No? Last one wasn’t on your syllabus? For 44 student fellows in a journalism education project called News 21, it’s exactly the type of investigative journalism they’re working on this summer.

News 21 — short for News for the 21st Century — is a partnership among five universities (Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California [publisher of OJR]) that’s sending its fellows across the country and the world to do investigate reporting on a series of complicated topics and long-term issues.

Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the three-year project began this spring and recently sent fellows to Korea to report on the U.S. military, to Mexico and Arizona to report on immigration concerns, and to the offices and anterooms of Washington D.C. to investigate the Department of Homeland Security’s finances.

While the project’s short term goal is to publish fellows’ work in mainstream news outlets, News 21′s organizers hope that, long term, the project will do nothing less than revitalize the nation’s top journalism schools.

“In a world where large news organizations are shrinking and are certain to shrink further, in-depth stories like what we’re doing aren’t being done,” said Merrill Brown, former editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com and the project’s editorial director. “And they won’t get done in our view without new institutions jumping in and figuring out how to do them. That’s where News 21 comes in.”

Taking over where newsrooms leave off?

The project has four newsrooms on four campuses. (Harvard, which doesn’t have a graduate journalism program, does not have a newsroom, but contributes fellows to each of the campuses.) Each newsroom is led by a coordinator who has several years of reporting experience.

Students apply to News 21 during the school year, and chosen fellows attend a semester-long seminar on the topic they will be covering during the ensuing ten-week summer program. Each university focuses on a different topic: Columbia fellows cover the Department of Homeland Security; USC fellows cover the immigration debate; Berkeley students cover the U.S. military abroad; and Northwestern students cover privacy and national security.

“They’re not just diving into these things cold, they’re actually experts,” said Brown, referring to the seminar. “The point of that is to try and encourage universities to make the link between topics and coverage so that journalism school isn’t simply about the craft but about preparing people to do great reporting about complicated subjects.”

Those complicated subjects are exactly the ones getting passed over in newsrooms today, according to Brant Houston, director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. Houston said that every year, investigative reporting continues a downturn in prominence.

“Investigative reporting relies almost exclusively on the individuals putting in lots and lots of time and effort for which they’re usually not compensated, except to have the story done,” he said. “Any program that that promotes investigative reporting especially during this time of increased government secrecy is a good thing.”

Some of the fellows are determined to uncover those secrets.

Jeff Delviscio, who graduated from Columbia’s graduate journalism school in May, said that, in his experience, employers are looking for specialists. News 21 helps him to develop contacts in his topic area — how the Department of Homeland Security protects chemicals from tampering — and the time to do good work.

Vanessa Gregory, currently in South Korea investigating U.S. military conduct, said she joined News 21 because it gives her more experience with a subject on which she’s wanted to report for a while, and which she wouldn’t have been able to report otherwise.

Some fellows are already publishing their work in mainstream outlets. Fellows at USC recently completed a television package about how two cities are dealing with immigration issues. That package, called “A Tale of Two Cities: San Bernadino and Maywood” will be the first News 21 piece to publish, and will appear on July 21st on Los Angeles public television station KCET.

“Our charge at USC was to serve local TV mainly,” said Judy Muller, USC’s coordinator for the project. “And we consider KCET to be local television, even though it will be seen all over the state. We’re also working on getting some stories on ABC. We’ve got a cover story for LA Weekly coming up.”

Coordinators said that the initial focus was for each campus to publish to a specific medium. However, the unpredictable nature of working with the press has caused the coordinators to concentrate on online publishing as well.

“Everybody kind of realized that the partners who may match up with the schools, that’s a real variable,” said Adam Glenn, multimedia coordinator for the Columbia campus. “But the one thing we do own is the Web. Our website is something that all the projects can control. There’s been an evolving focus on how we can deliver this to our website.”

News 21 fellows have already taken their first steps online. A few of the fellows entered the project with experience reporting or working online, and each reporting team posts to a blog.

In May the students and coordinators gathered at Berkeley, where Berkeley multimedia coordinator Jane Ellen Stevens demonstrated several ways to produce reporting for an online audience. Stevens explained how they can combine still images, video, and non-linear storytelling methods to produce stories that are “contextually rich.”

Some fellows are learning how to use their video camera as a reporter’s notebook, Stevens said. Eventually, they may be able to use parts of that video for a podcast, or spin off copy for a print project.

Fellows are using other non-traditional reporting tools as well. Columbia fellow Kody Akhavi, who had some experience with Flash before the project, is studying how to use Flash’s scripting abilities to publish maps and timelines to complement online stories.

