet and begin working with the local community it hopes to serve. As important as the journalism you’re sure to produce will be, you need them way more than they need you. (For more examples of journo-collaboration, visit beatblogging.org.)

4. Mobile: CNN is widely recongized as having developed the best mobile application for a news organization, as much for its iReport features that allow the audience to contribute photos and news as its integrated video streams. That’s a start. Mobile, by definition, is local since more and more devices know where the user is at any given time. Local news organizations need to use that to their advantage, like Media General does with its hundreds of mobile bloggers reporting high school football scores in the state of Ohio. And the viral success of social apps like Foursquare should demonstrate to every local publisher how mobile can build community. Don’t get caught thinking that publishing your existing content on a mobile device is good enough (like news publishers did with the web in the 1990s).

5. Community: Similar to Commitment No. 3 this is about building a trusted network of connections among people with ideas and information to share with one another. It starts with the usual mechanisms like comments on blog posts, news stories and message board forums. But it should extend far beyond that, both online and offline. Online, it means connecting people from where they already communicate, like blogs, Twitter and Facebook. For examples, see ChicagoNow’s blog aggregation and the LA Times’ geographically organized Twitter lists. It also means deploying better technology to facilitate the exchange of information, like The Stranger, a Seattle alt-weekly, has done with Questionland and Electionland. Offline, it means a commitment to educate and entertain, as well as inform. Hosting local events with speakers and panel discussions or meetups and Tweet-ups, based on locally relevant topics, can allow a virtual community to come together physically and be strengthened. (Which is probably why The Texas Tribune has an events coordinator on staff.)

***

The success or failure of these new endeavors will be based on execution, not ideas, of course. The editors, reporters, bloggers and community managers will need to connect with local audiences in a new way. Each operation will find different paths to success, since the “customers” will be different in each market and, therefore, have different needs.

“To maximize a news organization’s social capital and marketability,” I wrote a year ago in an article for the Nieman Reports entitled, The End of Journalism as Usual, “its journalism today must be transparent, authentic and collaborative.”

That still applies to the today in 2009 and the one next year in 2010. The good news is that the tools and technology to make that happen keep getting better. So an effort to be transparent, authentic and collaborative is easier today than it was 12 months ago. And it will be even easier 12 months from now, when we look back on 2010 and see how the future of news developed right in front of our eyes.

It can be watching journalists learn from programmers how to define a problem and find the right approach toward solutions. Or the way students bring fresh perspectives and are enamored with working side-by-side with professionals to build something that’s real. Or the suspense that builds throughout the day as teams take an original idea and craft and mold it and produce something that may be totally different by the end of the day.

But, in the end, it’s the fact that ideas get done that I enjoy the most. And that’s what makes GonzoCamp different than other conferences, workshops and meet-ups.

From the other side of the country, Xarker Dan Conover recognized this and posted to Twitter:

You learn by doing, after all. And racing against a clock, in the same room with other teams in the same race, injects a certain energy into the event that I haven’t seen elsewhere. When our lunch speakers from the Seattle P-I, Pat Balles and Michelle Nicolosi, came to give a quick talk and answer questions, it took several tries to get the teams to take a break. The momentum they had created in just over an hour of forming their ideas and projects was difficult to pause.

The urgency of a one-day event helps frame the projects. A team can’t try to take on too much with such limited time. But this urgency is not contrived. Not if you subscribe to the notion, as I do, that the news industry had better get moving faster with innovation in the digital age.

“The news media business faces a stark reality today: innovate or die,” John Cook wrote on TechFlash to lead off his report GonzoCamp: Five entrepreneurial ideas to help save journalism? “Some organizations will make the transition to the digital world. Others won’t. And while one could argue that it took far too long for newspapers, magazines and TV stations to recognize the transformational power of the Internet, at least some newsrooms throughout the country are awakening to the opportunities. The new entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well Friday in Seattle as journalists, developers, laid off newspaper hacks, students and others gathered at GonzoCamp II.”

(Complete reports from the five teams are being posted on the GonzoCamp site as they become available.)

What’s next? How about a national “tour” of GonzoCamp events? Maybe it will become a competition like the Global Innovation Tournament. While it’s not clear how it will continue, the energy and interest that GonzoCamp has created means it will continue in some form in 2010.

“It was really amazing for me to get to just hang around and soak up all the years of experience in the room, let alone participate with them in creating something so cool,” student Daniel DeMay said in an email. “Some really intelligent people who are very motivated for sure. I look forward to the next event.”

RELATED:

• GonzoCamp: Tomorrow happens here
• Less talk, more action: GonzoCamp is back
• GonzoCamp report: An emerging role for journalism when mixed with technology
• The race is on at GonzoCamp
• GonzoCamp goals: discover, play, learn