I will be taking part in two sessions tomorrow: Ethics for Entrepreneurs, a panel discussion, at 10:45 a.m. and How to Build What’s Next for News, a solo presentation, at 2:30 p.m.

Fresh of another amazing experience at the Online News Association’s annual conference, it will interesting to compare the content and the experience of the two conferences. Several ONAers are doing the double and are here in New Orleans this week, including Andy Carvin, who will be kicking the day off with a super session tomorrow at 9 a.m.

Many of you enjoyed my post on how to navigate the ONA conference in DC. So I thought I’d do a reprise for those journos heading to Austin this week. Last year was my first SXSWi, when I spoke about Journalism Next, but I think a learned a thing or two that might help you better navigate this intense but completely awesome experience.

DO: Take advantage of the fact that there will be a ton of great content for journalists interested in interactive. There’s an entire track focused on The Future of Journalism so you could fill up your schedule with nothing else. (Personally I liked last year’s track name, Journalism 2.0.)

In an attempt to capture some of the intimate feel of the earlier iterations of SXSWi, the conference will feature “campuses,” meaning similar programming will be scheduled in one location to gather those “birds of a feather.” This will be a great opportunity for like-minded digital journalists to network.

Mallary Tenore of Poynter wrote a great overview of 20 SXSW Interactive panels that journalists should attend and was nice enough to mention my presentation of my next book on entrepreneurial journalism on Sunday.

DON’T: Limit yourself to just the journalism content. Expand your horizons and drink from the firehose of SXSWi by attending sessions that have nothing to do with journalism, too. Some of my favorite sessions last year were focused on seemingly obscure topics. The wealth of different perspectives on interactive at this conference means you will enrich your experience if you force yourself out of your comfort zone.

Some of the sessions I have pegged include Conference Startups: Grassroots Innovation Rocking the Event World, The 4-Hour Body: Hacking the Human Body
and Haters Gonna Hate: Lessons For Advertisers From 4chan.

DO: Get some fresh air. The forecast calls for temps in the mid to upper 70s so if you’re coming from a northern climate, you’ll do yourself a favor by getting some Vitamin D. The Lady Bird Lake Trail near the convention center is a great place for a walk or jog. You can also walk the grounds of the state capitol or University of Texas.

DON’T: Be a wallflower. The people attending this conference are interesting and willing to chat, so introduce yourself and start conversations. You’re a journalist, after all. This is what you do. The first person I introduced myself to last year worked for Google. The second person worked for Facebook. I also met people from Israel and Australia and found myself at breakfast the first day with Jeff Pulver and his crew.

DO: Attend the parties, whether that’s your thing or not. Austin is one of the best cities in the U.S. for nightlife. Plus, this is where some of the best “networking” happens and where you’ll meet even more interesting people (thanks to that great social lubricant: alcohol.) And unlike most of the journalism conferences we all attend, the parties are a part of the official schedule. This is Spring Break for Geeks, after all.

DON’T: Stress out over the fact that there are too many good sessions to attend and you can’t possibly be in all of them at the same time. The opening slot on Friday has at least six sessions I wish I could hit, but there’s only one of me. If you’re not 100% sure on a session, pick one that is near one of your second choices. The sessions area spread out all over Austin so if the one you pick is lame and you want to duck out (totally acceptable at SXSWi), you’ll want Plan B to be nearby or you’ll spend too much time walking back and forth between venues.

If you are not attending the conference, follow along on Twitter. You might actually be in a better position to sample from all the great content of the sessions from your desktop than those of us “stuck” in one session at a time. Of course, you’ll miss out on all the “networking,” but there’s always next year.

The Online News Association’s annual conference kicks off on Thursday in Washington, D.C. It’s the nation’s only sold-out journalism conference each year, meaning this is the place to be if you’re excited about news in the digital age.

If you are going and maybe this is your first time, I’ve thrown together some quick thoughts on how to get the most out of the conference.

DO: Bring a positive attitude and a willingness to share ideas. The people at this conference are excited and optimistic about the future and will do anything to help others make it happen.
DON’T: Whine and complain about how people in your newsroom “just don’t get it.” Most of the people at this conference are dealing with, or have dealt with, “traditional” journalists who failed to see the value in digital. This isn’t the time for that. It’s a time to celebrate the possibilities. In fact, I think we should rename this from “conference” to “festival.”

DO: Arrive at the sessions early. They often fill up and you’ll end up sitting on the floor if you get in at all.
DON’T: Watch the livestream from the conference if you are at the conference. This is pretty much a geekfest, meaning everyone is online all the time. Even the most robust wifi system is going to struggle a bit with this crowd.