“Flash is just a vehicle for me to tell stories,” said Kody, who started experimenting with the animation tool to create a website for his former band. “There’s still a question whether investigative journalism is best expressed in new media. You can’t do it with everything, but the opportunity is there.”

Of course, a large project such as News 21 is bound to face some obstacles.

“I think the fellows get it,” Stevens said, when asked whether the educators were enthusiastic about the online media component.

But some coordinators, while enthusiastic about the project as a whole, expressed frustration with project’s online plans. And a few fellows are hesitant to fully endorse how the universities approach online media.

Rich Gordon, multimedia coordinator at the Medill School at Northwestern, said the universities were late to address the online component of the project.

“Carnegie has two goals for the program, though I’m not sure they’re equal,” he said. “One is to get stories delivered through traditional media. Two is experiment with innovative ways to do these stories. Each school is focusing first on the story problem. Only with the second it’s been like, uh-oh, we better figure out how to deliver this online.”

Hiring the multimedia coordinators and other support staff was one solution to that problem, Gordon said. All four of the multimedia coordinators have significant experience with producing work for the Web, or with converting non-Web pieces to work online.

The coordinators have to be mindful of what the students want to concentrate on as well. The fellows are enthusiastic about the possibilities of online journalism, though many say they’re mostly interested in reporting regardless of medium.

The program hopes to announce this month several partners in the press who will be publishing the fellows’ work.

“We want to demonstrate that a brand new institution with some resources can create something with meaning without necessarily having to have distribution capability of the New York Times or CBS news,” said Brown.

“I think it’s an exciting opportunity for the students and the faculty. It’s a process of all of us learning and teaching one another.”

[This version was corrected from the original to distinguish between coordinators and multimedia coordinators for each of the participating schools.]

You can learn a lot from watching others.

Business journalist Om Malik had the good fortune to watch others in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom and bust. He helped found and edit Forbes.com, served as an editor at Red Herring, and wrote a book, Broadbandits, about telecom industry malfeasance. At one point, he even worked for a venture capital firm. Along the way, Om starting writing a blog (monthly traffic: about 500,000 unique visitors) and developed a reputation as a thoughtful and insightful reporter who could easily navigate the techie warrens of Silicon Valley.

And then, during one soul-searching month this spring, the writer who writes about start-ups decided to stake his reputation and his income on starting one himself.

Or to put it another way: Open mouth, insert money.

The money in this case was a little less than $1 million from True Venture Partners. They’re betting that Malik can take his significant connections and experience and roll it into a profitable micropublishing venture based at gigaom.com. Malik’s new business will be called GigaOmniMedia Inc.

Malik is the latest in a string of bloggers who are finding financial backing for their news-oriented sites. Another daily news blog, Paidcontent.org, recently received modest funding, as did Christoper Carey of Sharesleuth.com.

The blog has been a tool of savvy journalists for years now. But these investments represent a vote of confidence in the technology community — which has long presaged the end of traditional journalism — that blogs can be used to support standalone journalism businesses.

Malik’s new blog-based business will begin July 1, one day after his job as senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine ends (he’ll stay on as a contributing editor).

He’s already received his first dose of competitive pressure. The announcement about his new business, which he planned to announce in private to friends and family first, was scooped by — wait for it — another blog.

We caught up with Malik to talk about blogs, business and the state of journalism.

OJR: Your blog is one of the more widely read in Silicon Valley, if not on the entire Web. What’s going to change on gigaom.com?

Malik: Well, there will be more features coming over the next 6-8 weeks. Some will be by contributors. The best thing about any of these niche sites like mine is that they’re so closely tied to what I wrote and what I say, so I have to balance out what others contribute. There will be one reporter joining me full time. There will be more details in July.

OJR: You’ll also be deploying certain “web services” to help your readers use the site, is that right?

Malik: Yes, a bunch of widgets to go with the way the site works. I don’t want to tip my hand too soon, but they will be enhancements to the site mainly.

OJR: But you’ll be writing about the same types of news, right?

Malik: Yes. My belief is that broadband is a platform and that you have to assume that going forward. Y’know a lot of things are built on top of that platform. Online gaming, MMOGs, wireless broadband, a lot of things. So what I write, it won’t just be about pipes anymore. Think of it as what I do now, but on a more expanded basis. It’ll be more focused on critical analysis than anything. A lot of people write about the iTunes store, but nobody’s writing about what powers the store, or the connection Apple needs to make it work, or the servers that power it. Just being able to do this full time is great. The ideal is that a tech leader or an ultra tech leader finds value in it. I’m a little nervous because it’s biting off a big chunk.

