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.

He’s probably right. But such a move would seriously damage the journalism education at the school. 

PR and journalism education need more integration, not separation. Both must now incorporate social media practices and new technology adoption. And both would be well-served by partnerships with business schools, since a journalism needs more entrepreneurs and PR “is inherently a business function in most organizations,” as Conrad writes.

To me, Conrad’s problems with journalism education represent a list of things to fix, not escape from. 

1. Write a good book. CQ Press is kind enough to support the author in me for another version of Journalism 2.0, this time for the college textbook market. The trick, of course, is writing a practical manual that will help aspiring journalists while the industry and practice continues its radical evolution at a dizzying pace.

2. Grow Serra Media. We will be announcing several exciting partnerships in January for our first product, Newsgarden. The challenge will be to keep the momentum going in this economic climate. We have a couple of new concepts to turn into products and remain optimistic that we can solve at least a piece of the puzzle for local publishers.

3. Think big and give back. I’m looking for ways to continue my thought leadership on the marketability of journalism, since I believe it’s directly connected to the sustainability of journalism. At the same time, I’m looking forward to picking up where 2008 left off, working with journalists around the globe on the skills and concepts that are critical to the transformation of our storied craft.

In a nutshell, I’m hoping to practice what I preach: Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. The future is now.

Happy New Year.

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.

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.

Still, the findings of a recent Bivings Group report analyzing the web sites from the top 100 U.S. newspapers (by ABC ranking) are encouraging. Among the highlights:

• 58% of newspaper sites now accept some form of user generated content, although it’s mostly just photos. Only 15 percent accept text, showing that the distrust of the audience by mainstream newspapers continues.

• 76% of newspaper sites display “most popular” lists of content, including most visited and most emailed stories, compared to 51% in 2007 and 33% in 2006.

• 75% now allow comments on articles, compared to 33% in 2007. That’s a significant jump, but is about four years late.

• Just 11% of newspapers now require registration to view content, compared to 29% in 2007. This is definitely heading in the right direction.

• All newspapers feature some form of contextual advertising and 43% accept interstitial ads. I’m skeptical that interstitials are a long-term, scalable solution, but it shows willingness to experiment.

Despite the positive figures, the report’s summary delivers a sobering analysis:

Speaking generally, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and aggressively experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.

Can you say “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?” That’s what this feels like despite the fact that the iceberg is in sight.

But wait, there’s more. I also gave my son and daughter domain names so they can have cool email addresses. And I installed Drupal on their domains so they can begin publishing online with their new OLPC.

They may never use them, and that’s OK. It’s opening the door that’s important.

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.

• 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.

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.