There are economic factors to consider, however. NBC paid about $1.2 billion for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympics. The company had to recoup that money somehow. Rolling the marquee events, highlights, and personal stories into a single primetime package consolidated eyeballs and, by extension, boosted ad revenues. The strategy seems to have worked, as ratings for the London Olympics were reportedly the highest of any in decades. People clearly tuned in despite the time-shifted broadcasts. NBC Research President Alan Wurtzel even told Reuters reporter Liana B. Baker that people appeared even more likely to tune in when they already knew the results.

Of course, it’s tough to credit any strategy, alone or in combination, when the company had a monopoly on coverage. Television viewers didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so the only solid conclusion one can draw from NBC’s ratings success is that a lot of people wanted to watch the Olympics and did.

Whatever you think about NBC’s broadcast strategy, though, you have to give them some credit for pushing the envelope just a little further on the digital front. The company’s transmedia approach to covering the Olympics was a promise, even if not quite fulfilled, of a future in which the Internet and TV (and, really, all media) finally, harmoniously, converge into a kind of unified and, yes, very social experience.

I got to hear about some of the ingredients of that digital strategy when I was invited, along with other local journalists and members of the Online News Association, to NBC4 Studios in Burbank for a sort of digital show-and-tell.

Mekahlo Medina, the local affiliate’s tech and social media reporter, tried to capture the spirit of this drive toward digital convergence when he reminded us that “TV is social and always has been.”

Medina put up a black-and-white slide showing people gathered around an early television set and pointed out that families and friends used to make TV viewing a social event. Advance slide and we see some dude on the couch, feet on an ottoman, a laptop glowing on his lap and a smartphone in hand while he’s watching TV…alone. The implication here is that even if technology seems at first to have isolated us, social media is making TV a shared experience again as people interact with their friends remotely. Interesting theory.

That said, on the social media front, a lot of what we saw has become rather standard fare (or at least should be) for any news outlet, TV or otherwise. Among the takeaways, which should sound familiar by now:

- create a Twitter hash tag to help guide or at least aggregate the conversation
- retweet, reply and favorite your followers on Twitter
- Storify events when appropriate
- encourage user-generated content using social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest
- ask questions on Facebook to get users more engaged
- create dedicated Facebook tabs for special content

But I did hear at least one useful tip I had never considered. NBC4 did a Facebook countdown by posting a new cover photo every day leading up to the opening ceremony.

For now, changing your cover photo counts as a significant activity in Facebook’s algorithm, at least according to Olsen Ebright, the NBCLA.com producer who headed the social media charge. The result is that your Facebook page will surface on your fans’ walls every day. It’s a strategy that could be useful for other Facebook campaigns, too.

So, how did the local affiliate fare with its social media strategy? All told during the Olympics, NBC4 saw an above-average gain in Twitter followers, and its Facebook likes roughly doubled, according to stats Ebright shared with the group.

Outstanding numbers to be sure, but it’s tough to conclude that any of the aforementioned tactics had much to do with them. As it turns out, it was the tried-and-true approach of a big-giveaway contest that appeared to generate the sudden spike in Facebook likes. The prize? A check for $40,000 to help some lucky fan pay his or her mortgage for a year.

In fact, a series of contest giveaways (iPads, $400 gas cards, theme park tickets) and a campaign for charity were probably the main reasons NBCLA.com shot to 350,000 Facebook fans from about 20,000 just last fall.

Call it an investment. Ebright told me that four years ago Google searches were still the largest referrer to their site, with Facebook providing a smaller but still sizable share. More recently, the two have alternated in the top spot, and during the Olympics, Facebook consistently surpassed Google as the single biggest referrer of site traffic to NBCLA.com.

Not every news organization will be able to afford such big prizes, but NBC4′s success is a sobering reminder that if you want people to come inside to see your content, you first might have to offer an incentive just to open the door.

As impressive as NBC4’s execution of its social media strategy was, though, the really exciting stuff came from the mother ship. There were two standout strategies — at least for this observer — that got to the core of what transmedia can mean.

One of them was a little gem of an innovation that comes, surprisingly, from the world of music: Shazam. For those who aren’t familiar with Shazam, it’s an app for your tablet or smartphone that can “hear” music and identify whatever song you happen to be listening to. That may not sound like an obvious tool for a journalist, but Shazam has recently entered into partnerships with other media organizations, including NBC, to offer some intriguing applications for their audio recognition software.

Nabisco tapped Shazam to help market one of its trademark crackers, Wheat Thins, by linking a TV ad to Twitter and Facebook.

“Through Shazam’s technology, the audio in the television ad identifies the sound and links to a pre-written Twitter post. Those who tweet the post get a free sample of the product,” wrote Laurie Sullivan, reporting for MediaPost.com.

But NBC appears to be the real test case. Shazam put that partnership front and center on its website, encouraging users to “tune in and tag” Olympic moments at anytime while watching NBC’s coverage.

So with what were the curious, tech-savvy members of the audience rewarded? I can’t say firsthand, since I’m an on-again, off-again cord-cutter (that is, I try to save money by ditching cable and instead get my TV shows and news via the Internet). But according to the site, when you hit the Shazam button on your phone or tablet while watching any of NBC’s Olympics coverage, you were treated to any of a number of goodies, including:

- a schedule of events
- athlete bios, news and photos
- up-to-the-minute results
- the latest medal tally
- interactive viewer polls

It only takes a little imagination to extend what NBC and Nabisco have already done with the Shazam app.

A lot of people, for instance, listen to the news as audio while they drive or otherwise move about. A tech-savvy media outlet could reach out to its audience while a major story is breaking and locate potential citizen journalists near the event. The CJ’s hear the request, hit the Shazam button, and get a special link that they can use to submit photos or video straight from their phones.

TV stations could link their viewers directly to extended Web content with a touch of a button. They could direct their audience online to get charts and other data visualizations, exclusive Web videos, relevant stats, helpful background and explainers to give context. All this without making anyone get up from the couch, say, to scan one of those increasingly obsolete QR codes.

And, of course, there’s the already-proven social media application. It’s like having a share button on your TV and in your radio. Your audience sees it or hears it, Shazams it, and shares it on their favorite social media network. Now their friends and followers have a direct link to your story.

