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.

Reading Wired.com’s 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now, I wondered what the list would look like if tailored to journalism. As the Wired article admits, some great technologies that are critical today have been around longer, but rose to prominence in ‘08. All are important for Journalism 2.0, some more than others.

1. Identity management: Journalists, and anyone who publishes online, should have an easily identifiable online persona. This is especially important for younger journalists who need to have something of substance return when a prospective employer does a Google search on their name (besides MySpace party pics). Are you on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Many journalists and news professionals found these social networks in 2008.

For site developers, are you using OpenID, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect? See Newsmixer.us for an excellent example of how to implement this game-changing opportunity.

2. Lifestreaming: Online audiences are now comfortable with a “drip, drip, drip” flow of information from people they trust. Journalists should recognize this and work to connect with networks of informed readers and provide them with short updates - call it “newsstreaming.” Beatblogging emerged as a proven model for this strategy in 2008. And hordes of newspapers jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, realizing the potential for connecting with an audience with a new form of writing (microblogging).

3. Location Awareness: As you might expect, I see a huge opportunity here. Most local news sites pride themselves on being more local than anyone else. But there’s a lot more to being local than covering a council meeting, especially for a new breed of information consumers armed with location-aware mobile devices. Can they access your news, information and advertising based on the neighborhood they are logging in from? Are you producing the right mix of news and information for this new medium? If not, are you planning to in 2009?

Honorable mention: Wired also listed HTML 5, Google Chrome and Firefox 3 in its list of 6. Suffice it to say journalists should be using Firefox (with plug-ins and add-ons) for web browsing, using cloud computing for collaboration like Google Docs and online calendar tools (Chrome’s strength) and be aware of changing web design standards like HTML 5.

I hope you have a great Christmas and enjoy the holiday weeks ahead. It’s a great time to look back on memorable events of the past year and look forward to opportunities in 2009.

For me, 2008 will be remembered as the year I turned the page and set out on my own, leaving my job at a newspaper. Professional highlights include speaking in Denmark, Portugal, San Diego and Washington, D.C. (among others) and meeting great people at every stop.

It’s the people I met that gives me great hope for the potential of online journalism (I’m looking at you!). I’ve said for a long time that this industry upheaval is about people, not technology. And we’re fortunate to have a network of smart, driven colleagues working hard to solve this problem of finding a sustainable model for news and information that leverages the technology and connects markets, information and communities to one another.

It’s safe to say that network is larger today than it was a year ago. And just wait ’til you see how large it is a year from now.

Merry Christmas.

I know it’s the holiday season and people are tired, broke, weather-weary and ready for a vacation. But I don’t know how to explain the collection of wacky ideas and decisions that surfaced yesterday.

• In Twin Falls, Idaho a newly appointed Idaho lawmaker and former newspaper publisher “may introduce a bill in the 2009 Legislature to force people to use their real names when commenting on the Internet.”

Rep. Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls told the Twin Falls Times-News the absence of such a provision “discourages people from participating in civil life” and “cheapens debate.”

My take: I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine how this could ever be enforced. This is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

• On SFGate.com, Stanford professor Joel Brinkley made the case for web sites charging for content as a way to solve the business woes for newspaper companies. Specifically he recommended that “the newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites.” The logic being that “many readers would likely subscribe” if most newspapers in a region went to a pay model at the same time.

My take: Do people pay for a print subscription for access to that news, or for the convenient delivery of a physical product to their doorstep? I think it’s the latter, so applying the print business model to online news is DOA (which has been the case for more than a decade now). Besides, could newspapers really replace as much lost advertising revenue with online subscription revenue? Even in the golden age of print newspapers, circulation revenue was less than a quarter of total income.

• And last but not least, GateHouse Media sued the Boston Globe’s parent (New York Times Co.) for linking to GateHouse articles on the Globe’s new local websites.

My take: As others have observed, this case appears all to similar to the universally panned decision by the AP to sue bloggers for linking to its news content. If it was a total copy-and-paste job, then Gatehouse would have a case. But it appears to be a deep-linking argument, something I told an audience in Denmark last month that U.S. web sites were well past worrying about. Apparently not.

First, it is a festival, not a conference, as the conference director Esben Orberg reminded me at dinner. The purpose is to explore the practice of media with challenging discussions, then come together and celebrate. Last night, instead of an awards banquet that seems customary at most journalism conferences in the U.S., there was entertainment in several areas of the Odense Congress Center, including live music in one section and a satire of Danish journalists by a pair of well-known Danish journalists. (I was told I would have loved it, but wouldn’t have a chance at understanding it since I don’t know a lick of Danish.)

