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.

LostRemote pointed me to Diane Mermigas’ excellent Pragmatic Media Predictions for 2009. It’s a sobering depressing forecast for the year ahead, with dire predictions like ”TV and newspaper properties will collapse under the weight of an advertising recession and legacy costs” and “a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.” Yikes.

But I’m a “glass-is-half-full” kind of guy, so I found something to be excited about. 

Local is the new social

Some local TV broadcasters and newspapers will begin to monetize enough to stay in business. Some Internet players will begin to dabble more in this huge void. Relevant local information, social sharing, retail coupons, school and community data, sports scores, car pools, etc. remain a big missed opportunity. It will be delivered to Internet-connected mobile devices, including smartphones. A new player will emerge and do for local content and services online what Craigslist did for regionalized classified advertising.

As I’ve said before, the Internet is a connection platform, not a publishing platform (as most news publishers have used it for). Local media can still win the local ad revenue game if they execute on the opportunity to create value through collaboration and connection and leverage their brand value before it’s too late. 

Who is going to be the “new player” that Mermigas envisions? I see it as a new role that individual news companies and hyperlocal news blogs will fill, with help from technology from companies like Second Street, Publish2, Pluck and Serra Media, the company I co-founded to attack this opportunity. When an audience connects to a brand they can trust for news, information and community and is encouraged to collaborate with the brand, that audience will happily welcome relevant commercial messages like local coupons and special offers. Then you have effective ROI to sell to local advertisers and you’re back in the game.

Connect and collaborate. Inform and empower. That’s the recipe for true transformation of the local news business.

Previously I wondered where did that $2 billion go? Given the state of the overall economy it’s a lock that we will be asking that question following each of the next 2-4 quarters, too. And the $2 billion figure (that newspapers lost last quarter) will probably grow larger.

Some cry out for new business models for news, but many that have been suggested aren’t new. And besides, if newspapers can’t get beyond selling banners to traditional print advertisers without looking scared, an entirely new business model is far too ambitious.

Those missing dollars are largely tied to advertising and, while some of it has disappeared because of the economic downturn, one has to assume that a good chunk went away because advertisers stopped seeing a return on their investment.

Now they are looking for something new. Local publishers: there’s still opportunity here. If advertising works, people pay, no matter what the economy is doing. It drives their business, after all.

One trend that shows no sign of slowing - even in a slow economy - are ad dollars are going to mobile. For local news organizations, what about mobile coupons? And geotargeted advertising has always made sense since ValPak set up shop and started stealing newspaper advertisers.

Innovation from the newsroom won’t make much difference if advertisers can’t effectively reach a target audience.

In a gathering called The Pitch last night in Seattle, 30 new media types kicked around the following question:

Can an established newspaper provide better hyperlocal coverage than a well-managed neighborhood blog?

The collective answer at the end of the night was, yes, it’s possible for an established newspaper to provide better hyperlocal coverage than a neighborhood blog. It’s just not happening right now in very many places (if any).

Here are some reasons why, in my view:

1. Coverage focus: Layoffs and buyouts mean less “feet on the street” for most newspapers. Most reporters are assigned topics instead of geography, anyway, making a push into neghborhood-level news today even more of a stretch than it was 10 years ago.
2. Business priorities: Advertising departments at daily newspapers are not structured for hyperlocal business. Sales reps are expensive so it’s alwasy made sene to focus on large clients who can sign lucrative annual contracts. Few have anything to offer a small business that wants to spend $100 a month. Long Tail economics have yet to arrive.
3. Audience participation: Online audiences are more likely to participate on a hyperlocal blog than an established, especially corporate-run, newspaper. This is largely the fault of newspapers who spent years building walls around their content. (We publish, you read.) Most are now trying to reverse the one-way communication chain, but they don’t get the immediate benefit of audience collaboration that powers any good hyperlocal news blog.

Each of the above weaknesses is an opportunity for established newspapers, from metro dailies to family-run weeklies. But, as many participants noted last night, it will take a radical shift in culture that is not well-suited to change.

1. Coverage focus: Many newspapers have publicly expressed a commitment to local coverage in the past few years. But few have dramatically changed the way the newsrooms cover local communities. Take a page from the playbook of the hyperlocal bloggers: In order to cover a community, you must first connect with it.
2. Business priorities: I remember having lunch in a taco shop with the director of a metro daily newspaper web site a few months ago who complained that the taco shop had no way to advertise on their site at an affordable rate. Daily newspapers need a new business model that connects local businesses to local audiences (since classified, real estate and auto dollars are gone). Family-run weeklies have always done this and many are still doing OK financially.
3. Audience participation: Dedicate real staff resources to mining, weaving and embracing contributions from readers. This goes beyond story comments. It’s about building community. And it’s not about technology. I can point you to 10 successful hyperlocal blogs that are all using a different platform. It’s about the people who are committed to connection.