The other exciting glimpse into the future of transmedia coverage was also the most obvious — the oft touted if much trashed attempt by NBC to live stream every event via the Web and mobile devices.

I won’t go too deeply into the details, since this territory is well trod (follow any of the links at the top of this post). The short of it is that for the first time fans of the Olympics had access to the raw uninterrupted stream of events both prominent and obscure.

Using NBC’s smartphone and tablet apps or its Live Extra website, anyone tired of the main event on TV could switch over to the live stream and watch something else, like badminton or trampoline (did they really make that an Olympic event?!). They could even watch multiple events simultaneously.

Cool, right? Well, yes, though I do wonder how many people would tune in if C-SPAN did something similar. (“Split your screen and get four simultaneous committee meetings live from the capital!”)

And this is where the complaining starts. The streams were not without their hiccups. A lot of complaints centered on poor video quality and service interruptions, which, in the 100-meter dash, could well mean you missed the entire event.

The Android app, for its part, garnered a measly average of 2 stars from the user reviews in the Market. Which brings us back to those angry Twitcrits.

In defense of NBC, I might offer this: no new technology, especially when deployed so ambitiously, ever comes off flawlessly.

Louis C.K. said it best when he told Conan O’Brien in a clip that went viral on YouTube, “Everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy.”

In his four-minute rant, Louis mentioned an airline passenger who, having just discovered that he had in-flight access to the Internet with his laptop, gets upset when it stops working.

“How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago!”

Indeed.

Many traditional journalists reacted much in the same way to digital and social media, and, in journalism and mass communication schools across the country, professors often railed against and slowed the development of digital media programs, even as the rest of the world moved rapidly on.
A year ago, in this journal, I wrote about an experiment in which I added digital elements to my Intro to Journalism class. As the associate dean and lead multimedia professor where I teach at Florida International University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) in Miami, I thought it was time to include Web development and the use of social media in classes before students were admitted fully to our program, instead of in the capstone journalism course when they were exiting the school.

Intro to Journalism is traditionally offered as a lecture class, not a skills class, with periodic quizzes based on a textbook, a mid-term and final. Some of my students were taken aback when, on the first day of class, I asked them to develop a WordPress site and post a written assignment. Those students who had a sense of the digital now, whose reach was beyond personal posts on Facebook or Twitter, were enthusiastic about the opportunity. There were 112 students in the lecture class; in hindsight, a couple of teacher assistants to help read the postings and comment on design elements would have made this a more efficient experiment.

Still, a year after the experiment, those students who were in my Intro class and were now in my capstone multimedia class were more advanced in developing and writing for the Web than the students who had been in more traditional such classes. These students had an extra year to meld journalistic values and reporting skills in a digital environment.

While teaching Intro, I thought it was a good time to gather a few faculty I knew who also were infusing digital and social media components into their classes. Our school has two departments—journalism and public relations/advertising—and though we newly had added a multimedia course to our core undergraduate curriculum, in which students are taught Final Cut, Soundslides and Audacity, and had updated our graduate programs (a Spanish Language Journalism master’s program and Global Strategic Communications program) with Web and social media work, we had not yet developed a formal digital major or graduate program. I thought this would be a good opportunity for us to compare notes and maybe find a path to a more cohesive way of teaching new media in our school.

I didn’t want to call a formal meeting, or ask faculty to serve on yet another committee to evaluate our digital relevance. As the ongoing change in media lends itself to improvisation, I sent out a vague email saying that I was holding a Digital Rap Session in the dean’s conference room. My idea was to gather a small, free-wheeling circle of professors, sort of like a musical jam session, where we could basically riff about our in-class digital experiences.

As nobody RSVPed, I thought I’d be having a meeting of one. I was surprised, actually thrilled, when eight faculty from journalism, public relations and advertising, some technology-oriented and some more traditionally-based, wandered into the conference room. Issues relevant to the seismic shifts in the media were usually discussed in separate departmental meetings.

Some of the faculty came to this Session out of interest, some out of curiosity—”What’s a Digital Rap Session?” But there were no accidental tourists here. Of the eight who showed up, all had either been infusing their courses with either theoretical discussions about digital media or hands-on work.

Several professors had been teaching our new multimedia production course, so there was discussion as to whether we were being realistic expecting students to learn Final Cut, Audacity, Soundslides and Web design in one semester. A mild debate also broke out about WordPress—as most of us were using it for Web work, did we need to purchase a dedicated WordPress server?

We found common ground—and were surprised—when we discussed student competency in digital skills. Several of us had made informal surveys and discovered that only about 20 percent of our students felt comfortable working on the Web or in video. Was this a national trend, or was it because our school is a minority-serving school—71 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African-American, 3 percent Asian—and weren’t exposed to the opportunities in their high schools?

The hour Rap Session ended without a commitment to meet again or to pursue any kind of action plan to develop new curriculum. But I felt the meeting was successful, if only for the easy-going atmosphere and collegial gathering of faculty from the three different disciplines.

Unstated, but apparent, was that, in spite of individual efforts to teach students digital media, the school needed a more cohesive pedagogical approach.

I let the Rap Sessions sit for the rest of the fall semester, then put out another call for a Session immediately after the spring semester started.

The number of faculty in attendance grew to ten. The need to create a digital program had fermented—we universally agreed that we had to produce an organized program that addressed the concepts and theories of digital communication, in addition to our digitally-infused courses.

Initially, we thought that the group that most needed these skills were recent graduates and people already out in industry who wanted to retrain, so we first went about developing a generic 16-credit Certificate in Digital Communication that could appeal to journalists, public relations reps, advertisers and interested lay people. Faculty from both of our departments contributed ideas for hands-on Web work and more theoretical courses in digital communication.

Over the next few meetings, as more faculty joined the discussions—the Sessions now had more than 50 percent of our full-time professors—we thought of expanding the certificate into a master’s program, as many schools are doing. But ongoing conversations with industry partners indicated that they wanted newly graduated Bachelor of Science students with the skills and understanding of the digital age. A formal survey of undergrads indicated that they were enthusiastic about enrolling in a digital media program.

