The project is called Sustainable Business Models for Journalism. What did we find? First, bad news: there’s no single, easy solution or amazing new business model that solves all the problems that traditional publishing models have.

But looking through some of the very grassroots operations around the globe, you find some similarities among the sites. Probably the most comforting lesson from these young and old entrepreneurs is the fact that there’s probably no need for an amazing new business model. Journalism is just going through a transformative period from a monopolistic, high-revenue and low competition model to a highly competitive global marketplace. And the ideas and advice we got from these entrepreneurs was not that much different from the advice you find in traditional business literature, startup manuals or even biographies of successful companies.

Here are some general conclusions from the 69 startups we interviewed.

Find your niche. Whatever you do, don’t do the same things as the others do. Or if you do, make sure you do it better in one way or another. Be faster. Or broader. Or more in-depth. Slower. Whatever you do, do it somehow differently than the others. As Ken Fisher from ArsTechnica.com says, don’t try to be 30 seconds faster with the same bloggy content that’s going to be on five other sites in 10 minutes.

Be passionate. Running a website is hard work and you can’t do it with a 9-to-5 attitude. If you truly love what you do, it makes the long hours more tolerable and gives you a competitive edge: you’re willing to work an extra hour. My personal guess is that the readers can smell the passion as well. Especially in France and, surprisingly, in Japan, the divide between “us” — the free journalists — and “them” — the established media — seems to be a strong driver.

Keep it small and agile. The old model of publishing was to design a publication and then hire people to do it. The new model is to have one or two people and see what kind of publication they are able to create.

You are the brain of your own business. Many of the journalists interviewed for our study said they hoped that someone else would do the business side of things for them: contacting possible advertisers, selling the ads and doing all the planning and calculation. David Boraks from DavidsonNews.net said it well: if you are starting a small business and you have a vision how to do it, you can’t turn it over to somebody else and expect it to happen the way you want it to.

Ask for support (aka money). If you know you’re doing a good thing, don’t be afraid to ask for support. Advertisers, especially local or niche ones, might actually like what you do. If they are passionate about candles and think your site about candles is worth reading, they are probably more willing to advertise on your site. If your readers can’t live another day without your passionate and unique candle reviews, they probably are willing to somehow give you money. “People are just looking for a way to support you,” says Doug McLennan from Artsjournal.com

These are just a few notes from our complete report, which you can read or download here. The website Submojour.net has all the case studies.

Pekka Pekkala is a visiting scholar at USC Annenberg. He is working on a book titled “How to Keep Journalism Profitable” with a two-year grant from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Folow him on Twitter at @pekkapekkala.

Start by reading a post Dave Winer put up last month called Paywalls are backward-looking. In the piece, Winer focuses on the heart of the news business model over the past century, and shows why traditional thinking about the news business won’t help it survive in the Internet era.

“Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, and the gasoline it took to get it to where you are. In fact, everything that determined the structure of the news activity, that made it a business, was organized around the distribution system.

“But that’s been over now for quite some time. And paywalls express a desperate wish to go back to a time when there was a reason to pay. Now news, if it wants to continue, must find a new reason.”

Let me back up a moment before advancing Winer’s point. Many beginning news publishers cripple their business by failing to recognize who their customers are. A customer is whoever writes you a check (or gives you a credit card number). Too many publishers naively believe that their customers are their readers, when the customers actually are the advertisers or foundations that are paying the bills to keep the publication running.

In a similar way, many news publishers – rookie and veteran – mistake the benefits that they provide these customers in exchange for that financial support. This is the brilliance of Winer’s post. It illustrates the real value, the real benefit, that news publishers once provided to the market: the ability for information to flow more easily. Customers paid for access to that information distribution system – readers paid for home delivery or newsstand access to the information included in the day’s paper, and advertisers paid for access to those readers.

The Internet, of course, allows information to flow even more efficiently than even newspapers ever could. Which is why the Internet – once widely adopted – meant the inevitable doom for the newspaper business model. Newspapers, with printing presses to pay off and circulations departments to pay, never could hope to deliver information as inexpensively as could publishers on the Internet.

Have you ever heard newspaper publishers lament their failure to install paywalls in the early days of the World Wide Web? “If only we’d started charging upfront,” they say, “our information wouldn’t have been devalued and we wouldn’t be in this financial mess.”

It’s like listening to a four-year-old talk about the Easter Bunny. It’s so naive I actually find it kind of cute, in a completely nihilistic way.

It’s naive because comments such as that betray a belief that what newspapers grew rich selling in the 20th Century was information itself instead of the access to information, as Winer describes. The information that the newspapers were providing (and continue to provide) access to is almost never unique to the news organization reporting it. It’s commodity information – available to anyone on the scene or with access to the source reporting it.

The market opportunity for news publishers was the fact that the average reader isn’t on the scene or doesn’t have access to those sources. So getting access to that information becomes valuable to that reader. That is what the reader was paying for when he or she bought a newspaper – the access to that information.