The festival has tripled in size since its inception in 1996, with some 1,500 attendees this year. There were 90 sessions, 200 speakers and 15 English-language sessions.

Attendees are incredibly orderly. The exhibition and reception area fills to capacity the moment sessions end and journalists carry on lively conversation. Then the minute the next sessions are about to start, the cavernous hall empties and people make their way into the separate rooms in a most expedient manner. (I would not have believed that 1,500 people could pile into one room and eat a sit-down meal and be to the next session in one our.)

I have met people from all over the world: Australia, Bahrain, England, and, surprisingly, one woman from from my neck of the woods. Fatema Fakhraie, founder and editor of Muslimah Media Watch, runs an operation I would have never guessed had its headquarters in Corvallis, Ore.

Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online, gave me an inside perspective on the state of Danish journalism and participatory media. She’s truly a global journalist, part Danish, part Puerto Rican who lives in Brooklyn and has a boyfriend in Germany. She told me that change and innovation don’t come easy in Danish culture, so Journalism 2.0 concepts are slow to take hold. I’ve heard that Danish media are still financially strong compared to their U.S. counterparts, but most fear that hard times are coming.

Kim Elmose, Blogeditor at politiken.dk, works with a staff of 35 online journalists at his organization which employs about 250. So Danish news media are not ignoring the web (Denmark apparently has one of the most robust internet infrastructures in the world), but Elmose said it may be stuck in a 1.0 mode. This was evident during the questions following my presentation, one of which centered on the practice of linking to competitive news sites. It’s commonplace in the U.S. and is actually the foundation of a movement called link journalism, but just growing in acceptance in Denmark.

As I discovered in Portugal, journalism is a shared experience even if practiced in different languages, and progression.

That was the the title of a discussion/debate staged at the Danish Media Festival today. In one corner, the self-described anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, Andrew Keen, and in the other … me.

(On a side note, the Danes really know how to throw a conference. There’s a live band, a speaker’s lounge, a bar and several different hang-out lounges, one with couches and another on artificial grass. Some 1,400 attendees are expected over two days.)

During my solo session, I tried to explain how journalists are more important than even due to the explosion of information available today. Participatory media, networked conversations and mobile connectivity have created a flood of information that require curating and navigation by trained and experience journalists.

I hit those same notes during the later debate with Keen, who worries that Web 2.0 will kill off the mainstream news organizations who have been responsible for the high-quality reporting we’ve enjoyed for so long.

He encouraged journalists to exert more confidence and establish themselves as the authorities. I, for one, am skeptical that more ego will help journalism build a future. On the contrary, collaboration with an informed audience is the key. If you don’t have an informed audience, just trolls and idiots in your comments, that’s your fault, not the internet’s.

Toward the conclusion, he suggested that a digital copy is now worth basically nothing, so news has lost its monetary value.  He suggested taking a page from the music industry and staging live performances in the future business model for journalism. (Just like the live music business is bolstering the music industry, what about journalists performing lectures and conferences?)

Far-fetched? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows for sure what will work. But I do know that optimism and innovation are more likely to feed the evolution of journalism than skepticism and inflexibility.

Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações

Journalism is an international passion and pursuit and I had the pleasure to experience this first-hand at an investigative journalism conference Friday in Lisbon, Portugal.

The one-day conference drew 120 reporters, editors, students and professors to a museum of communications history, an appropriate setting indeed.

Journalism 2.0 was translated into Portuguese last year, but not because I know the language. Fortunately there was simultaneous translation so I could follow along.

For my session, I tried to present new technology as a way to do better investigative journalism (slides available here). I showed some of the database pages that are popular theses days on U.S. newspaper web sites and encouraged students who are interested in journalism and technology to dive into database programming as a way to bolster their future career potential (applies to U.S. students, too).

The other speakers were experienced investigative journalists, two of whom had faced serious threats for their work. Their courage and fortitude were inspiring. (About the only threat I’ve faced is a features editor who jokingly suggested the editors at my last newspaper take me outside and kick my ass after I showed them the Epic 2014 video.)

Here is a look at the rest of the lineup:

Don Hale was the editor of the Matlock Mercury, when this newspaper became involved in the campaign to overturn the murder conviction of Stephen Downing. In 1973, Downing, at the time a 17-year-old with the reading age of an 11-year-old, was imprisoned for the murder of Wendy Sewell and served 27 years in jail. The conviction was declared unsafe by the Court of Appeal in 2001 and Downing was released. Hale was voted 2001 Man of the Year by the The Observer newspaper, Journalist of the Year by What the Papers Say and was made an Officer of the British Empire for his efforts and campaigning journalism, though he was also criticized for referring to Sewell as the Bakewell Tart.