Our group finally decided that it was critical for us to teach the fundamentals of the digital era in a uniform undergraduate program. As we developed the curriculum, we felt it was necessary to make it possible for students to overlap some of the digital media courses with journalism, public relations and advertising courses, so that they could benefit from the merging of majors.

Our new major—the Digital Media Studies—requires students to take the same core courses in writing and grammar, law and ethics, visual literacy and global mass media as our journalism, public relations and advertising students. Courses more specifically dedicated to digital media, including Introduction to Digital Media, a study of metrics and the impact of social media on social movements, follow the core. Students then have the choice of continuing in one of two directions: media management and entrepreneurship, or advanced production project-based courses that integrate Web, video and writing.

The major flew through school and university curriculum committees and was unanimously approved by the university’s faculty senate. It begins in fall 2012.

Throughout the Rap Sessions, I kept waiting for faculty objections that could slow or possibly derail the process. But there were none. Only surprisingly good-natured collegial discussions. The Sessions seemed to capitalize on a rare moment, when the timing and growth of the digital movement obviated the need for the school to produce a program to maintain its relevancy.

Although I spearheaded the Sessions, there was no one leader. Faculty from both departments came and went, felt the freedom to join or not, and contributed ideas.

In the end, the Rap Sessions broke down more than the walls between departments and disciplines, traditionalists and new media types, researchers and practicing professionals, SJMC veterans and the newly arrived. The free-wheeling forum of riffing professionals stepped outside the formal academic setting of assigned committees, and produced a collaborative effort by faculty connected in common purpose. In so doing, it reflected what the Digital Era seems to be increasingly about.

By the time what we now call legacy media was able to present the news it was inherently old.

Times, of course, have changed. News organizations have to change, too.

That’s the basic idea behind why at TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism, where I work, we’re going digital first with our student media and realigning our structure to allow us to make that happen. We’ve been converging our student media operations over the past few years and this is the next logical — and perhaps most important — step.

We have a four-day-a-week newspaper, the TCU Daily Skiff, a weekly television newscast, “TCU News Now” (which also produces daily updates), Image magazine and our one-year-old converged website, TCU 360.

Since 2009, our student media have moved into a new converged newsroom, began holding joint budget meetings, moved to a single website and switched the copy desk from the newspaper copy desk to copy editing for all of student media. That was just the start.

Now, the separate news organizations are being reorganized into a single news gathering force that will focus on digital and then use the content that is produced to serve the legacy outlets. There is a caveat. Because of its much different cycle, Image will remain largely independent initially. As will the109.org, a community news website that our program also runs.

Rather than centering the newsgathering on a particular media platform, the goal will be to have reporters produce content in real time and digitally. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that has to be embraced and sooner, not later.

In our setup, a student general manager will oversee all of student media. Working with that top leader will be a group of journalists focused mostly on content – news, sports and visuals, plus an operations manager to make sure the content gets where it needs to go.

The news group, in particular, will be broken into several teams, or small groups of reporters and a team leader/senior reporter who will focus on beats to come up with and produce stories. Teams could include administration, campus life, Greek life and academics.

Under the operations group will be an engagement person working with social media and a copy desk that will edit stories and post them online, in addition to production specialists who will make sure the paper and broadcast are prepared.

One manifestation of this digital focus could be live coverage of a campus event that takes tweets and relies on an editor – like the rewrite desk of old – to produce that content for print publication.

Steve Buttry, who works for the aptly named Digital First Media and is an alumnus of TCU, helped consult with us – cementing the ideas many of us have had for some time.

The biggest difference from Buttry’s recommendations and what we are doing is that, for now, we’re not reducing the publication or broadcast schedule. Many of us agreed with Buttry. We’d like to go further, but the decision was there simply wasn’t enough time to make such a drastic change on such relative short notice. A university committee governs our student media and the committee hires leaders for each traditional media outlet, according to the student media by-laws. There are also concerns of how advertisers would react.

Digital first is something you’ve likely heard quite a bit about in the past few days. The New Orleans Times-Picayune announced last week that it’s moving to a digital focus and reducing its daily print schedule to three days a week.

The University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald also announced last week that it’s reducing its print schedule to focus on digital, among many ambitious and exciting initiatives.

The Red & Black, the University of Georgia’s independent newspaper, reduced its print schedule to weekly to refocus on digital last year.

In some cases, but not all, a reduction in the print schedule is fueled by a desire to save money.

At a university, particularly one where student media is partly subsidized through an operating budget, we have the luxury that that is not the case.

We get to do this for the right reasons — that it’s the best way to prepare our students for the jobs they will have and because it is how people get their news now.

Simply put, digital first provides more up-to-date news in a more engaging way to better serve the public.

No one that I know in this business is anti-newspaper. However, those in touch with reality know changes like this are a necessity. We can’t cling to daily printed sheets of paper forever.

If there are skeptics, and I’m sure there are some, take comfort in the fact that if you are focused digitally the content will inherently be able to still meet the needs of the print or broadcast products. In fact, when done right, more news content should be produced and available for legacy outlets.

What we’ve found in our discussions about moving to digital first is that reducing the production time associated with traditional media allows for more time to be spent on producing journalism – and isn’t that what we’re all about, anyways?

Universities can take the lead. Some are doing that and we should. There is less pressure and fewer risks for us. If we want our students to enter an industry with a future we have to do our part to figure out new ways to provide great journalism.

I’ve shared a lot here. Now for the most important part: What are your suggestions and advice for going digital first?

Thanks in advance.

I arrived in June at USC Annenberg as executive in residence after 30 years in newspaper and online journalism, the last nine as top editor at The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Sacramento Bee. Since then I’ve been digging into questions that had become increasingly urgent to me as an editor.

They boil down to this: How do we fundamentally change the ways journalism works to serve people better in the digital era? How do we change not just the technology of journalism, but its culture?

In the past, newsrooms defined success in proprietary terms: “owning the story,” or beating the competition. If people wanted to know, they had to come to us — these were our stories, after all. This idea has never really held true. Now it is failing, out of step in a culture that is producing its own information and leans more toward sharing stories than owning them.