By making access to the world of information ubiquitous with direct connection to sources, eyewitness accounts, and publishers with cheaper overhead, the Internet has forced news publishers into the marketplace that so many publishers naively believed that they were in before. Now, news publishers really are selling just information, instead of the access to it. And they’re running into trouble because the market’s telling them just how worthless much of that commodity information is to them.

But there is a way out for newspapers – and that’s to embrace the change the Internet has forced and move into the segment of the information business that books – and to a lesser extent, magazines – long have occupied. Newspapers should reinvest in producing and selling information that is unique to their publication, and not readily available to anyone who was on the scene where news occurred.

So what unique information can a news publication provide? Investigations. Perspective. Analysis. And don’t overlook the uniqueness of a specific community of engaged readers, contributing to the publication’s information with their own unique perspectives, reports, and analysis. When well-cultivated by engaged leadership, that community itself can become a publication’s greatest unique asset.

But to produce that information at a low enough cost to compete with the uncounted number of competitors and potential competitors online, a news publication has to eliminate everything else it pays for that doesn’t advance the cause of creating unique information assets. That means ditching everything in the organization that obtains or reproduces commodity content – the stuff people can get elsewhere online. Drop the wire services, the syndicated features, and all the editors and designers who work on them. Eliminate the division between “news” and opinion, and demand reporters who have the expertise to draw informed conclusions from the evidence they report. (And the experience to know – and then report – when they can’t.)

Drop the division between newsroom and online production, and charge your reporters with the responsibility for cultivating a community of readers talking about that beat. Don’t leave investigations for a dedicated team of newsroom hotshots. Make investigation every reporter’s responsibility, and then reach out to other organizations – J-schools, nonprofits, readers and even competitors – who can help you uncover fresh, unique information that your readers will want.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but the best independent publishers out there are doing that work, under very low overhead, and if you can’t compete with them, you’ll soon be done in this business.

Then don’t forget that building an audience is only part of building and maintaing a business. You need those customers, too.

Let’s step back and remember why advertisers have been supporting news publishers in the past. Without in-media advertising, business owners had very limited media through which they could deliver information to potential customers. A storekeeper could put up signs around town or hire people to go up and down the street passing out flyers. But media advertising allowed business owners to reach people inside their homes, by interjecting the businesses’ messages into a newspaper, television show, or radio broadcast to which the consumer already had chosen to pay attention. And that’s what advertisers were paying for – access to that information flow.

Again, the Internet tore down barriers separating advertisers from consumers. With email lists, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, the Internet allows businesses more media through which to connect directly with their customers. Business owners don’t need advertising as much any more. Yet I believe that some demand for advertising will remain, as businesses look to connect with and acquire new potential customers. But news media hoping to attract that advertising income will have to be able to offer those advertisers sharply defined audiences who are well-qualified as potential customers for that business.

It’s the era of the niche – whether topical or geographic. And if your reporters aren’t producing that targeted, informed, uniquely valuable niche information, you’re not building an audience that any advertiser will pay to reach.

Think non-profit is your salvation? Think again. As we’ve written before, non-profit isn’t a business plan. It’s a tax status. And the foundations that support non-profit journalism are looking to reach desired audiences just as much as advertisers are. Again, if you’re working in the non-profit world, you still have to be delivering unique information to a targeted audience. Otherwise, you’re just not delivering the value your foundation customers demand.

If you’re going to be a success in business, you must at least be able to recognize just what business you’re in. Winer has told us the way toward building a viable news business online. The challenges for news publishers are to put aside their assumptions and to hear him.

What was this practice? It was conducting national job searches to fill local reporting positions.

When I began my journalism career, J-school advisers told us to expect to start out at a smaller paper in a national chain, then try to work our way up to larger newsrooms, bigger cities, and more desirable places to live. You had to “pay your dues” in some small town before you could move up to a major metro.

The model was that of an assembly line, where you started by proving yourself on low-risk tasks that weren’t particularly critical to the overall operation, before moving up to higher-speed, higher-pressure jobs with national visibility. (By broadening the candidate pool for every local reporting job, this helped chains keep labor costs down, too.)

But while the smallest papers in a chain might be next to invisible to the suits in corporate HR, they were real, and important, to the people living in the communities they served. Most of those readers weren’t trying to “move up” to some bigger city. They were home, and happy there.

The old newsroom hiring model saw the nation’s communities as interchangeable rungs on a corporate ladder. But, despite the billion-dollar efforts of companies such as Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, and Applebee’s, people in those cities and towns continue to resist their commoditization. Sure, they shop at Walmart and eat at Applebee’s, but only because they’re cheaper than alternatives. (Which often were run out of business by big-chain outlets operating at a loss until they killed off that competition.) Cookie-cutter newspapers could hold onto their local customers only so long as they offered the cheapest way to get information, too.