But I just love to write, this is what I’m made for. You can’t really lie to yourself and say you’re going to do something else. And I really think this move is in line with that.

OJR: How will the site make money? Will you continue your relationship with Federated Media? Any plans to do private analysis for individual companies?

Malik: Revenues will come from advertisements and yes, I will continue my relationship with FM. I would be looking at a sponsorship model as well. There are plans for a premium newsletter which will be delivered either as a PDF download or as a premium part of the site.

OJR: So where does Gigaom.com fit in the publishing ecosystem now? Are you a blog? A magazine site?

Malik: It’s an adjunct to whatever’s out there. It doesn’t displace anything. It only adds to what’s out there. What you’re really seeing develop online is highly focused niches. Mine is a tiny component of a very large domain, which is technology. It’s like one-tenth of news.com or one-tenth of some trade publication. But it’s basically what I know best. I think that’s why you see sites like paidcontent.org succeed, or sites like techcrunch.com succeed. They stick to one domain.

[Reporter's note: Techcrunch was started one year ago by a venture capitalist who wanted to write about new Internet start-ups. The blog has since become one of the most popular blogs online, garnering millions of visitors and earning its writer, Michael Arrington, extensive ad revenue.]

OJR: So on the one hand you have niche sites, like yours, but on the other hand are the aggregators, like Digg.

Malik: Right. Digg is basically an aggregator of news. But when you look at it you see a lot of the info on Digg isn’t coming from traditional media, but niche media. Go take a look. Hundreds of stories are there from sites neither you nor I have heard of. You take one look at one tiny site that has one tiny audience and that’s what makes life interesting, right? And this phenomenon only gets bigger because you have places like Netscape and Reddit coming along. I get the feeling they’ll only be more aggregators around niches.

OJR: You mean like Techmeme and Tailrank?

Malik: Yes, exactly. Both of them drive traffic in equal amounts. At least 10 percent of my traffic every month comes from Techmeme and Tailrank in equal amounts.

OJR: But there’s a tension here, no? The authors of the 2006 state of the media report said that news aggregators are a threat to publications’ bottom lines.

Malik: I don’t think that is true. Not at all. I think the aggregators drive traffic to newspapers. The BBC, and I’m sure a few other publications, recently added a digg link to their stories. This is only going to drive traffic to the newspapers’ web sites. I mean, you’ve seen the bump that can come when a story in linked on Digg.

And I mean, one of the reasons the whole blog thing took off, to be quite honest, is that it’s easier to find things. Have you noticed that? When you go to a newspaper there’s so many layers and categories you have to get through. If you could build a professional blog that reported well and honestly, and the content was easy to find, you’ve got a business. Maybe.

OJR: So in your experience, what kind of posts work? What gets you the traffic that will keep coming back?

Malik: I haven’t a clue. Like yesterday I had this one little piece about something that was sold — some little thing, I really didn’t think too much of it — and it got such a bump. It’s so hit and miss on the Web. You never know what’s going to work. But this isn’t any different from the rest of journalism is it.

OJR: Well right now there are a lot of students going through journalism school who are seeing professional and amateur bloggers alike starting their own businesses. Any advice to those students, or anyone thinking of blogging as a business?

Malik: They just have to try it out, they have to do it. Everybody should be having a blog because it’s a showcase. Not only for your writing, but for your analytical skills. And that’s what’s really important isn’t it. You don’t have to have a high-powered blog, but you can still get traffic.

OJR: Well, you report on Silicon Valley and venture capitalists, so I have to ask you: What’s your business’ exit strategy?

Malik: I want to run this profitably. But why should I even be thinking about an exit strategy yet? This is the life we all dream of as a journalist, isn’t it? To be your own boss. This is pretty awesome. Every day I wake up and think I’m working for myself. I’m pretty happy about that.

Since last November, NBC started streaming three of its news shows online. CNN launched a desktop application called Pipeline, which shows 24 hours of Web-only content. Reuters and the Associated Press launched affiliate video network programs that syndicate their content to other sites. And the New York Times, a newspaper with no great broadcast experience, made video an integral part of their redesigned Web site.

By all accounts, news consumers are eating it up. CNN.com, to take one example, only showed about 4 million streams per month last year on their Web site. Today, according to executives, they’re showing 11 million streams per week.

Other news organizations report steady traffic growth since last Fall as well. But despite all these online ventures, or perhaps because of them, publishers say they’re still experimenting with video to discover what works, and what flops.