For other views, check out the Twitterstream from the gathering.

Is it over? Is it too late for local news organizations to change strategy and find new business models online?

Despite billions of dollars spent in attempts to bury local news organizations and yellow pages publishers, the puzzle is still in pieces. “It is still not clear that we have cracked the code,” Mark Canon said, estimating that more than $3 billion (and possibly as much at $15 billion) had been invested.

As Seth Godin recently riffed, there is still ample opportunity to use digital technologies to connect, then profit. He observes that while newspapers are “tanking,” news is on the rise. Connect readers to one another with hyperlocal news and you’ll have no problem finding sponsors and advertisers, as long you “actually and truly reach everyone.”

That’s why Gannett has invested in Cozi and Ripple6. Cozi is an online family planning tool which makes it an odd choice for a news organization. Or, if you’re focusing on connecting with an audience, an obvious one.

Local newspapers can stop kicking themselves for not creating their own Craigslist, eBay, local Wikipedia (it won’t help matters). But what about Yelp? Paying one (or a handful) of restaurant critics is no match for a community of informed and passionate users who are connected to one another on a site like Yelp, which of course, is growing like crazy.

Look at Citysearch’s new plan. This company launched in the early days (full disclosure: my wife worked at Citysearch in the late 1990s) and reinvented itself several times. But it’s still around and it’s new model is has as much to do with connection as content.

And, it appears, at least a few investors think users will pay to be connected to information on local services. Angie’s List recently announced a new round of investment and says it has 750,000 members in 124 markets. Members pay a monthly fee to access the reviews. The company has raised $66 million to date.

The bottom line is this: Focus on the opportunity to create value through collaboration and connection. Build or leverage the brand value to create momentum. Pick a market for its potential, not its past performance.

As Godin said: “The best time to do any of these projects was five years ago, so that today you’d be earning thousands of dollars a week. Too late. The second best time to start: now.”

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.

Recently I was part of a strategic content planning session for a traditional newsroom. Given that the newspaper had recently been through a couple rounds of buyouts and layoffs, like most newspapers, I figured there would be some serious reinvention occurring in this brainstorming meeting.

Boy, was I wrong.

The editors, reporters and visual journalists went about outlining the priorities of their current product. Then they discussed which could be grouped together and which were more important. But there was no new thinking.

I suggested that one of the priorities should be content that is “marketable.” This caused some confusion. Since news is an advertising-supported operation (both in print and online) I didn’t think this would be such a foreign concept. Several times I was asked to clarify. Since I don’t think I made my point clear enough, I’m going to take another stab:

Content that is marketable means that the target audience is desirable to advertisers, either because of its size or quality (or, in the case of a site like Techcrunch, both). Local news operations are struggling to find the right balance between quality and quantity.

According to this N.Y. Times piece, and based on anecdotal feedback I’ve heard from site directors, scores of page views across a local news web site aren’t necessarily a good thing. Local news sites are organized based on the print sectioning that was invented because of press configurations (local, sports, business, lifestyle) and has been around for decades. Advertisers can’t put their finger on the demographic they might reach with this format. It’s not nearly targeted enough in today’s digital world.

So smart news operations have launched niche sites for moms, dads, pets, shopping, home and garden and, more traditionally, arts and entertainment. And if not topical, then hyperlocal. These are markets. You can picture an ad rep explaining to a prospective advertiser who they will reach when placing an ad in one of those sections.

Meanwhile, in this strategic planning session, the priorities discussed included “people stories,” “sense of place,” “talker of the day,” and “authority/personality.” Those are fine attributes of great newspaper journalism. But the sad reality is that great journalism is not the same thing as great journalism business.

Also discussed were the cornerstones of breaking news and accountability. These are a news operation’s loss leaders; they don’t form a specific market either. But they can draw a transient audience with their “click candy” characteristics and bring in new visitors who are then introduced to the rest of the content lineup that hopefully attracts a more loyal following.

A newspaper doing what it’s always done, but better, is not a recipe for reinvention. Nor is it a healthy business model. Just look at the newspaper readership data since 1970. It’s time to get away from the mass, generalized, one-size-fits-all approach that made sense in the era of limited publishing capabilities (see Vin Crosbie’s excellent essays for more).

