1999 doesn’t seem like so long ago but in Internet time it might as well be the beginning of the last Ice Age. In 1999, J.D. Lasica wrote what might be my favorite article in this story (which is why I saved it for last). He was speaking about citizen journalism from the other side of the last Internet bubble. He wasn’t informed by the rise of online advertising and its fall over the last year, he knew nothing about how deep of a wound sites like Craigslist and Monster would leave in the classified industry, he didn’t know about blogs and vlogs and Twitter.

What he speaks about in this article is citizen journalism in its purist form, the idea that regular people can have a profound effect on how the news is gathered. He speaks about it and points out that the fact the people putting their hats in the ring is a good thing,

Where will online journalism be in five or 10 years? In the hands of more and more regular folks, who may not even think of themselves as journalists.

The Internet has long held out the ideal of Everyman as publisher — ordinary citizens who take back journalism from the professional class. As the Web matures, we’re starting to see a flourishing of community journalism, a phenomenon that has both distant roots and a promising future.

‘The news consumer is turning into a news provider,’ says Walter Bender, associate director of the MIT Media Lab. ‘It’s not that these news consumers will compete with the New York Times, but the consumer becomes part of the process of telling stories in a way that enriches the public discourse.’

He goes on to describe how newspapers can enlist people with shared interests and connect them in meaningful ways to produce content. He describes, from the perspective of someone who see’s the web through the lens of Geocities and Tripod, the power that the rise in Social Networking could have over the collection and dissemination of information.

While he had no idea about the explosion of tools that the next ten years would see, he presents the future of journalism in an optimistic light, showing that the reality of all of this is that people need news, they need to be informed and that we should strive to find ways to inform them in ways to take advantage of all the tools we have at our disposal.

I suggest you read the article and then think about the rest of this story, although the title is “The Death of the American Newspaper,” I think you can see we have really been talking about the rebirth of journalism and how newspapers can respond in ways that improve the lives of the news consumer because, as J.D. puts it at the end of his piece,

This is where we’re heading: news not as a commodity dispensed by a professional class, but as a service in which the consumer is engaged as an active participant. In the future, journalism will become a catalyst for creating communities of interest and for building links and relationships between news providers and consumers. That’s a win for everyone.

I honestly think it is.

The shortage of advertising has left a hole in the newspaper that is allowing some people to see more what they are actually paying for, author Robert Picard is one of those people. As he states in January of this year,

“In reading the paper I realized that about half the stories were from news agencies and services and that I had read many of them day before on Yahoo! News and the New York Times and Washington Post websites. A number of the paper’s local stories were on the Boston.com site or other Boston sites before they appeared in print. I am an avid news consumer and love the paper format, but the paucity of original and novel content left me wonder ‘Why am I still paying for the paper, especially when I have to call at least once a week because of delivery problems.’”

Think about that. Newspapers need to move their content online, no one argues that but the question in the air is what happens to the print edition once that happens? What is so much better about the dead tree format that I would decide to pay for it once all the information is available online.

Some would argue that there is something really special about sitting down with a newspaper and reading it away from a screen, but this is likely more generational gap than act. People who were born into an age where their earliest experiences with the news were television shows and websites don’t feel compelled to sit down with the morning paper, in the same way they don’t feel particularly compelled to hear the town crier telling them about the days events.

This is not to say the death of print is inevitable, newspaper sales are up in many countries, especially Asia and we’ve seen far too many opportunities presented in this story to count newspapers out completely. What it does mean is that if the print edition is going to survive in America, it is going to need to do something entirely different. There needs to be a reason why I want this paper delivered to my house, and a reason why paper is the medium it needs to be delivered in.

If newspapers continue to avoid the real question, “why paper?” they will continue to find themselves on the losing side of the changing landscape.

Over the last several years the Associated Press has sought to move its content online. From the last segment we saw one such effort, with the AP teaming up with Microsoft to provide online video. With member newspapers threatening to leave, and profits failing, one place the AP is looking to improve its bottom line is the licensing deals it has with major Web sites,

“The Associated Press hopes to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals with major Web sites while mining new revenue from advertisers and readers as the 163-year-old news cooperative adapts to Internet-driven changes in the media.”

Over the last year, the AP has reduced its fees for U.S. Newspapers by $30 Million dollars. Over the next year it plans to reduce those fees by another $45 Million. All of this is in an effort to keep member newspapers who can no longer afford to use the AP’s content from leaving altogether. The AP states that they expect revenues to fall this year and next, after seeing them rise by 5% in 2008.