DO: Try to network as much as possible. While the conference sessions are always good, it’s the people who make this conference special. Never dine alone and always introduce yourself to whomever is sitting near you. (Or you can “pull a Ken Sands” and never actually attend the sessions, preferring instead to work the hallways.)
DON’T: Forget business cards, or Bump on your iPhone or Droid, so you can exchange contact information with the new people you meet.

DO: Post helpful information to Twitter with the #ona10 hashtag. Save a search with this term so you can see what else is happening at the conference, too.
DON’T: Post personal tweets with this hashtag, unless it will be helpful for others to see. This stream will be flooded anyway, so use discretion.

DO: Use Foursquare or Gowalla to connect with others and figure out where your new friends are having lunch or a post-conference beer.
DON’T: Check in at every corner of the conference hotel. Being mayor of the escalator is really kind of pointless, don’t you think?

DO: Drink lots of water and squeeze in a nap if you can. Especially if you like “late-night networking.”
DON’T: Complain about traveling and time zones. Most of us traveled through time zones, too. Remember, no whining.

And lastly, DO play Webbmedia’s QR code game. If this doesn’t prove how different ONA is from other journalism conferences, nothing will.

See you in DC.

Hamburger cake (photo by bunchofpants)

What if I told you that readers actually prefer meat and potatoes? Better yet, what if I said those servings are more valuable to the publisher because they make more money than the fluff? (Picture serving New York steak, not ground round.)

Too good to be true? The folks at Perfect Market assumed so, but went ahead and did a study anyway. They were happily surprised by the results, which suggests that readers are actually interested in meaty subjects. And their interest in those subjects pays more in advertising revenue for the publisher.

Now that’s juicy.

“In the current world of media change, news publishers are constantly asking ‘how do we make more money?’” said Tim Ruder, Chief Revenue Officer . “The assumption has been either it’s trend-chasing, or entertainment posing as news, or news being delivered as entertainment that would make money. But issues that matter to people still have high levels of reader interest. And, thankfully, high levels of advertiser demand.”

Perfect Market, which has a dog in this fight because it gets paid to help publishers monetize news content, conducted a study of 20 news publishers during the summer of 2010. Dubbed the Vault Index Summer 2010, it had a sample of some 15 million articles and found that the top 10 subjects in audience interest and rate of return for advertising had nothing to do with celebrities or gossip. The most valuable content focused on policy and pocketbook issues, the Gulf oil disaster, jobs and the mortgage crisis. From the press release:

… while the Lindsay Lohan sentencing and other celebrity coverage drove significant online traffic for major news publishers, articles about unemployment benefits, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates and other serious topics were the top-earning news topics based on advertising revenue per page view.

We’ve all seen the most-viewed and most-emailed lists on news sites and despaired over the sensational lineup represented there some days. The list that editors and publishers should be paying attention to is “most valuable,” not most popular.

“We’ve been working with a number of publishers individually and we started to see signs,” Ruder said. “So we thought it would be good to take a look across a number of sites. And we were happily surprised at the findings, which were counter to conventional wisdom.”

Here are the top 10 subjects, ranked by a combination of traffic and advertising revenue data based on advertising revenue per thousand page views (RPM). The 20 publishers in the study were mostly newspaper sites, plus other online news publishers, of varying sizes from across the U.S.

Most Valuable News Topics – Summer 2010:
1. Unemployment Benefits
2. Gulf Recovery Jobs
3. Egg Recall
4. Gulf Oil Spill
5. Mortgage Rates
6. Jobs
7. Obama
8. Social Security
9. Immigration Reform
10. Proposition 8

“We monitor our numbers pretty closely,” said Sheigh Crabtree, VP of audience development for Perfect Market. “The topics we saw consistently rise up were clearly in the public interest and clearly in advertisers’ interest. This is important for publishers to note as they are thinking about how to allocate resources.”

Perfect Market is based in Altadena, a Los Angeles suburb, and is a spin-off of Idealab, which helped Overture develop a paid search model before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2003. The company has raised more than $20 million in venture funding to date and counts Tribune Co. as one of its investors. It helps publishers with “revenue relevancy tools” which sounds like a fancy way of saying “make more money with your content.” They will have a booth at the upcoming Online News Association conference if you’re interested in learning more.

Incoming master’s students at Syracuse in print/online news, arts journalism and public relations students spend their first six weeks on campus in a crash course. This year, that collective effort resulted in a website with some 75 “slices of Syracuse life,” each one a 60-second snippet captured by the students in one day (August 3, 2010). “Secs in the City” – a play on the familiar HBO show/movie title – are one-minute videos, one-minute audio slideshows and short text articles. (Full disclosure: the project was published using Newsgarden, a social mapping platform I helped develop at Serra Media.)

“Essentially, ‘boot camp’  is to give new master’s students a comprehensive news reporting experience, including for many, their first forays into collecting and editing video, audio and photography,” said Syracuse professor Jon Glass, who coordinated construction of the website. “They learned the fundamentals of all three, plus received training with Final Cut, Audacity and Photoshop to produce their video vignettes.”