When online competitors such as Craigslist and Yahoo! News gave readers a cheaper alternative for classified ads and national news headlines, they bailed. And understandably so. It’s hard to appeal to readers’ sense of loyalty to local voices when those voices are recent college grads who’ve only lived in the community for a couple years and who flee the state whenever they get three or more consecutive days off. Those new hires didn’t grow up in the community. They barely know anyone outside the newsroom and the official sources they encounter on their beats. And frankly, they don’t care, either. They’re looking to “move up,” and get out of town.

If you’re a local, you might as well get your local news from a discussion board. At least the people posting there actually know the town, send their kids to school there, and are planning to stick around a while.

My first full-time job in the news industry was in Omaha, Nebraska – a community I’d never stepped foot in before my job interview at the paper. To my surprise, the paper offered me a gig, and with my first student loan payment looming, I took it. I had no business writing for anyone in Omaha, or the states of Nebraska or Iowa. Hey, I tried my best, but I didn’t know the names, the places, the people or the unique issues that mattered to anyone who’d grown up in that state. So I took the hint when the paper tried to run me out of town and eventually rented a truck to move to a city my wife and I knew and loved – her hometown, Denver.

(I worked there for nearly four years until I got recruited to a job in my hometown, Los Angeles, where I continue to live today.)

So as we look for new companies to emerge and redefine the journalism industry online, let’s hope those new leaders won’t make this same mistake, too. Readers deserve writers who are as invested in the community as they are.

And if that expression of idealism does nothing for you as a cold-hearted capitalist, allow me to frame the issue another way: You can’t collect a premium price for a bargain-basement product.

If you’re producing product in the cheapest way possible, you’ll only hold your market share so long as you offer the lowest price available. (Walmart’s learning this the hard way as its bargain-hunting customer base begins to abandon it for dollar stores.) Trust me, even if you think that the cheapest way to run a newsroom is with fresh college grads desperate for a job, they’re still more expensive than outsourcing to writers in Bangalore watching Web cams. Or script kiddies in Eastern Europe writing scraper algorithms. If you want to publish using actual live, local journalists writing your publication, you’ll never be able to operate at lower costs than your online competition. To survive as a business, you’ll need the higher income that only a premium product can command.

So your local writers better really be local writers, people are from – and of – that community. This goes for niche topic sites, too, and not just for geographically focused publications. Writers for niche sites must be insiders of the community they cover, as well – individuals with passion for and personal experience in the topic they cover.

What does this mean? If you’re a manager at a national news chain, it’s time to zero out the relocation budget, if you haven’t already. Make local publications hire exclusively from candidates in their local markets. It’s time to reconnect with those communities. Promote from within at your titles, too. If “outsiders” really want to work at one of your publications, insist that they move to that community on their own, first.

For journalists, it’s time to make an investment in your future by relocating to the community where you want to live and work, if you’re not there already. Then start blogging as soon as you arrive. Build the audience that you will leverage into either your own publishing business or a job at an established local publication.

For journalism students, do the same. Start your career right by going to the best J-school you can get into in the city (or state) where you want to live and work. If your goal is to work in niche-topic publications, rather than covering a geographic community, go ahead and look at big national J-schools. But select the one that also has the best available program in the field you want to cover, too. Either way, immerse yourself in the community you’ll be covering. Only by being in and of the community you want to cover can you make yourself an attractive candidate to the smart publishers who recognize the need to remain connected to their communities.

The market is speaking to us. It wants the era of clueless, disconnected, outsider coverage in journalism to be over. And thank goodness for that. Let’s make it happen.

A publication makes its greatest progress not when it introduces new products and services but when it shows the discipline to leave tired or failing efforts behind. You must fight the inertia that’s holding you back.

This month I began shutting down what where once the most popular services on my family’s violin website. While these were the first services we offered on the site, and the ones that defined us to our early audience, they’d become a major time drain for me, and were failing to leverage any significant income for the site.

Making the decision to close these services not only created an opportunity for me to devote more time to the stuff that is working on the site, it also forced me to confront the reasons why these services weren’t thriving anymore. An innovator who’s also designing and launching, but never taking a look back at her work – axe in hand – never learns any valuable lessons from the audience and customers she’s trying to serve.

When my wife and I launched the violin website, neither of us had time to do much with it. So I coded up some automated directories, which any registered member of the site could join – one for teachers, another for shops, and later, one for camps and summer festivals. The directories provided content for the site that readers valued, and the chance to be in the directories gave people a compelling reason to register with the site.

Years later, after my wife began spending more time writing for, editing, and coaching contributors to the site, those old directories fell behind our discussion board and blogs in pageview and visitor traffic. Sponsors wanted to be part of those blogs, interviews, and original feature articles on the site. I couldn’t get anyone to sponsor the directory pages, and the click-through data from those channels were just atrocious.