The biggest negotiation for the AP will be on its licensing deal with Google. They want to find a way to improve their terms, which they believe mostly benefit Google, which makes money by putting ads against the content. They are also looking for new ways to put advertising against their own photographs and news stories.

Will this work? I think the AP is asking the same questions the rest of the news industry is asking, what should their place be in the new landscape. Fortunately, the AP has the advantage that they are not directly tied to any platform, they have chosen to take a multi-channel approach which gives them more flexibility than the newspapers have (one example of this flexibility can be found in this segment’s clip). This approach, however, does not hand them a new way to monetize this content once the services that typically paid for it run out of money.

What do you think? Can the AP survive and if so, what should they be doing?

The Associated Press is an American news cooperative, owned by a number of newspapers, radio stations and television networks. These news producer contributed to the AP and use materials from it. As of 2005, the AP’s content could be found in over 1,700 newspapers. Most member newspapers give the AP rights to distribute their local news content to other members.

The Associated Press started as an agreement in 1846 between five New York City newspapers publishers. They agreed to share reports about the Mexican-American War. As the network grew, these newspapers and several others began to share telegraph wire reports as well.

Today, the AP operates bureaus in 120 counties and has a 4,100 employee staff that covers news both foreign and domestic. They have also diversified their offerings to include photojournalism, video and online content. Like many other news organizations they have not been immune to the downturn in the industry, they are facing layoffs and job cuts (up to 10% of their staff could be effected by the end of 2009), and as we will see next segment, they are working hard to restructure deals they have with major online content vendors as member newspapers threaten to leave.

We’ve gone through dozens and dozens of points in our exploration of the news industry. This segment I wanted to help you expand your reading list even further. Philly Future, a Philadelphia based citizen journalism initiative, has compiled a list of articles about newspapers, citizen journalism and the future of the medium.

Take some time to go through them. While you’re doing that, take a look at recent examples of how citizen journalism was used to get news out of Iran, a country that traditional journalists could not get access to during the elections.

With the number of ideas thrown out about the ways that newspapers can be saved, it almost makes you wonder what it would look like if the newspapers put some of their own advice into practice. Seeking Alpha adds another suggestion to the list, newspapers should focus on reinventing themselves through context.

“A really valuable data asset that newspapers retain via editorial systems is… context. One could even extend this value to historical narrative. Unlike social networks where history is a mere 3 years at best, and content portals where history is at most 10 years, newspapers have the potential ability to seamlessly link today’s breaking events to literally millions of local and historical events, opinions, and commentary that are decades deep.”

Newspapers not only provide us with news but they archive it. I took a look inside these archives earlier in this story and what I discovered is that Ron Shuttleworth (who wrote this article), might just be onto something. Newspaper archives can give us a more complete picture of our history than any other medium. They were published every day, from multiple perspectives, all across the nation. If you look at any story within the framework of the news articles published around it, you can get a deep understanding not only of how that story really happened but more importantly how that story might effect similar events in the future.

Ron continues,

Newspapers could be the gateway to context for online users, however they interact with information, or each other. And the technology is there. Nstein has some advanced web content management solutions that can help newspapers create context on the fly. It has the ability to extract and index meaning from any article, advertisement, or caption. The system can then connect the meaning of multiple articles to deliver narrative and insight on-the-fly. This is pretty powerful stuff, and could represent some value-add that only a newspaper editorial system could deliver. Hearst became one of Nstein’s biggest clients last year as it got serious about re-inventing itself.

Newspapers have always been in the volume business, the more they produced, the better off they were. This has left them sitting on masses of rich content that they are looking at only in the most shallow way, as archives. Maybe the future news product isn’t simply a rehashing of what is happening today, maybe it’s an insight tool that will give people context where now they only have datapoints.

Google has been trying to help bring some context by scanning newspapers and making them searchable, listen to Marissa Meyers describe it in the clip.

Talking Points Memo was created by Josh Marshall in 2000 and it’s a liberal-leaning political news blog.

It holds the distinction of being the only blog ever to win a Polk Award for journalism. Since we were talking about the impact citizen journalism last segment, let’s take this interlude to give you an example.

Above is a speech from Josh Marshall on journalism at the Berkman Center in Harvard on the future of journalism.

What is this citizen journalism stuff we keep hearing about? Without abstracting it too much, it’s the idea that people all have cameras and blogs and cell phones with cameras and some heartfelt desire to use these to inform the public. In principle, if you wanted to be a “journalist” you now have the tools to do it and the platform to present your information.