Professors hoped spreading students out across the city’s five different regions would help the students — especially those who just moved to Syracuse — learn about the community by  visiting the areas and interviewing the people who live and work there.

“This was a deadline-driven assignment with only one hour to shoot and then an afternoon and few hours the next morning to edit, Glass said. “We stressed they should be ‘slice of life’ stories rather than full documentaries, and for the most part the students delivered that with their video features and accompanying text stories.”

While the quick turnaround was fairly intense, Glass says the feedback was positive; most students felt it was among the most exciting aspects of the summer.

“While multimedia projects the past two summers were posted online, we wanted to integrate mapping into the final website as a way to introduce geolocation as something today’s journalists should factor into their reporting,” Glass said. “The Newsgarden tool enabled us to offer that functionality, and we’re really happy with the final product.”

Thanks for the endorsement on Newsgarden, Jon. And nice work on a cool project.

The ONA conference usually sells out so get your ticket soon. If you don’t want to spend the dollars for the ticket, consider volunteering to help and you’ll get discounted (or free) passes.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know much I like the ONA conference. It’s my favorite conference every year (and I’ve been to a lot of conferences).

SXSW is “spring break for geeks” according to CNN. It’s just a ton of fun, packed with information and thousands of really interesting people.

Last year was my first SXSW and I was blown away by the journalism presence. There were several panels focused on journalism and an impromptu meet-up I helped organize drew about 50 tech-minded journalists to a bar on a Sunday evening.

There are 49 journalism panels proposed. You can vote for your favorites here. I’m proposing a book-reading from my new book, which should be published by then. You can vote for my proposal here. (Many thanks, in advance.) And here’s Poynter’s roundup of 20 panels of interest to journalists.

The era of specialization is dead, but a new class of jobs and roles at new era news businesses offer exciting opportunities for journalists and communicators who are interested in new thinking and new approaches.

In terms of jobs, journalistic occupations are outperforming the overall economy, according to Michael Mandel, former chief economist at BusinessWeek and founder of Visible Economy LLC. That certainly seems counterintuitive to anyone who has heard about, or directly experienced, layoffs at newspapers and TV stations in the past five years. A shift in journalistic employment to nontraditional companies such as Yahoo and AOL, plus an increase in self-employed journalists has created surprising growth.

Drawing from numbers based on the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of roughly 60,000 households conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, Mandel found the overall number of employed journalists increased by 19% from 2007-2010.

Over a comparable time period, Mandel notes, employment in newspaper publishing has fallen 26%; periodical employment is down 16%; and radio and television broadcasting is down 11%.

Journalists are getting jobs. Just not in the traditional industries or at the companies you would expect.

And those traditional news companies that are hiring? They aren’t looking for the same old thing any longer. A spirit of innovation is mandatory, previous experience is not. If you are willing to learn new ways of communicating to – and with – an audience, including inventing some of your own, you’re ready for a job in a new era news business.

Luddites need not apply. New skills can be learned, but those individuals who have shown a previous proclivity toward trying new types of digital communication will separate themselves from the pack.

Indeed, here’s a piece of a job posting from July 30, 2010 on the Tribune website:

The TV revolution is upon us – and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance. We’re recruiting a solid team of anti-establishment producer/editors, “preditors”, to collaborate on a groundbreaking morning news/infotainment format unlike anything ever attempted on local TV. Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass. Or your excellence at writing readable copy for plastic anchorpeople. Not interested.

Sell us on this:

-Your personal relationship with the internet, blogs, video-sharing, iPads, Droids, Blackberries, Blueteeth, Facebook & Twitter, and all things Modern Culture

-You’re in sync with the pulse of the streets, not the PC, Capital “J” journalism world

It’s a new era, whether you’re looking for work in journalism at a traditional company or ready to explore the emerging world of journalism outside newspapers and TV stations. The career path is no longer well-defined, however. In addition to new skills, you will need a new adaptability to find your way. Just know that, if you have an open mind and an innovative spirit, the possibilities are out there.

Chadwick, a New York Times veteran, is helping produce a decade-by-decade look at the major events in technology, unions, advertising and corporatization which has led to the demise of many papers. “Fit to Print – A Documentary Film on the U.S. Newspaper Industry” is currently in production, but you can see a trailer of it here.

I asked Chadwick how the project got started and what are the plans for marketing and distribution. Here is what he told me via email:

I was working at the NYT for over 3 years and began to sit down with various staffers and reporters who were all expressing their concerns regarding two things: A) the trouble facing the industry B) how it is almost impossible for them to speak to anyone outside of the institution in expressing their opinions and concerns. A deep concern wrapped over with red-tape essentially. The NYT staffers still choose to speak out (as well as various reporters from other national newspapers including the Washington Post, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, USA Today, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle P.I. and many others). So I began to collect their interviews over the course of the year, and from there it began to escalate and the story of the U.S. newspaper industry took full shape.

