Today the Newseum , Washington's museum about the news, is officially opening to the public. 

I was able to visit the museum a few weeks ago since a friend of mine is a volunteer there, and many things interested me about it.  One of the most prominent thoughts that I walked away with was although the museum mainly focuses on newspapers and TV news, it devoted what I consider a surprising amount of attention to new media. 

There are exhibits that explored the heated debate about whether how blogging can fit into journalism and vice versa.  In fact, I walked out with the impression that — at least in the eyes of the Newseum — some blogging is solid journalism. 

Of course, personalities like the original Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox herself, and Matt Drudge were featured.  Further a major focus of the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery is how the Internet has affected journalism.

Unsurprisingly, many major news organizations are ogling over a museum devoted to glorify their business, and hopefully, its emphasis on new media will help alleviate some of the resistance of some journalists and organizations to the burgeoning importance of new media — from blogging to podcasts to flash presentations.

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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In the past we have praised those like Adrian Holovaty who use databases for news reporting.  Holovaty left his job at The Washington Post several months ago to work on a hyperlocal site called EveryBlock. 

It launched several days ago with database driven hyperlocal news and information reporting for Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco.  To report information about specific neighborhoods it culls data from other sources and presents it in a logical manner. 

For instance, it pulls pictures from flickr with geographical tagging and groups them by neighborhood.  Check out photos from Tribeca in New York.  In addition to photos it pulls data from sites like Yelp for restaurant reviews and local government sites for restaurant violation information.  Other information includes: crime reports, graffiti, lost and found listings, and news articles. 

You can see a screen shot below of a business review from Yelp on a map in New York.

Also, for those who use craigslist to find those missed connections (someone whom you saw on the train and are attracted to but didn't have a chance to even talk to), EveryBlock even collects this data and presents it in list or map form. 

The genius of the site is not that it collects this data, but it organizes it in a way that people should find useful.  People can search for multiple items by neighborhood for all this information in one place instead of having to visit multiple sites.  This is much more exciting and user friendly than your typical database.

I learned about an interesting social network the other day that will interest Bivings Report readers who follow how news is reported on the Internet; it is for tech savvy journalists who want to improve their general reporting skills and better contribute to the field — even if they have few resources.

The network is called Wired Journalists.  Check it out.

The desire to cover local communities is nothing new to newspapers.  However, it is hard for a paper that covers a large area to focus on events that are happening in all neighborhoods in the circulation area.  Time, page space, and budgets all constrain such coverage, but some papers are finding ways to cover hyperlocal news.

In the cover story of the Newspaper Association of America's January 8 issue of Presstime, "Cover Story: 8 Trends to Track in ’08," we can learn about newspapers that are succeeding in covering communities.  See the eighth trend.

The article spotlights how The Dallas Morning News works with community members to publish information on its neighborsgo sites.  People submit content through this site, and some of it makes into print and on the newspaper's homepage. 

Oscar Martinez, managing editor of neighborsgo, told Presstime that these hyperlocal sections act as "17 small-town papers."  Further, when mentioning the role of the public, he also said, "We're saying, 'This is your turn to speak up first, and we'll take it from there…' We're not creating a need to share information. We're providing tools to be able to do so."

That's the great thing about the Internet. It facilitates connections between people and those with their sources of news.  That's one of many ways that the Internet can help newspapers. 

My friend Kevin Anderson, an online journalist, wrote an interesting post titled "What is an online journalist?" yesterday on his blog Strange Attractor.

The gist of the post focuses on how it is still common in contemporary journalistic culture to feel that the Internet is not a medium suited for unique quality news reporting and analysis.  Of course, it is a great place to repurpose, publish, or post reporting from other media, but true journalism supposedly cannot originate in the digital realm.

With newspaper ad revenue and dropping, radio and television audiences declining in both quantity and attention paid to specific sources, and a burgeoning amount of sources providing news, news companies and journalists cannot afford to ignore the value of online journalism.  Beyond the fact that the medium lends its well to more up to date and in depth reporting in ways that print and broadcast outlets can't match, more and more people are turning to the Internet as a primary news source.

Hopefully, in 2008, more journalists will realize this and value the online medium by viewing it as a complement to their work and not a threat.

Last week The New York Time purchased [clarification: the paper is, as Jeff Jarvis notes, "hosting it, selling ads on it, promoting it, but not buying it or hiring its creators"] the sometimes irreverent Freakonomics blog run by University of Chicago economist Dr. Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner. Clearly the newspaper saw that this informative blog had a community worth transplanting to its web site.

Was it a brave move to purchase a blog that isn't control by NYT staffers? Yes, especially since Leavitt pondered about how to maximize a terrorist attack — commenters went wild –shortly after his blog switched over to nytimes.com.

However, buying a blog is another example of how old media organizations are missing the point. Old media companies should focus on fostering innovative new media properties themselves and not simply purchasing them when it makes sense cents. [Update: While partnering with a blog like Freakonomics is definitely a wise move, it doesn't take place of the need for in-house innovation.]

As we've observed here at The Bivings Group, newspapers and their traditional media counterparts seem schizophrenic when it comes to new media. They want to succeed but are unwilling to allow their employees to do what it takes.

In fact, sometimes their current employees won't cut it as The Economist's Project Red Stripe proves. In this case, employees were given time, resources, and freedom to create something new and extraordinary but, as Jeff Jarvis explains, failed to capture the new media or web 2.0 vision perhaps since they came from a traditional background.