Open journalism captures a different mindset, one we’re starting to see in breaking news coverage and web journalism. It says: Everyone owns the story. Let’s all get it right.

Expert journalism is still needed, maybe more than ever, for reporting, verifying, providing context and holding institutions accountable. Yet it’s only part of the picture as people act, individually or collectively, to create ways to generate or share information — new capacity for community knowledge.

I’m wondering how we hook up the wires to power a new idea, one that makes good journalism a joint effort of experts and the public and that supports quality. Open journalism, not a new phrase but still a nascent idea, offers a framework.

I talked recently with Brian Boyer, news apps editor at the Chicago Tribune, who seems like one of the happiest guys in journalism. Boyer is an open-source believer; his team blogs and posts all of its software for others to use. Recently, he ordered T-shirts for his team that say ‘Show Your Work.”

That’s the ethos journalism needs now. But how do we get from “owning the story” to “show your work?”

Journalism isn’t software code, but it is a discipline with standards and techniques that, like code, can be replicated and disseminated. It can be worked on openly, documented and shared, which is where I think the open source idea can be instructive.

We have to remember that news companies didn’t invent journalism and don’t own it. Like the people who named open-source software (not that long ago, in 1998), those who want a public good definition for journalism have a chance to say what that means in a competitive, fragmented marketplace.

Open culture doesn’t mean you don’t compete (transparency and responsiveness are business advantages) or that everything is shared. It can save on costs and spur innovation. Journalism is ripe for it.

This open journalism theory is an idea in progress, one I’d like to test and flesh out. (Below is some background on what I’ve been exploring) What can you add?

I’ll be sharing my conclusions on the USC Annenberg site and hope to offer a compendium of ideas. I’m going for 100, but that too might change.

This week I’ll be at the Online News Association conference in Boston, so if you’re there, look for me. Meantime, please respond via comments to this post (cross-posted at my personal Posterous blog) or via:

Email: melanias@usc.edu

Twitter: melaniesill

G+: Melanie Sill

***

Background: Here’s some of the territory I’ve been exploring:

The news discussion right now dwells heavily on distribution: platforms, channels, apps. I’m focusing on the labor-intensive work of original reporting on public affairs, particularly at the state and local level. That’s where news company contraction has left major holes. That gap also is where we have opportunity, in a changing marketplace, to advance a different kind of journalism.

A few influential people have outlined ideas for open journalism, yet so far no definition has stuck. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, has used the term open-source journalism and proved that transparency doesn’t impede competitive success. Media critics have argued via books and blogs for practices that redefine the relationship between people who do journalism and those who contribute to it and use it.

Outside the news business, people are working on community issues and information gaps in new ways. I’ve been following a Stanford student-led nonprofit called California Common Sense and its government “transparency data portal,” launched over the summer. CACs.org didn’t replace something that used to be done by newspapers or television. Instead, its corps of student programmers and analysts built a new web site that draws in government spending data of all sorts, presents it visually and invites users to scrutinize it. The site quickly caused a stir and plans to expand.

In Vermont, a restricted-access neighborhood site called Front Porch Forum has created authentic information exchange among people who live near one another, also engaging local elected officials. Its founder, Michael Wood-Lewis, says he’s not replicating journalism but “growing audience for local journalism.”

And as Hurricane Irene approached the East Coast, I was watching the nonprofit Crisis Commons site line up volunteers online to build a wiki-type information resource, which seemed to attract little notice from major news sites. From my sideline seat I wondered how journalists and entities such as Crisis Commons could work together more effectively in such situations.

These are just a few of a fast-multiplying number of groups being formed to provide information or work on community issues, mostly online, in new ways. They are resources for improving journalism, doing things media haven’t really done before, yet seem mostly untapped so far even as publishers have less to spend on original reporting.

It’s hard to talk about what’s hopeful in journalism without addressing what’s worrisome — the rapid decline in the numbers of journalists doing original reporting at the state and local level, the financial precariousness of both new and old media. Almost everyone running a newsroom of any size or funding source has some question about how long the money will last.

Yet open culture is a business principle of our times involving transparency, responsiveness and a focus on end users (citizens, readers, viewers). Journalism needs those ideas to be valuable and relevant. It needs open-source tools to reduce costs, collaboration to build capacity and two-way communication with audiences to inform strategy and tactics.

A framework for open journalism has emerged over the past few years, particularly in the way web culture and tools have opened up knowledge sharing. Along with organized efforts, countless peer-to-peer touches occur across blogs, Twitter and at meetups and conferences. Journalism has back channels where people are help each other sort out technically challenging work. Some are new, some aren’t: for instance, the NICAR-L listserv at Investigative Reporters and Editors, where journalists help each other every day on working with data and using new tools.

Hacker-journalists are joining newsrooms (developer jobs are among the hottest in the industry) and bringing new ideas, skills and attitudes into the mix. They’re connecting with a broader data explosion online that’s connecting journalism with science, government and others who’re turning numbers into stories and meaning.

Universities, foundations and philanthropy are active players in creating acts of journalism now along with learning and experimentation. Startup newsrooms, grant-funded enterprises and other new branches of journalism are helping each and are developing partnerships with new and old media. Professional organizations and journalism think tanks have amped up training. And collaboration is happening in some of the most territorial work of journalism, investigative reporting.

Journalism is opening up.

Yet much of this is occurring outside journalism proper, and many people I speak with see scant progress in mainstream news. The knowledge-sharing among journalists isn’t reaching beyond them to other communicators and users.

I think we’re still missing many chances, partly because we need to work on more systemic approaches to reinventing journalism relationships.

Here’s an example of one such system: American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, a system of signing up members and tapping their experience through email and web postings. The network has grown to include 120,000 registered sources tapped by 45 news partners in commercial and nonprofit media. Through the network, now expanding, journalists can solicit people’s knowledge to directly inform and improve reporting.

The idea of tapping into people’s experience is hard to debate; lacking systems to do it, resource-strapped newsrooms often don’t.

What’s the next breakthrough? What systems and frameworks does open journalism need to succeed not just as a concept, but as a new set of practices supported by people because they find them valuable?

