The newsroom at The Daily Telegraph. | Credit: victoriapeckham/Flickr

The person who spoke this line was Matt Berger, the director of digital media at Marketplace. What he meant was there is no business model that will support an organization with 100 reporters writing 100 stories (or, as we used to refer to the newsroom, 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters).

When you are going up against a World Wide Web that has so much real-time content, it’s almost impossible to gain enough traction to adequately monetize the work of a single soul banging away at a single keyboard. This old model was only possible when information was scarce. And information was scarce because it was delivered on newsprint. (And yes, there are still a few places that can achieve the necessary scale in the digital realm, and we all know who they are.)

Of course, there is nothing earth-shattering about this concept. It’s blatantly obvious. And yet, when you stop to consider it, you wonder how anyone who cares about the future of the industry could be thinking about anything else. Or why so many news sites are still swimming upstream by trying to sell ads against work churned out by individual journalists.

The implications of this challenge are unsettling. The single “article” — journalism’s basic unit of commerce — will only rarely generate enough value to cover its cost of production. (Gulp.) But as I began to consider what scalable journalism meant, I also realized how many conversations I had had recently that were really about addressing this very problem.

I recently sat down with Steve Rosenbaum, author of “Curation Nation” and founder of Magnify.net. His startup seeks to address this issue by helping news sites appropriately harness content that’s out there already, rather than attempt to produce it themselves. Plenty of people might want to visit the homepage of Field & Stream to watch a video about boat trailers or fishing lures. But it’s not realistic to think that magazine’s staffers can churn out enough quality video to satisfy the demand of either the audience or advertisers. Again, it’s a question of scale.

Yet the Internet is brimming with videos about these topics already. So Magnify reels in an array of relevant videos that editors can choose from. Field & Stream provides the context (you’re watching this in the confines of their site’s video page) and the curation (they choose the content that they feel is most valuable). The best part: The magazine can sell pre-roll ads or ads on the site even though the content (the actual video) was created elsewhere. Depending on the arrangement, the magazine either pockets the revenue or shares it with whoever made the video. This last point marks an evolution of the concept of curation. Not long ago, showing someone else’s video on your site was considered “theft” by some. Now, many just call it “distribution.”

The issue of scale is also lurking in the background throughout the recent report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism on Post-Industrial Journalism (though it weighs in at an industrial-length 122 pages). Much of the report discusses the need for a new workflow that is more open and responds to the ways in which information is currently assembled and consumed. (For a smarter, Cliff Notes version of this concept, read the post from my friend and former editor Reg Chua.)

Obviously, the layers of editors that were once charged with policing copy have no place in the modern, distributed newsroom. But editing — the process of vetting, sharpening and enriching content — still holds tremendous value. I spoke recently with Roman Heindorff, one of the founders of Camayak.com, a browser-based product that helps organize a newsroom’s workflow. The founders were trying to address an increasingly common problem: how to bring sense to the news organization of the future, which will be made up principally of part-time contributors working on myriad projects, sometimes across vast geographies. Camayak has begun to gain traction with campus papers, which often have hundreds of occasional contributors who need a seamless way to collaborate with each other. The overall goal is to make the most efficient use of available human resources to produce greater amounts of content. The founders also believe there is a virtuous circle involved: The more people are able to use the platform to collaborate successfully, the better the content.

Marketplace’s Berger approaches the problem from the perspective of structured journalism. Achieving appropriate scale requires putting lots of up-front effort into building a digital product that doesn’t wilt with the day’s news. This means creating a database of content that the audience can dip back into multiple times and still draw new conclusions. The database can be regularly refreshed with new content to extend its life.

His Exhibit A is a Marketplace feature called Future Jobs-O-Matic, an interactive tool that lets you browse hundreds of professions to see how many people are employed as welders or what the average salary of a machinist might be (Answer: $39,000). The database is updated every two years, but people keep coming back to it, sharing it, using it in the classroom, etc. Buried in the data, of course, are also nuggets that traditional “article-producing” journalists can use as building blocks for stories.

The implications of what this all means from where I sit are far reaching. Much of what I do involves teaching students the rudiments of how to produce an article — which has an ever-shrinking economic value. Clearly, this needs to be rethought. And those of us who inhabit journalism schools need to create an environment that pushes students to produce journalistic artifacts that have a shelf life, that draw content from the crowd and that still provide a platform for storytelling and for meeting the information needs of the public. Should be a snap.

