Journalists, such as those in the RevenueTwoPointZero conference, cling to news as it’s been done. Their entire premise is about preserving what has already fallen. Journalism’s fight can be likened to Terri Schiavo’s case.

The questions we ask:

• How do we save newspapers?
• How do we pay for newspapers?
• Why don’t people read newspapers anymore?
• Why aren’t people engaged with the news?
• How do we mae people read newspapers?
• How do we make people become engaged?

These questions are relevant but I think we need to back up before we try to answer them.

Our problem comes from the fact that we are trying to solve journalism’s problem for journalists. The above questions are really the following questions in disguise:

• How will I stay employed?
• How will my media company make money
• How will what I do remain recognizable through this change?
• How can I do the least amount of change while doing the same thing I’ve always done?
• How do I measure successful journalism in this new world?

Shirky makes it clear that we should be asking different questions. We are the revolutionaries. I posit we should be asking these questions:

• What is journalism in 2009 and beyond?
• What is journalism for?
• How do people’s lives intersect journalism?
• How do we build a journalism that intersects peoples lives the way people want it to?
• How does journalism restart; what does it look like, what does it sound like, how does it act, how should it work?

[...]

CRITIQUE & LAUNCHING POINT

Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content.

Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about what happens next.

Observations

It was very difficult for us all to break out of our comfort zones. I likened our first day to us playing Pong, tossing the same ideas back ‘n’ forth inside of a box. Many of us came prepared to talk about our areas of interest or our own ideas but IDEO does not work on a predestined premise. Their approach is meant to create ideas from scratch based on everyone’s knowledge.
[...]

GROUP 3 PROTOTYPE

The concept

Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”

This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
[...]

GROUP 1 PROTOTYPES

The concept

They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin’s day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities.

In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise.

As a business model, you’re giving incentive to companies to participate and encourage participation with the news and other media companies. This allows journalists to go where the people go instead of forcing them to come to the news, enforcing a beat system and community-driven content.

[...]

Readers of The Nevada Sagebrush seem to break the general trend recognized by other student publications. Many of them said their readers are apathetic and comment rarely and many times when they do, conversations degrade into racist remarks, troll battles and other things often experienced by professional papers.