While more than a few people would argue ethics, journalistic credibility and a host of other failings in this model, but it is a reality that many newsrooms are seeking to embrace. While today’s citizen journalists have everything from Twitter to Flip Video cameras in their arsenals, back in 2005 there was still a healthy discussion around how mainstream press can begin to use citizens to improve the overall value of their news product.

Take this article, for example, from Poynter (a school of journalism) that outlines 11 different layers of citizen journalism. This excerpt is from layer two, “The Citizen Add-on Reporter,”

A small step up the ladder is to recruit citizen add-on contributions for stories written by professional journalists. I mean more than just adding a ‘User Comments’ link. I mean that with selected stories, solicit information and experiences from members of the public, and add them to the main story to enhance it.

Here’s an example: A series of car break-ins is occurring at trailhead parking lots in your area. A reporter writes a short article about the problem, identifying some of the locations of the vandalism. As a sidebar to the conventionally written story, trail users are invited to post their experiences of having their cars broken into, including submitting photos.

This approach turns a standard 10-inch minor article into an ongoing story, with victims or witnesses to the crimes contributing information and news over a longer time period. (Until the culprit is caught and the story fades.) The information from the public serves as a warning to other trail users about which parking lots have had break-in problems. The public-submitted information could even be crafted by the news staff into an online map of crime reports, featuring victims’ self-reports and photos.

I would be interested to see how this article would change if it was written today. I think the concepts are still quite valid but the tools and platforms might be very different. That’s the way with technology and more generally with anything based on making predictions, you’re aiming at a moving target and often the best thing you can hope for is that you’re at least pointed in the right direction.

Two perspectives below,

Hindsight is 20/20.

The Boston Globe, like many of the nation’s newspapers, have faced buyouts and layoffs over the last few months. A successful round of such buyouts reduced the number of people who needed to be fired, but the paper – which is owned by the New York Times company – is still suffering, primarily due to falling advertising income and classified profits.

That reminds me of a story.

In 1995, Jeff Taylor sat in front of a group of Boston Globe executives. He had an idea for a website, a job board, that would post help-wanted ads online. It was one of the first of its kind. What he wanted was $1 Million dollars in exchange for controlling interest in this venture.

He was going to call Monster Board.

The Globe’s executives declined. Why shouldn’t they? They were making $100 Million a year on classified revenue. Even though the million that Taylor was asking for it was only a small fraction of what they would make that year, it was still an unnecessary risk for an industry that doesn’t like taking risks.

To make a long story short, Taylor found his money from TMP Worldwide, an advertising firm. With it he created Monster.com, a website that posts help-wanted ads online. A website that in 2000 generated $500 Million dollars, much of this coming from people who might have otherwise put help-wanted ads in newspapers, including the Boston Globe.

Classifieds were big business. At their peak in the 80s and 90s the Globe was selling 100 pages of ads for $40,000 to $50,000 a page – it was staggering, but that kind of income made it hard to accept the fact that it was possible for it to ever go away and that denial was what has left the Globe in its current position, with a forced $20 Million dollar pay and benefit concession requirement from its parent company (which, as of June, is being renegotiated) and pay cuts across the board.

Would Monster have saved the Globe? Maybe not. What this story does give us, however, is another example of why newspapers are in the state they are now in and it should act as a warning for any industry that becomes too deeply mired in complacency.

“The readership decline was first taken seriously in the late 1960s, when new information sources began to compete successfully for the time of the traditional newspaper reader. Competition spawned by technology began long before talk of the electronic information highway. Cheap computer typesetting and offset printing led to the explosive growth of specialized print products that could target desired audiences for advertisers. Low postal rates combined with cheap printing and computerized mailing lists spurred the growth of direct mail advertising. In short, the owners of the traditional toll road have been in trouble for some time now, and they know it.” -American Journalism Review, 1995

Well before the Internet, offset printing changed the way that people worked with printed material. It was a technique developed by Ira Rubel in 1903, it involves taking an inked image and transferring it from a plate to a rubber blanket. That blanket is then transferred onto a printed surface.

Offset printing has a number of advantages over traditional letter presses, it allows for higher image quality, longer equipment life, easy plate production and most importantly lower costs. By reducing the cost of printing extremely large volumes of printed materials, offset printing made it economically feasible for companies to produce more and more specialized print products.

Anytime you give people easier access to the means of production, you increase competition and this is exactly what offset printing did, it allowed more content to be created and more choices to become available to advertisers.