And while most media companies are reticent to reveal exact traffic numbers for their video, they were willing to share evidence about what types of videos are popular with viewers, from breaking news to user-generated content to celebrities and sex.

The three types of popular videos

At first blush, the question of what’s popular online may seem simple. It’s the same as offline, right?

Not exactly. Media executives say yes, it’s true that you can, for the most part, map the popularity of online video to what’s popular on broadcast television. Live and late breaking coverage, celebrities and sex, and innately visual stories work very well.

Bart Feder, CEO of The FeedRoom, says that visual stories in particular are the ones that tend to be the most viral types of video. His company helps other companies and news organizations, including the New York Times and BusinessWeek, publish and monitor their online video.

“Call up the must-see-TV category,” Feder said. “It’s the car chase. It’s the guy who proposes to his girlfriend on the floor of the Philadelphia Spectrum and she runs away. Stories about the war. Any war or conflict. Stories like these don’t do as well as plain copy.”

But beyond the hurricanes, sex, and terrified would-be brides, broadcasters have discovered other types of content that work well. For example, evergreen content, or videos that aren’t pegged to a specific news event, can continue to draw traffic well beyond its air date. Over time, the residual interest can rack up large traffic numbers.

Broadcasters have also found success with exclusive, in-depth content. The Associated Press, which syndicates its video to about 1200 sites, says they’ve drawn traffic with interviews. An interview with the wife of the West Virginia coal mine collapse, and another with the wife of a Shuttle Challenger astronaut, did very well.

Jim Kathman, product manager for the AP’s online video network, said that a segment that summarizes the major news events of the day, called “One-Minute World,” has started to do very well. Reuters, which also syndicates its video, has found the same success with their “World Update” videos, and quirky segments called “Oddly Enough.”

Executives agree that site editors and producers need to strike a balance on what types of videos to surface. While big news events like Hurricane Katrina are of obvious interest to everyone, it’s important to understand the other types of news content your specific audience is looking for on your site. Play to your strengths, editors say, and you’ll do well.

Context is King

What’s popular on a site that syndicates video content may be different from what’s popular on a network’s site, or on a traditional print publication’s site, like the New York Times.

Nick Ascheim, product manager for the New York Times Online, said that their most popular content mirrored breaking news events. However, the paper also offers extensive entertainment and feature reporting, so they try to surface non-breaking news content as much as possible.

“In video right now we’re not focused on breaking news,” said Ascheim. “What we’re focusing on is something we’ve called breaking analysis. We’ll do a video piece a little while after the story breaks. This works really well for something like a Supreme Court decision.”

Also popular: Movie reviews and David Pogue. While the Times wouldn’t reveal traffic numbers, Ascheim said that Pogue’s videos about personal technology — often less than two minutes long and sometimes shot by Pogue himself in motel rooms — are very popular with consumers. That Pogue’s videos are not always high-quality productions speaks to consumer interest in highly-personal reporting experiences.

The AP’s Kathman reports a similar interest in reporting as storytelling. “We don’t typically do, like the New York Times does, a bunch of analysis,” said Kathman. “We don’t usually have a reporter with a mike talking for two minutes about a story. But there are a number of reporters who can give special insight into a story. So we’re selectively putting some of our reporters who have specific knowledge of a subject on camera.”

Site editors and producers agree that context is the most important element in drawing consumers in. Since news sites cover a wide range of topics, and because watching video is a relatively large time investment, its important to help the user identify exactly what she will be watching. Some services, like CNN’s Pipeline, aid the user by showing related videos and links to stories beside what’s currently streaming.

Ascheim said the Times’ staff was working on ways to better label videos that appear on the home page, since that video could point to content deep within another site section. Editors also have to consider the power of search in the mix.

“Before we had really good search, publishers were focused on the browser metaphor: tabs, contextual links, story packages,” said Stephen Smyth, Reuters vice president of media. “Now as search has become more popular, it’s more of a 50/50 proposition. It’s not just packaging the story right, it’s putting the right metadata in and making sure all the video search engines get the feed.”

Time Well Spent?

Executives and editors agree that short content, by and large works best on the Web. The short time period allows users to continue “leaning in” and interacting with the site.

ABC News Now, for example, streams about 14 hours a day of video. The average consumer spends 10-12 minutes on the site, but gets about 8 stories in that time as they click from video to video, according to Mike Clemente, executive producer. Compare that to broadcast television, where the audience watches no more than 5 or 6 stories in that time.