News operations need markets, their own markets, to monetize and fund the future. Most have the tools at their disposal. It’s simply a matter of strategic planning.

Local newspaper web sites have made a lot of progress during the past 10-plus years since they were first launched. Video, blogs, comments, constant updates - the list is long.

But one area that hasn’t evolved much at all on local news web sites is … strangely … the local news section.

If you click on the “Local News” tab on most local news sites, you see the same thing you probably saw in 1998: A list of headlines, in reverse chronological order, that link to stories published in the print newspaper. (I don’t pretend to have done this on every site, only a few dozen.)

At the same time, editors and publishers emphasize their “local news franchise” as the cornerstone of their operation. So why the disconnect from mission to execution?

When it comes to local coverage, readers care about their local, not someone else’s local. A newspaper defines “local” by how large an area it can deliver newspapers and sell advertising in the most cost-effective way. Then editors publish news that is as generally appealing to that audience possible. And that’s the problem: It’s too general.

Most newspapers over 20,000 circulation cover an array of communities that are geographically disparate enough that few, if any, readers actually visit or care about the communities they do not live in. That leaves them waiting for the news organization to write a story about their community while ignoring all the other “local” stories.

Is it any wonder local news sites have such lousy user loyalty metrics?

Crime and sports do well on local new sites because they are generally interesting to a local audience. But actual local news - new businesses opening, road repairs, school achievements - is only interesting to a subset of the local community that lives nearby.

And while newspaper operations have evolved during the Internet age, the fundamental structure of covering local news is still driven by filling pages for the general interest print publication. Meanwhile, the greatest tool for truly covering a series of communities sits under utilized in plain sight.

The web and mobile publishing are perfect platforms for covering local communities because they natively offer four characteristics that should be strengths instead of weaknesses:

Cut: Content can easily be cut — or segmented — to a specific hyperlocal area. Many news organizations do this to a city or town level, but it should be segmented on a neighborhood level so a visitor can quickly drill down to the area of greatest interest to them.

Capitalize: The bar needs to be lowered on what is “news” based on what is interesting to a hyperlocal audience. News organizations have successfully made this transition on topical blogs, but few have made progress on local news content which needs to be published a lot more frequently. Three stories a week from the city council meeting agenda don’t cut it.

Collaborate: Need help getting prolific? Tap the power of the crowd. But don’t ghettoize the content in some other section of the web site that no one will ever find. Fold it into the appropriate hyperlocal section.

Collect: Feeds from other sections of a local news operations like business, features and sports - plus outside blogs and “competing” web sites - should bring links to content that is specific to a hyperlocal area. This is a form of link journalism, but many of the links are already on the news site.

The ingredients are there. (Think of the success many sites are having with niche sites for moms or pets.) Apply the right recipe and a local news organization can live up to its promise of doing local news better than anyone else.

At the same time, it can create new hyperlocal markets that don’t currently exist on its site.

And isn’t creating new markets what it’s all about today?

If you read media blogs with any frequency, you’re familiar with the common perception that we have all the information we already need online. We just need better ways to aggregate and organize it.

I disagree.

People can’t find the breadth or the depth of local information that they seek. It’s not fully baked news stories that are necessarily missing either. It’s shorter takes on a wide range of topics that you wouldn’t normally find in a local newspaper. It’s something I’m calling “blurb journalism” in my mind as I continue to noodle on the concept.

The weekly column on “The Medium” in the Sunday New York Times addresses this opportunity today. Virigina Heffernan, who does a nice job analyzing new online trends, digs into the case of s suicide in her Brooklyn neighborhood and is frustrated at the lack of news coverage - or locally generated citizen reporting - she finds online. (See Narrowcast News.)

This is one example of information that people want, but can’t find. Recently, I had a similar situation:

A father whose children go to grade school with my kids paid the price for standing up for our neighborhood. He was out walking the dog after dark and took exception to some youngsters revving their engines and peeling out in a gravel parking lot at the neighborhood park. They struck back, beating him up and sending him to the hospital for several days with a broken jaw. This wouldn’t have run as a traditional news story in a newspaper or on a local TV news broadcast. But it was hugely important to people in that neighborhood.

The web is the perfect place for this type of information to be created and shared. To date, blogs are the platform of choice, but we need a more generalized framework that will allow citizens who aren’t dedicated enough to power a local blog 24/7 to share with one another news, tidbits, tips and even gossip.

Blurbs. Short, frequent information updates on a specific geographic area. This is the need we are aiming to fill at Serra Media with Newsgarden. The latest version is now live in Gig Harbor. Check it out, and let me know what you think.