And so we’ve endured years of conference panels, email exchanges, and blog posts about paywalls and paid content strategies, as publishers try to figure out exactly how much people are now willing to pay for news content.

Lost in this is the realization that people have been telling us – for generations – how much they’re willing to pay for news.

Start with newspapers. For most of my life, newspapers cost 25 or 50 cents per daily copy. Think how many stories appeared in each of those papers – perhaps a dozen or so staff-written stories at smaller papers, up to several dozen or more at a major metro. Add in the wire stories and syndicated features, too, and we’re talking about hundreds of items of content in each daily paper.

Now consider that the cost of the daily paper included home delivery of a physical copy and usually included a fair number of coupons, too. Subtract the value of the delivery, the copy on paper and the coupons. How much of that 25 or 50 cents is left? Not much. Divide that paltry remainder by the number of items of content in that paper. It ought to be clear that the marginal value to a consumer of each newspaper story is pretty much zero.

Let’s think about magazine stories. Magazines cost more, from a couple bucks to several dollars a copy. And they include fewer, though often longer and more in-depth, stories. Again, you’ve got the benefits of home delivery and a copy on paper (but typically not so many coupons as a newspaper, if any). Once you subtract the value of that delivery and the paper copy, you’re left with a much more than you had after you subtracted the same from the cost of a single issue of the newspaper. Divide that remainder by the number of stories in the magazine and you will probably find that each magazine article has some value – though it is small, ranging from a few cents to closer to a dollar for exceptional examples.

Still, it’s better than the newspaper articles’ value.

Now let’s consider books. A typical non-fiction book retails between $10 and $30 and usually has just one item of content within – the narrative of the book itself. (Anthologies are different, of course.) Again, you have the value of the printed copy, but there’s no home delivery (if there were, you paid extra for it) and almost always no coupons. Therefore, the marginal value of the content in a book is substantial – several dollars per work.

That’s the way it’s been in the past, and if you’re willing to face facts, that’s the way it remains today.

Consumers have told us what they believe the value of journalism to be. And in a market economy, consumers’ word is law. Incremental, commodity daily news reports have close to no cash value to the consumer. Longer, more in-depth magazine-style pieces have small but significant value, but almost always under a dollar and usually just a few cents.

Only book-length journalism has substantial per-unit value, in excess of $1 and often much more.

That is why I’ve been writing so much about eBooks lately. Incremental daily journalism traditionally has had no financial value to a publisher beyond its value as a vehicle for advertising. Magazine-length journalism has had some income value, but typically has relied upon a healthy amount of advertising income as well. Only book-length journalism has been able to rely consistently upon the income from its consumer value.

As Internet competition has cut the price of advertising, it has cut the income of publications – such as newspapers and many magazines – that are dependent upon the value of that advertising. But what the Internet took away from journalism in newspapers and magazines, it is giving back in books. Journalists who can produce book-length-and-quality work now have unprecedented ability to publish directly to a global marketplace. And the collapse in advertising revenue is not affecting them one bit.

Yes, there’s more competition in the book publishing space, too. But 1,000 eBook readers deliver a heck of a lot more income to a writer than 1,000 blog or newspaper website readers. If the journalism industry is going to keep professional reporters employed, books and eBooks are going to have to play a much larger role in this industry than they have in the past.

A kind of online summer school, the Mojo Learning Lab is running webinars, discussion, reference pointers and coaching for more than 60 people — those who made the first cut in a process that’s part contest, part collaboration and large part public experiment.

While not alone in trying to harness tech innovation for better news and information flow, the Mojo effort has drawn several hundred idea pitches — for better online discourse and storytelling, better tagging and linking of parts of video and other improvements — that touch on both the problems of current formats and the opportunities of evolving Web tools.

The $2.5 million project is a joint effort of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. It aims to “embed” 15 people and projects in partner organizations over the next three years. This year’s selection process began with a broad call for ides and meetups around the Web and in several countries and will continue with 20 participants being picked for a two-week “hackfest” in Berlin this fall before five finalists are selected.

Mojo is interesting not just for what it wants to do — connect Web innovation with journalism needs — but also for the way it’s trying to do it.

Instead of spinning winning ideas and their authors off with some prize money, the partnership hopes to develop them in working news operations. The 2012 partners: Al Jazeera English, the BBC,the Boston Globe, the Guardian and Zeit Online.

Organizers also promise, and are hammering home to participants, that winning projects must be built using open Web standards so they can be broadly used for greater impact. The program website describes a process that will train participants to turn concepts into code and offer publicly available demos and reference materials.

Anyone can follow along at the Learning Lab and project website, or via Twitter at #MozNewsLab.

Spreading “lessons of the Web”

All that can sound a little abstract, but a lecture the other day by London based “international developer evangelist” Christian Heilmann of Mozilla connected some of the dots. Heilmann’s focus was on programming standards, particularly regarding HTML5, but his illustrations focused on making news and information on the web easier, simpler and more elegant — both for people who create material and for people who use it, no matter the device, browser or screen type.

Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman,who stopped by the lecture to introduce Heilmann, told participants the Mojo partnership aligns with the foundation’s decision to reach beyond its signature Firefox Web browser to other projects “in particular places where we feel like the future of the Web is going to be shaped.”

“Journalism and media is one of these places,” Surman said. Mozilla, he said, has two main interests, “One, that the lessons of the Web and how organizations like Mozilla operate are things that media can tap into,” and second that new tools and services are based on common standards, including HTML5.

Both Knight and Mozilla hope the Mojo project, beyond the software it produces, can act as an accelerant to the frustratingly slow movement of innovation into the core of news culture.

In a recent interview, Jose Zamora, journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation, referred several times to “bridging the gap” between innovation and organizations with significant news capacity and audiences.

He noted that Knight has committed $27.1 million in the past five years to the Knight News Challenge, a contest-based grant program aimed at jump-starting media innovation, funding 76 projects from 12,000 applications.

Zamora said the Mojo partnership is a different approach with similar goals to the news challenge, aiming to pull ideas and skills of programmers, Web designers, artists and other disciplines into thinking about news and information.