BBC News, in contrast, hired Ben Hammersley — who has a new media background and is young enough that he isn't bogged down by the old media model — to launch its multi platform social media reporting on non-BBC sites. Will this idea succeed? I don't know, but in this case the organization is trying and testing to develop its own new media project instead of buying one. Hopefully, the Beeb will continue to allow social media savvy folk like Hammersley and its Director of Global News Richard Sambrook to experiment.

If old media companies want to truly tap into and succeed in the new media world, they need to rethink their strategy. Instead of buying successful blogs, podcasts, or social networks, perhaps they should either hire or reassign people who are new media innovators and give them freedom to develop a successful product.

Further, it is likely cheaper to hire people than acquire established products and brands. [Update: Perhaps a partnership, as in the case with the Freakonomics blog, is cheaper, but this can come at an expense when the deal ends if The New York Times hasn't found a way to build new features and communities around Leavitt and Dubner's genius.] 

Like Erin, I enjoyed attending the Journalism That Matters conference this week.  Although a panel discussion that concluded with a bleak prognosis for the current mainstream news media business model kicked off the event, the dreariness only surrounded the business model, not the craft of journalism.

However, many veteran journalists felt threatened by the conference's tone towards traditional journalism as it focused on "citizen journalism's" rise, but I hope that they felt much more upbeat towards the end.  In my view the craft is doing well, and the Internet is, as one veteran journo put it at the concluding session, helping fuel what he sees as a renaissance.

As Erin mentioned there were many people who have started hyperlocal and other niche sites, and they're having varied levels of success or failure.  There was a lot of discussion of an Internet based business model for news, and people seemed to like the fact that there were many potential models discussed at the conference.  They seem excited to see what ideas not only survive but thrive along with those that fail. 

The Internet has lowered the barrier of collecting and disseminating information, and I'm thrilled that so many people are brave enough to go out on a limb and try to make their ideas work.  In fact, people who lack journalistic credentials and training — the "citizen" journalists – are also entering the fray to cover topics that they're passionate about.  Thus, more ideas for business models.  

On another note, I can see why many people can see a high failure rate of on-line news ventures as threatening to the craft, but there is a silver lining.  The business model of news is changing, and that makes it even more important to find a new set of viable models.  The Internet provides a forum to shift through the plethora of ideas out there to see which ones are viable.  That's good for journalism.

Keep an eye on Journalism That Matters, its conferences are likely hosting the people who will develop the next viable business models for journalism.

Steve Petersen and I just spent the last two days at a conference here in DC called Journalism that Matters.  I went with the intention of figuring out what the business plan will be for newspapers as we move deeper into the digital era.  I didn't quite figure this out, but I did get to talk with a lot of interesting people about their views, opinions, and predictions for online media.

A lot was said at the conference, but I will try to sum up a few points here.

• Hyperlocal isn't as easy as it sounds. There were several people at this conference trying to get hyperlocal news sites started.  Some seemed to be successful, and others less so (both in traffic and profit).  The founder of McKinneynews.net told me that even though there are no other sources for local news in her town, she can't seem to get people to participate through interactive channels (comments, blogs, etc) on her site.  In this particular case, she thinks that the town is so small that people fear what their neighbors will think of their comments on certain issues.  Advertising is also a problem for her as "local advertisers just don't 'get it' yet."  Even though it may seem like there is a huge opening for sites focusing for local news, this niche is proving difficult for people to succeed in.  Other sites, including MyMissourian.com and Paulding.com , seem to be hugely successful, focusing their efforts on citizen media and discussions within communities.  What makes one site work as opposed to any other?  Is it the demographics of these disparate communities?  Or is it something else?

• Open format conferences have both good and bad points.  JTM was an open format conference, with the agenda largely determined on the fly by participants.  This was great for getting to meet lots of people and for having the opportunity to talk about a wide variety of issues. On the other hand, discussions tended to be unstructured, a little bit chaotic, and even argumentative at times.  I got a little frustrated on the second day of the conference, and at times felt like I wasn't really getting anywhere.
  
  
• The future business model for newspapers is still up in the air.  Even after 2 days with 160 experts trapped together in a conference area, no clear was reached about how newspapers will succeed in the future.  Some see the future in citizen-centered media, others predict print will totally fall by the wayside, and still others think that the future newspaper will be a combination of print, "professional", and "amateur" journalists.  I think the model is still unproven, and a conclusion will only be reached after more experimentation.
• Journalists are passionate about their trade.  If nothing else, I learned in the past 2 days that journalists are truly passionate about what they do. For them, sharing news isn't about a business model, or getting enough ads. Rather, it's about getting an interesting and accurate story full of important information to their audience.  While news reported by citizen journalists certainly has value, society would be losing something if "professional" journalism went by the wayside.  At the same time, some journalists at the conference seemed very set in their ways and hesitant to accept new models of doing things, a common trend in the newspaper industry.

Other interesting topics of discussion included the debate over skillsets:  what should journalism students today be learning? I think that they should be taught much more than reporting and writing.  Communication with citizens is becoming more and more important, as are online and computer skills. 

Another tidbit I found interesting is that some news outlets are starting to give citizen journalists some training.  One TV station, for example, provides classes once a week for citizens interested in doing some reporting. There they learn the basics of reporting and have their writing and speaking critiqued.  Graduates of this class can then provide the TV station and its sister newspaper with content on issues that the outlet may not otherwise have time to cover.  Citizens benefit because they get to write and read about what they love, while the media outlet benefits from having inexpensive and quality content produced for them.

All in all, I am happy that I attended the conference and definitely think that it was a worthwhile event.  I will be interested to see how some of the entrepreneurs there fare with their websites after all that they learned over the past two days.