“We don’t just do straight TV on the Web. Why would you watch something in linear form when you could choose the order?” said Clemente. “If I have a VCR from 25 years ago I can do that too. I just don’t think doing straight TV on the Web makes sense.”

NBC might take issue with that. NBC was the first network to stream its nightly newscast online, and recently added “The Today Show” and “Meet the Press” to that online lineup as well. The network publishes the “netcasts” after the original broadcasts clear the West Coast.

Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News vice president of digital media, acknowledges that NBC Nightly News streams about 250,000 times per month and generates far less traffic than shorter news clips on msnbc.com. But, Lukasiewicz argues, the online shows are an important part of the network’s news arsenal.

“There’s no question that news consumers prefer shorter content online,” he said. “But there’s a roll for time-shifting and a role for netcasting and a role for shorter clips. What we need to do is understand how each of these forms work and be where the consumer wants us to be.”

That was part of the strategy behind CNN’s launch of the Pipeline application, according to Sandy Malcolm, executive producer of CNN.com. Pipeline, which streams unique and sometimes unedited content 24 hours a day, complements CNN.com’s free video, which is shorter and freely accessible.

“I’d say one of the most popular Pipeline experiences so far was Coretta Scott King’s funeral,” said Malcolm. “We had multiple camera angles, it was commercial free, there were no reporters talking over it.”

Up Next: Pulling the Audience In

Traditional news isn’t the only type of video that’s booming on the Web, of course. Publishers say they’ve also taken note of the popularity of user-generated content on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

But while they’re eager to jump on the user-generated content wagon, publishers have to ensure that type of content fits into their editorial vision and process.

YouTube, for example, can host any type of video without following an editorial directive. “But we cant just put on every Joe who says ‘let’s get out of Iraq, it sucks,’” said ABC’s Clemente. “We have to wait for someone who’s thoughtful, and we put that into an appropriate context.”

CNN’s Malcolm and NBC’s Lukasiewicz agreed. All news organizations have to judge whether user-generated content is accurate, vetted and real. That vetting process can remove the immediate feedback of seeing your video online that Web users are becoming used to.

Luckily for publishers, online video is in its nascent stages. The economics are still uncertain and the users still fickle. Unluckily, the challenge now is to be everywhere users want them to be.

But a small network of writers at scienceblogs.com are trying to broaden scientific discourse by editorializing about everything from gay actors playing Christian characters to the embryo-worshipping antics of one Senator Fetus Fondler, more commonly known as Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania.

“Science doesn’t get a lot of comments,” said PZ Myers, a biologist and professor who runs the popular Pharyngula blog. “No, it’s the occasional post on atheism that gets people riled up.”

Scienceblogs.com was launched last January by Seed Media Group, publishers of SEED magazine. Seed recruited 15 of the best known independent science bloggers, offered to compensate them based on traffic, and set them loose to blog about whatever they wanted.

The result has been an idiosyncratic glimpse at our culture through the eyes of one philosopher, one physicist, a few writers and biologists, a former Senate staffer, a computer scientist, and various and sundry academics and science-minded lay people.

“[Seed] got the idea that blogs can’t work with restrictions,” said Myers, who is known for his humorous vilification of creationists, conservatives, and anyone who traffics in blatant idiocies. “There hasn’t been a peep from the editorial desk.”

Since its inception, the network has since grown to 19 bloggers.

Science + Religion + Politics = Controversy

There’s no shortage of pure science content on ScienceBlogs — comments on the disease vector Aedes aegypti and its role in the spread of the Chikungunya arbovirus, anyone? And there are several blogs, such as Afarensis and Gene Expression, that tend to stay away from cultural and political commentary altogether.

But a brief review of recent posts on some blogs reveals titles like “Science guy harshes creationists’ mellow,” “Your morning dose of unintentional creationist humor,” and “Keep your Prayers to Yourself!”

A first-time visitor to scienceblogs.com might assume the network was a bastion of liberal-only, anti-religion commentary, where the bloggers preach to their choir. But the bloggers, for their part, say there are a few conservatives who visit every now and then.

Ed Brayton, who writes Dispatches from the Culture Wars, said that his blog gets more conservative readers than other ScienceBlog destinations.

“I am a libertarian, which essentially means that conservatives think I’m a liberal and liberals think I’m a conservative, and they’re both wrong,” he said.

Tim Lambert, who writes the Deltoid blog, said his posts about the war in Iraq, especially, incite arguments. “When you have people disagreeing with you vehemently in comments, you sure don’t feel like you are preaching to the choir,” he said.