And yet, the directories began eating more and more of my time. No longer were interested violinists joining the site to get access to the directories, now they were attracting sweatshop spammers from around the world. Spammers looking for free backlinks to their scams and affiliate storefronts were polluting our listings with thousands of submitted entries that had nothing to do with the violin.

At first, I manually deleted or blocked the submissions. Then I started writing scripts to block them, or mass purge them after the fact, if they’d gotten through. But the spammers kept getting more sophisticated in their attacks on the site, and frankly, I got tired trying to stay ahead of them.

For what? For directory pages that were hardly unique any longer? When we began, no teachers’ associations had membership directories online. Now hundreds did. Other listings of summer camps and music festivals abounded. Directories aren’t what we provide best anymore. That’d be our original interviews, features, blogs and discussion board – in short, our editorial content. So why not ditch the effort to prop up failing directories and spend our time and effort building more great original content instead?

The only directory we had that retained much unique value was our business directory. So I salvaged that by converting it to a paid directory. If violin shops want in now, they must pay us an annual fee. That effectively eliminated not only the spammers, but also small, undercapitalized shops that really couldn’t handle inquiries from our global audience.

By the way, I can’t recommend enough that local and niche Web publishers develop a business directory for their advertising customers. With so many spam-laden business directories polluting the Internet, readers appreciate a well-targeted, up-to-date directory that lists only real businesses serving a specific community. And business customers are willing to pay to be in a directory that’s spam-free and promoted to a real audience of engaged community members instead of drive-by Web searchers. A directory is an easy sell to a local business owner who can’t spell “CPM” and doesn’t want to hassle with a complicated banner ad campaign, too.

But I wouldn’t have been in position to create that new paid directory for our site (which has led to five-figure annual income for us), if I’d been satisfied to leave our old directories be. By picking up the axe and taking it to the directories, I chopped away a lot of waste that had been covering up a better opportunity for our site.

So innovation involves not just creation, but destruction as well. What are the old pages, services, products and habits that you or your organization is investing significant time and money to maintain for your publication, only for insignificant revenue or other value in return?

Swing your axe thoughtfully, though. I gave our directories over 10 years before cutting them down. They had their run. Killing a new service before giving it a decent chance to find a customer base can cost you far more than leaving a dying service to linger. But once you’ve given it your best shot or a service has run its course, don’t let fear or apathy keep you from killing a project that’s sucking money or time, or polluting your pages with inferior content.

And once you’ve given something a shot, don’t kick yourself if someone else makes it work. Remember, ideas are worthless. If someone else executed an idea in a way you couldn’t, well, good for them. Go find an idea you can execute with success. Focus on what you and your organization do best, and let your axe keep your way forward clear.

Yes or no, don’t let this story discourage you from eBook publishing. If anything, this case should be encouraging independent news publishers to jump into the eBook market.

Why? As Talking Points Memo explained, this case boils down to an alleged attempt by big book publishers to collude to get an “agency” deal where they would get to set the price of the books they published and were sold on Amazon.

The TPM summary didn’t mention it, but that agency pricing model is the pricing deal that you get with Amazon as an independent eBook publisher. Why is that a price fixing offense for them and not for you? In short, because they allegedly colluded to get particular prices under that deal, according to the TPM summary.

Econ 101 lesson here: If you can enter a market where existing players are colluding to hold up prices, you have a huge business opportunity if you can undercut them on price. Typically, when big businesses try to collude on price, it’s because they have high barriers to entry in that business that keep potential competitors (i.e. disruptors) on the sidelines.

And that certainly was the case in the book publishing industry just 10 years ago. Today, however, the barriers to entry to book publishing are about the same as the barriers to entry to website publishing were 15 years ago – pretty much zilch. You need some tech know-how, but it’s nothing more than a sharp learner can teach herself or himself within a few weeks.

Remember, the big book publishers – like the big newspaper chains before them – have highly specialized, multi-level workforces that can drive their operating costs higher than Voyager 2. The traditional book publishing operation model includes

• authors
• agents
• book editors
• copy editors and proofreaders
• interior designers
• cover designers
• manufacturing
• publicists
• distribution
• retailers

Each book sold must pay a portion of the salary or wages of each person that chain. And don’t forget that each company involved needs to pay for all the managers overseeing these people, as well as a cut for profit as well. No wonder book publishers are trying to inflate the prices they charge.

Publishing an eBook independently through a retailer such as Amazon takes the manufacturing, distribution and retailing roles off your table. Independent publishing also removes the need for acquiring an agent and a book editor (though I recommend showing your work to a trusted colleague for feedback before moving into copy-editing).

As an online journalist, I have the ability to write my own book, to edit it, and to code up the HTML for the eBook design. As a website publisher, I have built an online community of tens of thousands of frequent readers to whom I can market my books, and the social media skills to help empower them to spread the word virally on my book’s behalf.