I don’t want to give too much away, but we are focusing on the historical perspective of the newspaper industry in turmoil dating back to the decline in the afternoon dailies and transition from hot to cold typesetting. Decade-by-decade, we will detail major events with technology, unions, advertising and corporatization which led to the demise of many papers. We are also embedded with investigative reporters, showing what is taking place out in the field right now in real time.

The marketing and distribution plan is still up in the air. We are still looking for funding and sponsorship to help us complete the film and get it out to the public. Ideally, this film is meant for film festivals and broadcast television. We just hope that an institute or organization will help us complete the travel and editing we need to get this done in order to make this a great film.

I think one of the challenges Chadwick faces is making a film that comes off as something more substantial than a bunch of newspaper journalists lamenting the changes in technology and society that have weakened their industry. I hope he will reflect some of the responsibility that newspaper publishers, editors and yes, journalists, should bear for the current state of the newspaper industry. Many of the wounds have been self-inflicted, after all.

We all know how important newspapers have been in the U.S. and we’d love to see them return to strength. I hope Chadwick gets the funding he needs to finish the film. It is an important story that needs to be told.

Thanks to Richard Dean of Dubai Eye radio station for having me on his show yesterday. We covered a lot of ground – from citizen journalism to jobs to the business prospects for media’s big boys – in less than 20 minutes. If you’re interested, you can listen to the interview here.

During my four days in Baku, the nation’s capital city, I met with dozens of journalists. Some had jobs at newspapers or TV stations, some were writing on their own and many were just starting out as students. But they all had the same passion for journalism that brought you and I to this profession. (Rashad Shirin, right, served as my interpreter for four days in Baku, making it possible for me to discuss journalism with Azeri journalists.)

In Azerbaijan, however, there are far more hurdles to clear. News outlets must receive a special license from the government, which means there is no investigative reporting. (The government doesn’t tolerate criticism.) Independent news sources, mostly online, apparently operate with a single-minded focus on complaining about the government, so the idea of journalistic objectivity and fairness are a “work in progress,” to put it mildly.

Still, many journalists I spoke to are hopeful that the Internet will change the game and bring a diversity of voices and reporting to a nation that sorely needs it. Unfortunately, this nation also sorely needs affordable Internet access and smartphone availability if it is to emulate the thriving new media ecosystem of other countries.

Terry Davidson, public information officer of the U.S. Embassy in Baku, answers questions from reporters about the translation of Journalism 2.0.

There certainly is a lot of interest in journalism for a place that has such struggles with it. At the event where the translated version of Journalism 2.0 was introduced, three TV cameras and a handful of newspaper reporters surrounded me and the public information officer for the U.S. Embassy, Terry Davidson, to ask questions. (Can’t say I’ve received that kind of interest from journalists in the U.S.)

A group of journalists-turned-community coordinators that I met with had recently returned from the U.S. They met with journalists in Washington, D.C. and Dallas, where they met with my friend Mike Orren. The founder of Pegasus News, one of the most successful local independent journalism startups, Orren has survived the entrepreneurial roller coaster for more than five years. Meeting with Azeri journalists gave him a new perspective.

“I came away humbled at how much we take our freedoms for granted,” Orren wrote on his blog. “I’ve bitched and moaned over the years about how hard it was/is to do a start-up. But I can’t imagine how different that would be in a world where I had to fear for every word I typed.”

(You should have seen the Azeris’ faces light up when, while demonstrating Twitter, I showed them a DM from Orren about his meeting with them with the conclusion: “Amazing people.”)

Journalists / community coordinators after our training session at the American Center in Baku.

I agree. I was impressed by the fortitude of those blogging and using social media to spread independent ideas and challenge the status quo (even more impressive when so many of their friends and colleagues had been jailed for similar activities.) And I recognized the optimism of the student journos because it looked just like the idealism and intelligence I frequently see on college campuses in the U.S. While the U.S. students think they are facing adversity – and they are – the Azeri students are facing more yet seemed resolute in their commitment to journalism.

When I asked one group why they are interested in journalism, one young man replied with a somewhat sheepish grin: “To be famous.” Indeed, that’s how many journalists in the U.S. got started. Seeing that byline, hearing your voice on the air or seeing yourself on screen can be a powerful motivator. But this reply came from a student who lives in a country where some of the most well-known journalists are famous for being jailed.

That courage, combined with the tools of new media, will hopefully bring about a new era of journalism in this emerging country. If my book helps this process along even just a little, I’ll be proud to consider myself part of the Azeri journalism evolution.