Tara Smith, who posts to the Aetiology blog, said anything that she writes about AIDS draws a wide range of dissenters, including people who deny the disease’s existence. She said the best she can hope for is that people learn from what she’s writing, whether they agree with her or not.

The conversation and arguments the bloggers generate seem to be working. The network is garnering anywhere from one to three million page views per month, according to editor Christopher Mims, who manages the blogs from the Seed offices in Manhattan.

The Benefits of Networking

More traffic means more money for the bloggers. But while the compensation can be a useful supplement, it’s certainly not enough to make a living on.

“It paid my cable bill,” said Smith, who works full-time as an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa.

“The draw wasn’t the money,” said Brayton, who also founded Michigan Citizens for Science and the popular science forum Panda’s Thumb. “Whether I make a nickel on it I’m still going to do what I do.”

Brayton said he was attracted to the blogging network because Seed takes care of the technical details. Prior to joining ScienceBlogs, he maintained his own site and server.

Brayton was concerned, however, about the editorial policy. He spent a few days negotiating his contract to ensure he had editorial carte blanche.

Smith and Myers also had concerns about editorial control, but were assured that Seed wouldn’t interfere with their posts. Both were attracted to the idea of Seed managing the technical aspects of blogging.

Another benefit of networking: increased visibility.

“I think the collective nature of this project improves traffic,” said Brayton, who said he’s seen the number of visitors steadily climb to about 4,500 hits per day.

Lambert said his traffic has increased 50 percent since he began blogging for scienceblogs.com. He ascribes that increase to the quality of all the blogs combined.

The network effects extend beyond the sites themselves. Many of the bloggers knew each other, either professionally or through blogging, before starting to write for scienceblogs.com.

Long-term view

Whatever success the bloggers have had so far, they’ve managed it without a big marketing or advertising push from Seed, which has allowed word to spread via the Web. Seed has run a few house ads in the magazine, and they took advantage of an ad exchange with the journal Nature to promote the blogs.

“We’ve seen a very positive response from the advertising community,” said Michael Tive, general manager of Seed Digital Networks. “We’ve seen a willingness to understand and explore blogs as a subset of digital media.”

Seed also operates a news aggregator called phylotaxis.com and the magazine site, seedmagazine.com. They sell ad space on all three sites.

Currently scienceblogs.com is running Harper Collins ads, and has run ads from other large companies, such as Subaru. Tive said the blog format attracts young, educated readers who can be a very appealing audience for advertisers.

Seed expects to hire a full-time blog editor soon, and they’re considering a redesign of the pages.

As for the bloggers, they say they plan to continue blogging at scienceblogs.com for as long as the domain is active, and as long as it doesn’t become too much like work.

They credit scienceblogs.com with helping to make science more accessible to a wider community. Blogging, they say, hasn’t penetrated the scientific community to the same degree that it has technology and politics. But blogging at professional journals and magazines, such as Nature and Scientific American, is helping to legitimize the practice among scientists.

“In the scientific community, blogging is growing. It’s still kind of a fringe activity, still associated with teenagers and not really regarded as a professional pursuit,” said Smith.

“But it’s getting attention.”

But perhaps the biggest sign that the turf battle between bloggers and journalists may be drawing to a close is the upcoming launch of a blog syndication network that will help newspapers republish existing blog content on their websites.

“I like to call it the AP newswire for blogs,” said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, who quietly debuted the network, called BlogBurst, at a party in Silicon Valley last month.

Several large newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, have signed up as “lighthouse partners” in the network. Syndicated blogs will begin appearing on those papers’ sites in the next few weeks.

While blogs have previously networked together to achieve greater exposure — Pajamas Media being one obvious example — BlogBurst is apparently the first network that was created specifically to syndicate blogs directly to newspapers.

“You have a lot of great bloggers out there, and a lot of time they blog about a subject you may not be as strong on on your own site,” said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, adding that the paper was interested in supplementing sections like food and travel. “We just thought we’d get on the front lines and see if it’s something that would work long term for us.”

Newspapers are only testing BlogBurst right now. But in theory, the service will work like this: Pluck signs bloggers to BlogBurst and examines each blog to see if the blog’s content and quality are appropriate for syndication. A list of approved bloggers is then made available to newspapers through an online interface, and editors can pick and choose which blogs they want to syndicate, and for how long.

The blog content will appear on the paper’s site, but will be embedded with the site’s look and feel. Ostensibly, newspapers will benefit by supplementing their coverage, and bloggers will profit from increased exposure. Pluck plans to eventually share a percentage of ad revenue with the bloggers.