All this means that I can handle pretty much all the work of publishing and marketing an eBook. Which also means that I can keep all the money my books earn for myself. Sure, retailers such as Amazon will take a cut, but in Amazon’s case they do bring something very valuable to the table – a recommendation engine and category best-seller lists that help drive sales of your books. That’s worth the cut they take, in my opinion. (Barnes and Noble? Not so much.)

All the rest is yours. You don’t have to set aside anything for managers or for shareholders. That should give you the ability to produce and market your work for a fraction of the cost of producing and marketing that same work through a traditional publisher, even if they were producing only the same eBooks. And you can do that while making more money than you would as an author if you had published through a traditional publishing house. So let the federal government, the New York publishing houses and Amazon fight it out. Ultimately, the future of book publishing belongs to the independents.

I’m nowhere near unique among journalists. If you’ve worked in online journalism, you probably have a similar skill set to me, and can handle the work of self-publishing your best reporting work into eBooks. With lower expenses, you can undercut “the big kids” on price. That leaves it up to you, and your skills as a storyteller, to compete to attract the attention – and purchases – of readers.

You want to stay in the news business? Here is your purest, most direct shot to do that. If you can tell stories that people want to read, eBooks are a marketplace in which people are paying authors – nearly directly – to read them. No employer or publisher can tell you ‘no’, or silence you. No big business can beat you on price.

So why not jump in?

That might seem like an absurd question, especially for readers in the United States, where the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press. How can a news website be illegal?

Well, while the First Amendment protects freedom of the press, plenty of other federal, state and local legislation regulates the conduct of business. And the First Amendment doesn’t give news publishers a free pass to ignore that. So you’d better be paying taxes on your business income. And abiding by legal hiring and employment practices if you’re bringing on help.

“No sweat,” I can hear some of you saying to yourselves. “I pay my state and federal income taxes and work by myself at home. I don’t need to worry about employment law or all that other stuff.”

Ah, you work at home, you say? Then you might not be running a legal business after all.

Have you checked your local zoning code to see what it says about running a business out of your home? You might surprised by what you learn. Even if all you do in running your business is to type on your home computer, the fact that you’re earning income that’s not coming from an employer is enough in some jurisdictions to cover you under local home-business zoning and tax rules.

Every few years, the City of Pasadena (California) sends me a letter asking me to pay up for a city business license and tax. The same letter goes to everyone with a Pasadena mailing address who reported Schedule C income on his or her federal tax return who hasn’t obtained a license yet. (Schedule C is the form through which you report all 1099 or miscellaneous income. It’s the form that home business owners who do not incorporate use to report their business income.)

Pasadena’s hardly alone. New York City, for example, levies a unincorporated business tax that hits many freelance writers and website publishers. The City of Los Angeles also hits freelancers and writers (among others) with a city business tax, but exempts the first $100,000 in income. Fail to pay these local taxes and license fees, and you’re running an illegal business.

Now, even through the U.S. postal service assigns me a Pasadena mailing address, I actually live in unincorporated Los Angeles County. So whenever I get that letter, I just reply with a written note that I live outside the city limits, and they leave me alone. But I always wonder how many less-informed LA County residents don’t realize that, and send in the money anyway. It must be enough to make it worth the city’s postage costs in sending out those extra letters.

But even in unincorporated LA County, I’m subject to residential zoning code addressing home-based businesses. (Writing and publishing don’t fall on the long list of home businesses required to obtain an LA County business license, so that’s not an issue for me.) Now, before I go any further, let me acknowledge that busting writers making money on work they’re creating at home is pretty far down the priority list for most communities. Getting money from unpaid taxes is one thing, but zoning enforcement’s rarely an issue for home businesses that don’t generate excess noise, garbage or foot or vehicle traffic.

That said, if you’re writing stuff that might, uh, tick off the powers-that-be in your community, it’s just smart business to make sure that you’re not breaking any rules a vindictive local official might use against you.

So take a look at your local residential zoning code. Here are a few interesting things I discovered about unincorporated Los Angeles County:

The safest thing to do as a publisher is to rent yourself some office space in a legally-zoned commercial office building. That also can help make your emerging business look more legitimate in the eyes of potential customers and clients. But if the numbers don’t work for you paying that extra rent each month, don’t forget to give your local residential zoning code a look before you get too far down the road with your publishing business.

Because even if all you’re doing is writing, you don’t want a local commissioner you’ve just busted in an exclusive expose using that zoning code to bust you in retaliation.

Cover yourselves.

P.S. And LA County? Please, let’s revisit that whole no “video production” thing soon, please?

Here’s a hint. It’s not newspaper companies. From the report:

In the last year a small number of technology giants began rapidly moving to consolidate their power by becoming makers of “everything” in our digital lives. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and a few others are maneuvering to make the hardware people use, the operating systems that run those devices, the browsers on which people navigate, the e-mail services on which they communicate, the social networks on which they share and the web platforms on which they shop and play. And all of this will provide these companies with detailed personal data about each consumer.