Manso Preto is a freelancer Investigative Journalist. He is the author of the book “Minho Connection” (1992) where he details his investigation about a drug traffic network.  In 1992, the Portuguese Police, award him a medal of honour for his contribution and insights to the fight against drug dealing. Due to his investigation, he was invited (1998) by the U.S. Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) to spend a week in Los Angeles and in Washington, in order to assist DEA in some cases. Manso Preto was the first journalist in Portugal being convicted in court for refusing to disclosure its sources. His conviction was later reversed by a court of higher instance.

Ricardo Fonseca is a journalist in Visão, the most renowned Portuguese Newsmagazine. His investigative journalism work covers several fields, from the eastern European mafias to the illegal construction in Portuguese coast. However, his main work has been in the justice, crime and public safety.

José Pacheco Pereira is a professor in one of the major Portuguese universities and a much respected politician - member of the Portuguese Parliament for three mandates and Vice-President of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2000. He created a famous blog called “Abrupto”, which has around 70.000 visits per month, an impressive number if you consider that the total Portugal’s population is around 10 Million persons. The opinions he writes in his blog are often cited in the media and sometimes acquire the status of “news”. Many say that his blog was responsible for major changes in the Portuguese government and inside its political party.  He is also a permanent collaborator and commentator of the Portuguese written press and television.

Digital technology hasn’t just changed the way we do journalism. It has created a new information ecosystem.

Journalists today need to be navigators in this realm. And to navigate, one has to know the lay of the land and be comfortable operating in it.

I previously wondered what online journalists need to know now. I now wonder why we don’t lose the distinction of “online” journalist. Every journalist, editor, news navigator, media professional needs to know online. And digital. (Because we’re not limited to browsers anymore.)

I’m thinking this way after speaking to the Illinois Press Association’s annual convention. And because I was scheduled to speak at the Pacific Northwest Association of Journalism Educators conference this morning (but, regretfully, I will have to miss).

The topic in Illinois was “evolution and revolution in today’s changing newsrooms.” The topic in Easton was “what do today’s journalism students need to know?”

When you add those together, you get this: if you want to do journalism, you have to be digital.

Mindy McAdams was spot on recently with her assessment of basic skills to teach the next journalists.

But to truly be digital, to be part of this new ecosystem, you need to follow the advice Elizabeth Osder recently delivered to a group of students at USC:

“… be relevant and useful versus arrogant and entitled.”

Too often we are caught up in the technology and skills needed today, when it’s really a mindset that is most important. If you are committed to being relevant and useful in a digital world, figuring out how use RSS and build a Soundlides slideshow comes pretty easy.

Way to go, Elizabeth. Thanks for giving us all a new mantra to pass on.

And a tip of the hat to Amy Gahran for this link. See her comments here.

Reflecting on the ONA 08 conference on the long plane ride back to Seattle, I realized that my pre-conference concerns about whether this conference would be be able to generate its usual positive energy were thankfully dispelled.

The group of 750 journalists, technologiests, educators, students and independent media innovators filled the ballrooms of the Capitol Hilton with excitement and constant talk of “what could happen” instead of “what is not happening.”

One common theme I noticed was how corporate technology can’t keep pace with innovative start-ups of pureplays. Everyone I talked to seemed unhappy with at least part of their technology platform, and this includes people from MSNBC.com, ESPN.com and washingtonpost.com. But no one seemed to be allowing this to slow them down.

And I was quite impressed with The Associated Press efforts in the mobile space.

And the talk of journalism educators to get their students up to speed on technology. And marketing. And business models. And entreprenership.

Just because there aren’t many traditional job openings doesn’t mean there isn’t any opportunity.

I’m traveling tomorrow to Washington, D.C. for the ONA 2008 Conference.

In years past, this conference has been insulated from the funereal atmosphere at other conferences I attend that specifically target newspapers. Talk of layoffs, buyouts and new digital demands didn’t surface at ONA. The halls pulsed with optimism and exceitement.

It will be interesting to see if that same level of positive energy is present this week. I hope so.

I can’t help but recall the first few years of ONA, when the optimism of us news geeks was tempered by the head-in-the-sand approach many of our employers were taking in the relatively new age of the digital revolution. Complaints of “they just don’t get it” were all too common.

Now the pendulum has swung fully.

The future of many mainstream news companies rests on the shoulders of those who attend this conference. And the need for innovation has never been greater.

It’s good to see conference planners are aware of the topic that needs top billing: The business of news.

This confab has grown from a plucky little gathering to one of the most important confabs for the media business each year. Naturally I’m looking forward to it and will be posting updates on the blog and Twitter. Stay tuned.