“Historically, blogs have been very tech and very political,” said Panos, “But mainstream media’s interest is much broader — food, wine, travel, for example. BlogBurst will help them tap into that feature level content around the Web.”

Follow the money

Newspapers are also attracted to BlogBurst for the advertising revenue the blogs could generate.

“If we’re selling plenty of travel advertising but don’t have the page views to actually serve it all, then it might be a good idea to syndicate a really good set of travel blogs,” said The Washington Post’s Brady, by way of example.

Brady may be understating the situation. By most accounts, companies are lined up to advertise online like planes waiting to land at O’Hare.

Revenue for the online ad business was only about $12.5 billion in 2005, or around 15 percent of what was spent on print, but it’s expected to grow by about 30 percent in 2006 and reach $55 billion by 2010, according to analyst firm Piper Jaffray.

But directly increasing ad inventory by publishing more pages isn’t the papers’ only goal. If a newspaper can spark a conversation on its site by using syndicated blogs, it may be able to increase its traffic, and thus its ad impressions.

“Blog content is significantly better than message board content,” said Jim Debth, general manager of statesman.com. “Just the level of discourse is so much better. We expect the blogs [we syndicate with BlogBurst] to be very engaging. We hope readers will come back again and again.”

Seeders of clouds

Newspapers have been striving to engage their audience online for several years now. In syndicating blogs, newspapers are borrowing a page from the blogosphere’s playbook: Start conversations and build communities.

That goal was most recently iterated by Reuter’s CEO Tom Glocer in a speech to the Online Publisher’s Association last month. Glocer said media companies must be “seeders of clouds” by starting conversations and embracing responses by both traditional journalists and bloggers.

By inviting that community inside the tent of its brand, a newspaper could tap audiences and voices beyond its general readership, increasing its visibility and relevance to the blogosphere.

“If the [newspapers are] managing a bunch of syndicated blogs then there’s ultimately going to be a relationship between the papers and those bloggers,” said Jim Kennedy, director of strategic planning for the Associated Press. “That’s a good thing.”

But do newspapers need to rely on a vendor to help them build relationships with bloggers? Why can’t publishers hire an editor to pull in the best and most relevant content from the blogosphere, which is already easily and freely available through RSS feeds?

The answer is less one of ability than editorial control. Newspapers need to pre-approve content for fear of diluting their brand. BlogBurst provides the first filter in that approval process.

“It’s a newspaper’s job to add editorial value,” said Barry Parr, a media analyst with JupiterResearch. “It looks like BlogBurst will give them a level of control they didn’t have before.”

Can a stodgy old newspaper reciprocate, adding value to the blogosphere? Well, if numbers from a recent Gallup poll are any indication, the answer is yes.

According to Gallup, only one in five Americans, or about 40 million of us, read blogs. By comparison, more than 55 million people visited newspaper websites in November of 2005 alone, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings analysis conducted for the Newspaper Association of America.

BlogBurst won’t reach nearly that many people, at least not at first. But NYU journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen says that the syndication network is a first step in helping mainstream media readers understand and navigate the immense variety of blogs.

“It’s part of a bigger thing which is the rationalizing of the blogging system, which started out as no system at all,” he said.

Meet the new media, same as the old media

As bloggers become more acquainted with syndication, it should be interesting to see whether and how blogging habits change to accommodate newspapers’ publishing schedules and content interests.

There is a danger that syndication could change content expectations on both sides of the newspaper/blogger divide.

Clive Thompson noted in a recent New York Magazine article, “Blogs to Riches,” blogs are already becoming increasingly similar to traditional publications.

As for newspapers’ role in the relationship, said Rosen, “If it starts to become ‘blog this way because this is what we need from you,’ then I think it won’t be effective.”

Newspapers, meanwhile, will doubtless be wary of diluting their own voices by becoming effectively just another news aggregator in a media landscape populated by the same. Sites such as topix.net, Digg.com and Tinfinger already have a head start, drawing over $45 million in funding in the last two years, according to VentureOne.

Regardless, experimenting with blog syndication is a good way for newspapers to learn more about the vicissitudes of the blogosphere. At the very least, they’ll be broadening the dialogue with bloggers everywhere.

“We’ve been talking to publishers for the last 15 months, and there’s been a relative sea change in how pervasive the mainstream media interest in blogging is,” said Pluck’s Panos. “They’re all going to adopt the format, the only question is when and how.”