Already in 2011, five technology companies [Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL] accounted for 68% of all online ad revenue, and that list does not include Amazon and Apple, which get most of their dollars from transactions, downloads and devices. By 2015, Facebook is expected to account for one out of every five digital display ads sold.

A year ago, we wrote here: “The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.” In 2012, that phenomenon has grown.

“Our analysis suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives,” PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel said in a press release. “But it remains unclear who will benefit economically from this growing appetite for news.”

Well, a first read of the Pew report suggests that it’s Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL who are benefitting economically from the public’s appetite for news online. :^) But let’s not forget that quite a bit of that 68% market share that Pew reports for these five businesses is passing through to uncounted numbers of affiliates and partners, too. For example, a large chunk of Google’s market-leading advertising income flows to its AdSense partners. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them.)

In my reading of the Pew report, I found an implicit concern that more and more online ad revenue was flowing to these tech company intermediaries, rather than directly to news companies as they presumably had done in the past. But I don’t have a problem with that. Why? I don’t believe in equating newspaper, broadcast and cable companies with the “news” industry.

I’ve never believed that newspaper companies are the originators of journalism. To me, the true originators of journalism are reporters and sources. Newspapers were yesterday’s middlemen, bringing together reporters, an audience, and the advertisers who were willing to pay to reach the audience that journalists’ reports would attract. Sure, newspaper companies played a vital role, but calling them the originators of content is akin to giving credit to an talent agent for an actor’s performance.

Today, tech companies have disrupted these arrangements. As a journalist, I can use Google’s Blogger to create my own publication and Google’s AdSense will pay me for the advertising revenue that my work attracts. And let’s not forget those downloads from Amazon and Apple, either, which provide an even more direct route for today’s writers to earn income from an audience. I don’t need a job with a newspaper a make living as a journalist now. Tech companies have become the new middlemen, through which sources and writers can reach an audience and customers, instead of having to rely on newspaper and broadcast companies to make that match, as they did so often in the past.

In this view, Pew’s report is not a depiction of a news industry losing control of its revenue future to the tech industry. It is instead a map of how tech companies are disrupting publishing monopolies, creating new avenues for journalists to travel in their careers.

Some of these new avenues are yet uncharted. Others won’t lead to any reasonable income. Others still will turn out to offer immense profit. All my work writing over the past few years on OJR about entrepreneurial journalism has been to help you find the best new avenue for you. But just because newspaper companies are getting squeezed doesn’t mean that you have to lose your future in the journalism business.

Unfortunately, you also can’t make the assumption that any profitable new avenue you find will be around permanently, either. Remember when Netscape dominated the browser market, when everyone was rushing to make deals with AltaVista, or when it seemed that Microsoft had a monopoly over computer software? It’s quite possible that 15 years from now, future writers will make the same types of cracks about Google’s advertising market share or the amount of time everyone spent on Facebook.

This is where you won’t find answers from Pew, or from me, or from any other pundit out there. You’ll find them only from yourself. This is why I stress the importance of living in the community you cover, or being a fan of the niche you cover. This is why you need to build and maintain relationships with your audience and with your customers. “Objective” separation is career suicide.

Because you need these relationships so that you can function fully as a consumer within the space you cover. That’s vital because it is as a consumer that you’ll get your first signs of any disruptions coming ahead. I remember people I had contact with in the music industry 10-plus years ago who’d spend their workdays developing market campaigns for CD sales, then go home and listen to music they’d download from the Internet to their MP3 players. They never allowed their experience as consumers to inform their work in the publishing industry, and many of them lost their jobs in the disruption that followed.

You’ve got to be an engaged consumer in your market, and you’ve got to apply that experience to your work as a journalist. Use it to anticipate disruptions, so that you can be ready to take advantage when they happen. Fifteen years ago journalists who were getting their news from websites instead of printed papers should have realized where their future was heading and moved before they were pushed. Today, writers who are reading eBooks ought to be making the jump to writing and publishing eBooks.

I don’t know yet where tomorrow’s disruption will come. But here’s a hint: Anywhere high barriers to entry – cost, equipment, etc. – are keeping people from producing and selling content, that’s an industry ready for disruption. Anywhere people are making money solely by controlling access to information is a place where people are going to be losing their jobs in the future.

Tech companies are taking money from old-school news companies, sure. But don’t look at that as a problem. Look at it is the opportunity it provides you.

That question popped into my mind last week when I read a LinkedIn research post that claimed that newspapers have shed a larger percentage of jobs that any other industry in America over the past five years, losing more than 28 percent of its jobs during that time.

I mean, wow, everyone in the business knew that newspapers were shrinking, but dead last? And dead last in a down economy?