“The environment is changing so fast and it’s constantly moving, that we don’t even know exactly what we looking for,” he said. “It’s probably things that we haven’t even imagined.”

To that end, Zamora said, Mojo reached out worldwide and to many disciplines outside journalism to solicit applicants, few of whom came from traditional news backgrounds.

“In the first round it will be more about technology, but it’s about trying to bridge a divide and create a different culture,” Zamora said.

Mojo’s supporting foundations joined forces after Surman met Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, and recognized “a kindred spirit” in terms of civic aspirations and interests in finding ways to accelerate technology innovation in journalism and news.

The two organizations share a commitment to information as part of civic life and want to “build stuff, not just talk about stuff,” Surman says. As he and the Knight leadership talked, Surman said, he also attracted by the “subversive idea of really getting inside big media organizations and playing inside.”

Can “open” ideal come true?

Yet Mojo has built some large challenges into its plans. The first is trying to stimulate both competition and collaboration — and open prototyping — at a time when ideas for apps and solutions crowd the marketplace.

“Figuring out the balance between contest and collaboration is both intentional and not easy,” Surman said.

Another tall order is Mojo’s promise to make outcomes open to anyone who wants them, an ideal that has not proved out with some Knight News Challenge projects.

“Nobody’s good at taking iterative inventions that are interwoven with something bigger and pushing them back into the world,” Surman said. Mojo’s paid fellows will be working in news organizations with their own content management systems, he noted.

“We won’t know till we get there what it means to do it in the open usefully in ways that others can pick up and run with it,” he said.

Along the way, Mojo’s champions hope to link like-minded people: news and information experts, programmers, designers, videographers and others who want to build better tools for creating and consuming news — and who’ll do so using open platforms and collaboration.

“We want to create a bit of a school of thought around these changes,” said Phillip Smith, a Toronto-based digital publishing consultant leading Mojo’s operational process.

Smith said he talked to dozens of journalists, journalism educators and newsroom programmers before putting out calls for ideas. The other day he blogged an invitation for journalists to lob their suggestions into the Mojo process. He also has posted at PBS MediaShift about Mojo.

The Mojo participants trend more heavily toward code than newsgathering, but offer a notable mix of interests, backgrounds and information passions.

Chris Keller, who’d worked in print and online roles in newspapers before joining madison.com to work on audience development, is hoping to develop better topical pages for news issues. Corbin Smith, 23-year-old working on his graduate thesis in Toronto, pitched his idea for a “kind of fact-checking and narrative building platform” that would be associated with a user rather than a web site.

Dan Whaley, a San Francisco entrepreneur who’s founded and sold one major dot-com company and is involved with several nonprofit ventures, was drawn in by a Mojo challenge inviting proposals for taking online discourse “beyond the comment thread.”

“This to me is mankind’s biggest problem, is how do we understand what’s credible?” Whaley said. “In order to figure that out, we have to have a feedback channel that works.”

Whaley submitted the outline for Hypothes.is, which he described in the pitch as a platform that “will enable sentence-level (i.e. annotation, or “atomic” commenting) critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review.”

Whaley’s bio notes that he wrote the original code and cofounded the online travel reservations company GetThere.com, which Sabre/Travelocity bought in 2000 for a widely reported price of $750 million. Hypothes.is isn’t dependent on the Mojo process, but Whaley said he was impressed by the participants and enjoying discussing his ideas with like-minded people.

“This challenge is kind of like the hashtag for people who are interested in solving this problem,” Whaley said. “In that way it’s attracting people like myself with a wide set of backgrounds.”

Does Web innovation need foundations?

Mojo organizers say they’ve heard some complaints and criticism, mostly in email and project comments. There were questions about whether technology innovation could happen in newsrooms at all. Some newsrooms questioned the selection of the first five partners — operations that seemed to have a leg up already on Web innovation.

There are practical concerns, too. Most legacy news organizations run on closed or proprietary content management systems, built for print or broadcast, that don’t afford easy integration with new technology. Incoming Mozilla journalism leader Daniel Sinker, who will take over Mojo’s leadership, noted that some newsrooms have found ways to work around such obstacles — implementing new features at the front end of systems rather than the back end, for instance, or building apps that work outside the CMS.

“Most limitations around CMS are cultural limitations,” Sinker said.

Others wondered why there was a need at all for a Mojo project, given the seemingly infinite supply of ideas, new tools and startup ventures for online information.

Zamora, however, said Knight sees gaps that the marketplace isn’t filling and a need — as a foundation focused on journalism’s changing role in the digital era — to actively promote news and media innovation. He also emphasized the impact that could come with working through Mozilla, an organization that’s “of the Web, not just on the Web.”

Despite all the players competing on Web technology, Zamora added, few take an open approach that “allows everyone to use services or products… or to learn from their projects, successes or failures.”

Success, he said, will be measured not just by the news partnerships and new products themselves but by whether Mojo succeeds in creating ripples that carry out many circles beyond its core.

“I think one of the main things would be to create this new culture of news organizations being more proactive and more open to constant changing on the Web,” Zamora said.

At Mozilla, Surman also hopes that Mojo’s ideas infect newsrooms. Mojo’s circle of influence seems modest so far – voting was light on the idea pitches and only 24 nonparticipants were following the Learning Lab early this week, according to the web site counter. Surman wants more “community-building” — and more impact.

At the end of a year success would show up not just in the newsroom projects but in relationship building among participants, the broader Web community and among the news partners and their business structures, he said.

He hopes the Mojo project will lead newsrooms to hire more people like those chosen for fellowships “to work on projects like the projects we introduce,” Surman said, describing “a cultural transformation piece, where decisions are being made.”

NOTE: Based in D.C., they both met me on a collaborative document, each on their own computer. You can playback the unedited conversation here.

Ahmed and Andrew, thank you both for taking the time to chat with me about your newest project. In fact, first let me congratulate you on the launch of The Stream, which officially aired Monday (5/2/11). For folks that have not yet heard of the show, please take a moment to describe the project.

Fitzgerald: Thanks so much for inviting us to chat about it! So The Stream is a television show and online community on Al Jazeera English. We’re telling stories from around the world that are driven by and often about social media. The site compiles information from around the globe by working with our audience and then the television show is the place where we talk about those stories, bring in people (via Skype) who are involved in them, and also allow our audience a chance to be part of the discussion.