That’s part of the fun of events like this – discovering interesting and useful sites you hadn’t heard of before. If you’ve been on the Web for a while, you might remember sites like the NCSA Top Five of the Day and the GNN Select, which delivered a fresh supply of quirky and cool sites to early Web surfers. But in recent years, many of us have settled in with a predictable collection of sites that we check on a regular basis. I know I have, and I suspect many other web surfers have done the same.

• Related: Two Cities, Two Gatherings for Two Kinds of Content Creators, by Staci D. Kramer

So I welcomed this chance to inject some fresh choices into my bookmark list. Here are some sites I gleaned from the ONA conference:

OpenCroquet.org: Looking for an open source operating system with a 3-D user interface and built on peer-to-peer architecture that will help enable team collaboration on a variety of projects?

OK, if that sentence made your eyes glaze over, let’s try this: Are you a geek? Do you aspire to become one? Then click over to this project, brought to you by some of the folks who developed computing’s first graphical user interfaces. (And, no, that wasn’t Bill Gates … )

Even if you aren’t a geek and don’t want to become one, you might at least concede that geeks build fun stuff that makes great stories. The open source software movement is developing many fascinating tools like Open Croquet, and better yet, the people developing them are willing to talk. Open source program code means none of the nasty non-disclosure agreements proprietary software developers often insist that journalists sign to get access to sources. You can find an extensive list of current open-source software projects on Wikipedia.

Lynda.com: Need to learn Flash, Photoshop or some other computer tool and you don’t have the time or budget to fly to events like ONA? Lynda.com will hook you up with all the instructional videos you want, served online in QuickTime-format, for 25 bucks a month. Heck, the last ColdFusion book I bought set me back 50 bucks. And that covered just one program.

Five Steps to Multimedia Reporting: Whoa! Not ready to start learning new software yet? Looking for a basic introduction to this whole “online journalism” thing? Then let Jane Stevens at UC Berkeley walk you through storyboarding, fieldwork, editing and assembling your first online package. Even if you’re an online veteran, click through for a welcome refresher course.

Eyetrack III: If you haven’t looked yet at the latest finding from this annual research project, do yourself and your site a favor and click over to the Poynter Institute’s website.

Researchers recorded the eye movements of several readers as they browsed news websites. They then combined those results with the various pages’ layouts to create “heat maps” showing how well page elements drew the attention of readers’ eyes. Researchers tested several layouts for navigation, advertisements and story copy and described each option’s effectiveness. If you are thinking about a redesign, Eyetrack III provides some real-world data that can help you avoid design mistakes. And even if you are not planning a redesign, a visit to the Eyetrack site might convince you to start thinking about one.

The Northwest Voice: The Bakersfield Californian has assembled one of the more sophisticated attempts at community-developed news content in the industry. Sure, other websites have been publishing news and information from their readers for years. But Mary Lou Fulton’s team also publishes the Northwest Voice as a print publication, freely delivering copies of readers’ news and photos throughout the community every other week.

Flickr.com: The site provides a hassle-free solution for managing digital photos. No, big sites with custom editorial systems won’t need this. But little guys and bloggers looking for a quick way to get their images online might want to give it a look.

Flickr accepts photo uploads from email and camera phones and allows users to publish photos publicly or only to selected users or groups. The site also generates HTML code that users can cut and paste onto their website or blog. Or you can distribute your photos via RSS. The site imposes a 10 MB upload limit on free accounts but allows you to upload more photos for a monthly fee.

LiveJournal.com: Ana Marie Cox’s lunchtime speech on Saturday illuminated the rift that persists between online writers with traditional news media backgrounds and independents who got their start on the Web.

As OJR’s Staci Kramer wrote last week, blogging is both a publishing tool and a social culture. If you don’t blog but are looking to find an example of blogging as culture, visit LiveJournal.com and click on the “Latest Posts” link. That will take you to a page displaying the most recent entries published from the various writers using LiveJournal’s blogging tool. Prepare yourself for a random collection of thoughts, opinions, personal experiences and sometimes … insight.

Balance LiveJournal’s collection of posts with a visit to Technorati to see its list of the 100 most linked-to blogs on the Web. Technorati’s list, which updates constantly, often includes some of the more popular journalist bloggers, including Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan and 2004 Online Journalism Award winner Dan Gillmor.

Which brings me to… the complete list of 2004 Online Journalism Award winners. The BBC once again captured the top award, but the complete list of finalists in all categories includes many great story ideas, reporting techniques and multimedia tricks that any dedicated web publisher could rip off … er, find inspiration from.

Coming Thursday: More from the ONA conference, with columns from OJR’s Staci Kramer and 2004 Online Journalism Awards Finalist Mark Glaser.