My interlocutor meant to not-so-kindly imply that citizen media was ascendant, and traditional journalism nearly extinct. AOL had just purchased Weblogs Inc. User-edited site Digg.com was becoming more popular every day. Online news cynosure Dan Gillmor was experimenting with the Bayosphere in San Francisco. All signs pointed to a future where reporters were marginalized by community-edited news sites, blogs and aggregation services.

Of course, this exchange happened at the Web 2.0 conference. But every reporter has heard the bugaboo about the post-scarcity, citizen-driven, small-is-the-new-big future of journalism. It’s a scary proposition, and as the mainstream media watches its revenue shrink year after year, it’s a future that looms increasingly large and real.

But despite all the recent hum and chuff about Web 2.0, there has been surprisingly little progress in “journalism 2.0.”

In the last few months, we’ve seen that pure citizen media projects aren’t panning out as proponents thought they would. Bayosphere is closing up shop. Backfence.com is struggling. The sites have little focus, and they’re completely dependent on the whimsy of their contributors.

Meanwhile, news aggregators are coming on strong. Sites like Digg, Tailrank, and reddit have received quite a lot of buzz. But while these sites are great for providing context for a larger story, they’re still purely reactive. They can’t pursue a story or break their own news.

Don’t look to mainstream media to correct these imblances. As Jay Rosen consistently points out, the traditional bastions of good journalism are actually withdrawing from competition online.

A potentially winning combination

Of all the startups entering the news marketplace in the last year, I’ve only seen one that could be a viable platform for online journalism.

Newsvine is a Seattle-based company started by former Disney and ESPN staffers. Their site newsvine.com launched an invitation-only preview beta in January. The site publishes news feeds from the Associated Press and ESPN, and then gives users the ability to comment on those stories, publish their own stories, write their own blog, and vote which articles should receive the most attention. (You can find a detailed overview of the site’s features on solutionwatch.com.)

By combining hard news with citizen opinion in a single site, Newsvine has built a powerful call-and-response mechanism that couples the culling power of news aggregators with the empowerment of citizen media. Each type of content provides a check against the excesses or omissions of the other. That focus on daily news then provides the clear organization and compelling presentation that can spur readers to involvement.

Newsvine.com’s international scope may also allow it to circumvent the traffic trap of hyperlocal coverage. Most experiments in online “news” focus on a specific region, or specific constituencies (memeorandum for tech and politics, gather.com for would-be writer). Newsvine.com includes all the news.

The site is constructed so that users can create or read local coverage at, say, sanfrancisco-oakland-sanjose.newsvine.com. But they can also read and contribute in other regions as well. Navigating the regions, you get the sense that you’re using the journalist’s version of citysearch.com. (Albeit with better design and much more personality.)

Finally, there’s newsvine.com’s carrot to users: Every contributor gets a share of the ad revenue generated on their pages. The more popular your contributions, the more money you’re likely to make.

Promising, but will it work?

The ad revenue sharing plan is a big part of Newsvine’s value proposition and speaks to the biggest hurdle the site will face: attracting a critical mass of passionate users.

Right now, the site is sparsely populated by a group of early adopters. (Traffic on beta launch day did exceed 100,000 page views, which is remarkable.) Getting user attention in the fragmented media marketplace will be difficult at best, as a recent report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York shows (to cite one example among hundreds).

Despite its beautiful design and robust features, newsvine.com doesn’t offer any features that a dedicated Web user couldn’t find distributed elsewhere on the Web. Bloggers can already share ad revenue using Google AdSense on their own sites, and they can comment on the news on their own blogs.

Even if Newsvine manages to attract enough users, they still need to attract those who will make positive contributions. As Dan Gillmor noted recently, participants need incentives. Otherwise, they’ll visit, read, and leave.

It’s not enough, on the Web, to offer a clean, well-lit place to read the news. If Newsvine is to be a successful news organization — not just a technology company — then they will need to invest in columnists, editors, and personalities. And they’ll need to tend their garden of contributors very, very closely

Imagine

When I use Newsvine, I imagine what it would be like if CNN.com or NYTimes.com adopted this approach to news — an approach that sacrificed none of the legitimacy of traditional journalism while adding value from a diverse and interested public.

Mainstream media can’t compete with interactive media by deploying a few small blogs and setting up comment sections. Those are capitulations, not innovations. Likewise, interactive media can’t compete with journalism simply by adding RSS widgets and scraping news sites for headlines. Those are traffic-generating tools, not community-building tools.

Newsvine is in the sweet spot. The site’s conceit is worth paying attention to. By combining professional journalism with inspired citizen comments and blogs, Newsvine has the potential to keep the spirit of socially responsible journalism alive on the Web. That spirit is conversation.