When you consider that many newspaper companies have been trying to add or at least redeploy positions to their online operations, the jobs picture becomes even more grim for the print side of journalism. As far as jobs go, this is – literally – the worst part of the worst industry in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Given that job market, why would any students want to major in print journalism? More importantly – why would any ethical college or university allow those students to do so?

College today costs an obscene amount of money, an outrageous expense that’s often justified by the extra earning potential that college graduates enjoy over those who do not earn a college degree. But median wages for college graduates (adjusted for inflation) are shrinking, not growing. And given the collapsing job prospects in print journalism, it seems to me mad to invest tens of thousands of dollars in training to work for newspapers.

And, yes, I wrote “training.” Journalism schools long have considered themselves professional schools, with a focus on training over scholarship, and if you doubt that, consider the relative dearth of PhDs on university journalism faculties, compared with the large number of adjunct faculty and instructors. But it’s going to be increasingly difficult for journalism schools to retain support within their universities if employment prospects in the profession for which they are training their students continue to collapse at the rate that newspapers’ are.

Students are wise to all this, of course. I’m hearing plenty of anecdotal accounts that students are abandoning print journalism, choosing instead to apply or transfer to programs in online journalism, public relations and communications. Add that newspaper companies are no longer enjoying the massive double-digit annual profit margins that led them to fund million- and billion-dollar foundations to support journalism education, and journalism schools are facing a one-two punch to their revenue with many feeling declining enrollment and donation support.

Fortunately, there’s some very good news in the LinkedIn analysis. Take a look at the top three growing industries over the past five years. There’s the Internet at number two and Online Publishing at number three. That’s the future of journalism education right there – fulfilling the growing need for instruction and guidance in profitable and community-building communication in the growing online publishing media.

Unfortunately, too many journalism faculties aren’t well staffed for this shift. While the core principles of sound reporting, clear writing and honest imagery remain for online journalism, today’s journalism students also need instruction in entrepreneurship, as well as building and leading communities in a dynamic, real-time, interactive publishing environment – skills where print veterans too often lack needed years of real-world experience. Worse, too many print-focused instructors advocate journalists maintaining distance from the communities they cover in the name of objectivity – advice that I believe harms 21st century journalism students.

The situation reminds me of the dilemma that newspapers have faced over the past generation, as they tried to diversify the ethnicity of their newsrooms, while at first holding their size steady, then laying off workers. It’s next to impossible to make the numbers work for adding new people from different backgrounds into a work environment that you’re trying to shrink. It’s far easier to diversify a growing industry, where employment opportunities abound.

So, too, will it be difficult for journalism schools to find the empty positions to recruit and hire community-minded entrepreneurial online journalists – who often have plenty of competing career opportunities – while those schools feel funding pressure due to the newspaper industry’s collapse. Journalism schools shouldn’t abandon instruction in print journalism, for jobs and opportunities remain the field. And the history of print journalism needs to remain a part of any journalism or communication school’s curriculum, for the lessons learned (and ignored) by that industry remain instructive to publishers and journalists in any medium.

But with the newspaper industry collapsing faster than any other segment of the American economy, it’s time to quit actively directing students into print. FWIW, I could make the same argument about many professional schools in which colleges and universities recruit and admit far more students that their fields need, including law schools and some departments of business schools. Over-recruitment of students for shrinking fields is an emerging national scandal in higher education. Or, at least, it ought to be.

Students considering professional programs deserve hard facts about job market in those fields, not to discourage them from learning, but to help them be fully informed about their prospects in the future. The primary responsibility for journalists is to tell the truth. So journalism educators should lead the way.

If you thought print was dying, well, according to that chart, it’s not even started to get really sick yet. Life is going to get much, much, much worse for the print industry.

The Flurry study cited above showed that while the percentage of all money spent on advertising that went to television and radio ads roughly matched the percentage of time people spent watching TV and listening to radio, the percentage of money spent on print advertising was nearly five times larger than the percentage of time people spent reading print, versus consuming other media.

In short, even with all the recent cuts in print advertising revenue, the ad industry is still way overspending on print versus the amount of time consumers are paying attention to it.

So if advertisers are overspending on print, they must be underspending on some other medium, right? While the Flurry study found significant underspending on Web advertising, the real opportunities were in mobile – where the study found consumers were spending 23 percent of their time but industry was spending just one percent of its ad dollars.

From my reading of the Flurry report, it appears that they attributed time on iOS and Android devices as time spent on mobile. But a lot of the time that I spent on my iPhone I spend looking at the Web, and it’s unclear to me whether the ads I see on my mobile Web browser would be attributed to the Web category or the mobile one. If I’m at all representative of the rest of the population, there’s a blurred line between the Web and mobile for this sort of analysis.