Shihab-Eldin: Thanks, we are joking here because I always feel a need to add something – and in this case just wanted to emphasize that this was conceptualized well before the Tunisian Uprising and as it has evolved, we have realized we were right to rely to a large extent on our community/audience, both online, and on TV, and across the world to inform our editorial approach.

That was one of my next questions… can you talk about how the show came about? Was this before or after the recent uprisings… obviously before. How did this interesting TV show happen? And how did you get involved?

Shihab-Eldin: The show is a product of the reality the media industry is facing, and governments for that matter, which is that conversations are happening online, across borders, across social classes, and across communities. And as we saw in the Arab world, they are powerful and have the potential to mobilize, unite and challenge – not only governments – but the collective Arab psyche and how they see their identity.

I got involved in the project because I used to work in Doha at Al Jazeera English and have a background in New Media. When I graduated from Columbia University, the mainstream media had yet to witness or recognize the true power of these tools. Since then, I’ve worked in Doha with Al Jazeera as an online journalist, but then also at the Doha Film Institute and helped launch the online and social media efforts of the organization. There I worked with a man named Stephen Phelps who was brought in to essentially take the concept of The Stream and implement it. I’ve always championed the potential power of social networking for media innovation, for the development and progress in the Arab world, and so, perhaps it was a natural fit!

Fitzgerald: My background is in participatory journalism; my last big project was working at Current TV in San Francisco where, among other things, I managed the citizen journalism program. I had my “Al Jazeera” moment like everyone else in the US on January 25, when I tuned into CNN to see what was happening on the streets of Egypt and saw a segment on Charlie Sheen. Twitter set me straight: “Go live stream Al Jazeera!”

I’d heard Al Jazeera was developing a new social media-driven show and, especially after the Egypt coverage, was very eager to see if there might be a way for me to help out. Lucky for me (also in a conversation with Stephen Phelps) it was a good time for me to come in and lend my expertise. My hope, really, is that this show is and continues to be a real leader in how to produce truly interactive television journalism, and I’m trying to bring all the best lessons I’ve learned to bear in that aim.

What is the goal/vision for the show? Both in journalism, in the Arab community and for Al Jazeera network?

Shihab-Eldin: The general idea is to give voice to the voiceless – specifically those who live in countries where civic engagement is not tolerated, but suppressed – and give them a voice. We do not want to reinvent the wheel. While we want to build a community (both online and through TV and eventually merge the two), in order to do that, we must tap into communities that already exist where conversations are already taking place. We also are hoping to pass on the airwaves to a new generation. Fifty percent of the world is under 30. Almost 70 percent of the Arab world is under 30. We deserve our moment – and the converged platform of The Stream is just one part of it.

We do not want to appear to be telling audiences or the community what is worth discussing, we want to invite and engage people who already have a nuanced understanding of their particular corner of the world (or community) and allow them to drive the narrative. Often times they are far more knowledgable on the “real issues” so to speak, than the mainstream media or than they get credit for.

Having this show launching on AJE, rather than CNN, means something, no? How does the network effect the show… or empower it? Or is the network not a factor? Could this show work on another network? What would the differences be?

Fitzgerald: The network is absolutely a factor – in the sense that Ahmed mentioned above: this idea of “the voice of the voiceless.” What makes this a show on Al Jazeera English and not a show on another network is our aim to find the voices that aren’t being heard. It’s a truly global show for a truly global network. We work hard to find stories that really reflect that. Keep in mind – Al Jazeera English has a much, much bigger audience in, say, sub-Saharan Africa than the US. That’s one big difference between this show on this network versus, say, CNN.

Another difference is that the show has the space to be serious. We’re covering important topics and taking the time to air them out. If this was a show (like many similar shows that have attempted in the recent past or will be in the near future) on a US-based network, it would struggle to not treat social media as ‘funny cat videos’.

Shihab-Eldin: Hillary Clinton answered your question when she pointed out that “You might not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads… which is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.” Al Jazeera gives you global news in real time.

What Al Jazeera also seems to be doing is experimenting and embracing technology, including social media. Why is it that your network “gets it” while other news outlets struggle to genuinely embrace Web and tech culture? What’s the secret?! Or am I, and others, projecting?

Fitzgerald: Haha, no secret I’ve seen since I’ve come on board. I think it might partially be a little projection (which I too am guilty of) because Al Jazeera is doing what feels like serious, high-quality journalism. In terms of techniques, I don’t know that the network has any big secrets that no one else has up their sleeve.

I will say, about The Stream in particular, what makes this show different is that it feels like the experience of being on the Web. There is no giant touch-wall, we don’t have crazy animations. We are individuals who use the Web like anyone else and the show is a reflection of that experience. It’s more true-to-life, I think that’s something that has been lacking in television news treatments of social media.

Shihab-Eldin: I would say it is difficult to “get” something that is constantly evolving, so to even claim that we “get” social media in its entirety may be a stretch. But I think The Stream is simply applying the same editorial judgements that Al Jazeera uses which is not to focus on being “flashy” or “objective” – which I think the US mainstream media is so focused on. I don’t know what “objectivity” is really. It seems contrived to me. We focus on the story and how we understand it given our perspective and facts and the context we can provide. Al Jazeera’s New Media team has always been looking for ways in which to use technology and social media to achieve a function rather than a form. It isn’t about the polish but about the product and why you are using this medium and what the real power of these tools are with regards to producing, sharing, or highlighting important information, quickly.

I’ve crowdsourced a couple questions, which I’ll sprinkle throughout… @NSlayton asks about your editorial selection: What editorial outlook goes into picking stories? It there newsworthiness vs. popularity of a story?

Fitzgerald: Great question. It is, like most editorial decisions, an ever-changing mix of all that and much more. We’re not covering day-of news as much (the network has an excellent News department that covers day-of incredibly well) so newsworthiness is a looser definition as we use it. It’s a mix of if this story resonates (or will resonate) within social media, if it’s a story that hasn’t been particularly well-covered and if it hews to the network’s greater editorial strategy mentioned above.