Regardless, the Flurry study suggests that there’s much more growth to come in ad spending on Web and mobile as the ad industry lags changes in consumer behavior. Whether than becomes Web ad spending, Web spending targeted at mobile, or some new, emerging format for mobile advertising, people are spending too much time on these media, relative to what business is spending to reach them, for advertisers not to make the switch and chase them. At some point, the market will balance and more of that print ad market share will flow to online.

Let’s not forget that advertising is just one part of the revenue picture, either. What do I do when I’m not reading Websites on my tablet? I’m reading eBooks. Frequent OJR readers should be well familiar by now with my evangelism for eBooks. I hope that the Flurry study will further encourage you to get into that marketplace, as well. As people spend more time online and with mobile, there are direct sales opportunities there for content publishers, whether that be through eBooks, apps, movies or something else we’ve yet to envision, in addition to ad sales opportunities.

What you see in this chart probably reflects your perspective on the changes disrupting the news industry – as evidence of continuing doom in the print publishing industry, or as a road map to the ongoing gold rush in online media. Just because newspaper executives who drove all the disruptive challengers and potential innovators from their industry can’t figure out how to make money online doesn’t prove in any way that money isn’t there to be made. The Flurry chart should make the opportunities clear.

More layoffs are coming to print newsrooms. Companies that entrust their future to managers who’ve spent their entire careers in print will continue to lose market share, and fail. But there’s plenty of money there for people who can build the expertise to use Web and mobile media to solve problems for advertisers and consumers more effectively than a declining print medium can.

The picture’s clear. Are you willing to look at it?

Here’s an important point I’d like to give a bit more time than we had in the chat:

If ads aren’t selling themselves, you’re not ready to sell

The question: “Can a journalist learn to sell advertising?” My response? Ultimately, you don’t need to. Not the way that most journalists (in my experience) envision what “selling advertising” to mean.

Our first advertisers on my family’s websites came to us. They were members of the community, loved what we were doing and wanted to make sure that we had the commitment and the resources to keep the site going. Other journalist entrepreneurs I’ve met have had the same experience. If you build a large enough community of readers, who are engaged in the topic or neighborhood you’re covering, advertisers will come to you looking to get access to those readers.

Believe or not, some businesses really do take the long view. They understand that anything that helps promote the health and prosperity of their community helps their business in the long run. Businesses do better when they’re surrounded by other successful businesses – not isolated in some uninhabited backwater. So if you’ve built a resource that’s helping to engage and strengthen the local community, these businesses will want to help you to succeed, as well.

Many advertisers are also desperate to find effective successors to the local newspaper ads that they (or their predecessors) used to place to connect with engaged local consumers. If they see you as reaching the potential customers they need to reach, they’ll come looking for you, checkbook open, trying to place an ad campaign.

If that’s not happening? Well, that’s often a sign that local businesses don’t yet see you as a valuable community resource, or attracting a significant number of consumers they want to reach. So instead of spending time on the uncomfortable task of pitching skeptical local advertisers, work instead on building your readership community. When your site gets to the point that money’s coming to look for you, that’s when you’ll know you’re ready to turn your site into a business.

This is why it’s important to either start your site before you need it as an income source, or to put away enough cash to live on for a year before quitting your job to start a site. Twelve months seems to be the consensus – among the chat participants and other others I’ve met – on how long it takes to build a commercially viable readership community around a start-up local news website.

If you’re worried about how much to charge those first potential advertisers, why not take some time to look into what other websites covering your community (or comparable nearby communities) are charging? Consider yourself a potential advertiser on their sites, then call and ask for a quote. You’re not being dishonest – heck, if someone can make you a deal, maybe it’s worth the investment to promote your new site. And your research moight help you to decide what would be a fair and competitive rate for local Web advertising in your community.

Another question: “How did you learn to close the deal?”

My answer? I just had to learn how to shut up. Hey, these businesses wanted to support our site. They wanted to order a campaign. Instead of saying, “Thank you! I’ll send the invoice today!” I was engaging them like I would a news source, probing them to see if they really meant what they were trying to say.

Nice technique for a reporter. Stupid, stupid, stupid technique for a publisher. Just shut up and book the deal.

Now and then someone will come to you who’s not a good fit for your site. Perhaps they sell something you know your community won’t accept. Or perhaps you suspect that their margin’s too thin to be able to afford your ads, given the response you think they’ll get. Different advertisers have different needs, which is why I think it’s important for news publishers to diversify their ad products. On our violin site, we created a (relatively) low cost directory listing for shops and smaller businesses who couldn’t always afford our display banner ad rates, but who still wanted contact with our community. And I have suggested to some potential advertisers that they might find other communities that are a better fit for their products. (I always phrase it that way, rather than saying “No.” Perhaps my aversion to the word “no” is my Disney training talking.)

Ultimately, you’ll need to engage advertisers and potential advertisers – to learn their pains and talk frankly about the ways you can, or can’t, help them build their businesses. But when you’re starting, and booking your first few customers, just shut up (save a “thank you”) and let them help you help your community.