Shihab-Eldin: Andrew is right. We rely on what people are talking about, but more importantly what they are saying. Popularity, to me, is pretty insignificant, because chances are if something is popular it is popular because it is relevant or “newsworthy” – otherwise we wouldn’t cover it. This fits within Al Jazeera’s aim of offering a different perspective and balancing the news climate with stories from the global south.

Okay, you’re going to have to excuse me… but haters gonna hate… and there are plenty of haters for social media, participatory journalism, citizen journalism. How do you respond to those “traditional” journalists that think this is undermining journalism… or Journalism? Or has the recent uprising changed the conversation, proving the value?

Shihab-Eldin: Yes, there are lots of haters. A black man being elected president is a big change – and a lot of people hated that. But it was natural progress in the context of America’s history and maturity and although it can be uncomfortable, to hate what is organically changing is not particularly constructive.

On the issue of “traditional” journalists thinking this undermine’s journalism, they will come around. I’m 26. I’ve been lucky to grow up using these tools and so inherently understood their power. I graduated from Columbia University in 2007 when the New Media/Digital program was essentially the joke of the school and the smallest program. I then got hired at PBS and The New York Times largely due to my new media savvy, when some colleagues in Print or Broadcast were struggling to find jobs. I met some “haters” there but usually people hate when they don’t understand something. For those who are still not convinced, I would ask them what is journalism? I doubt we have the same definition. Mine tends to be broad and inclusive, if that makes sense.

Fitzgerald: I’ve done a lot of thinking about this over the last few years. I mean I started working on citizen journalism when people (business people, largely) really thought it would be a replacement for traditional journalism. I think the lesson we’ve learned in the last few years, and are continuing to learn as we go, is that citizen journalism/social media/participatory journalism – all of these are tools for journalists to add to their toolkits.

How did you two get into social media… were you early adopters? What was your “ah ha” moment that made you realize this was not a gimmick, but a powerful shift in how we could practice journalism?

Shihab-Eldin: I’ve always been into social media. I was using ICQ before I hit puberty to connect with friends around the world while living in Egypt. There is so much that the social media community can learn from the journalism community and vice versa, although now, thankfully the lines are blurred, and it is all part of one larger community, which in essence is part of what The Stream is trying to accomplish.

Fitzgerald: Haha I have a very simple answer to this question: I live in San Francisco. It’s unavoidable!

Ha! I went to university in The City and know what you mean. But I was, admittedly, also a tech nerd/geek.

Fitzgerald: As to the second part of the question – I had a long series of a ha! moments at Current TV because we did so many experiments in the intersection of social media and journalism. I decided to work in citizen journalism after we pulled in a video from a Louisiana resident who, immediately after Katrina, shot a video of himself going into New Orleans in a flat-bottomed boat. And of course, Current Hacks the Debate – which was (I’m pretty sure) the first-ever live TV Twitter integration (the brainchild of Chloe Sladden (among a few others), who is now at Twitter).

Shihab-Eldin: I was born in Berkeley, so maybe it has always been in my blood

Nice… so here is another crowdsourced question. This one is from @Bradleybowman who asked two questions: Whats the biz model given no commercials? Who embraced or thought up concept?

Fitzgerald: I don’t know that either of us are particularly well-suited to discuss the greater business model question for the network at large – but yes, no commercials and no Web ads.

Shihab-Eldin: Andrew is right, however what I can say is that we are funded by the State of Qatar and the government values what Al Jazeera is accomplishing so much that it is one of the nation’s primary objectives to fund the network as part of a larger mission of developing Qatar and the Arab world. The Emir speaks on this often.

As we talk/type, you have just completed episode 2 — not counting the test shows leading up to Monday’s launch — and, granted, it’s still early… but what has the reaction been so far? Any surprises along the way in launching?

Fitzgerald: We’ve been really pleased with the reaction so far! A couple of great reviews out there in the blogosphere on our pilot weeks. People seem to be responding to the authenticity of the way the show deals with the Web. That’s been nice to see – affirming our suspicions on that front. (We’re trying to think of any funny anecdotes for you).

Shihab-Eldin: I will admit something (fully acknowledging that there are haters out there). What was surprising to me was in fact the general reactions I’ve received so far, not just in the media, but by friends and colleagues who are extremely critical and skeptical of the ability to truly converge the Web and social media with television. There has been a resounding sense that we are on to something truly innovative and I think in a few months, the show will look quite different than it does right now – that is both the most exciting part and the most frightening. Even my mom loves it. That may have been the biggest surprise as she usually dismisses these “technological tools” as “a waste of time”.

Ha! Final question, one that I like to ask journalists I get the privilege to interview… With these “tough” and “challenging” times, what keeps you going? Why are you a journalist?

Fitzgerald: It’s an important time to be telling stories. That’s what I believe. Our world is changing at a pace that’s arguably unprecedented. For me, for us, our field is also changing at an unprecedented pace. The way we tell stories continues to shift and grow. I find that really exciting. What we’re doing today could be entirely different from what we’re doing in five years. In two years, even. (Two months…hah!) As tough and challenging as these times may be, I think it’s a really exciting time to be a journalist.

Shihab-Eldin: I must be a journalist because when my family and I found ourselves in refuge in Berkeley, California during the first gulf war – unable to return to Kuwait – a local TV station came to our house to do a story about us and asked me all about my family back in Kuwait (I was 7 at the time) and asked after my grandmother in particular. I remember being fascinated and intrigued by her interest. Why did she care? Did she care? I think that is what it all comes down to – connecting with either the plight or the accomplishments or the challenges of other humans around the world – that may sound cheesy – but it is what makes me tick.

Well gentlemen, thank you again for taking the time to chat with me… and much success to the new project.

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

Pay for work is always a sensitive question. Pay, after all, quantifies work. And since most people pour more than a bit of emotion into their work, quantifying it can feel uncomfortable, and even a bit offensive.

But writing and reporting are work. And if a marketplace has determined that one’s work has some significant economic value, it has been quantified already.

The job of the manager then, is to divvy up the economic value created by her or his workers and distribute it among them.

This week brought two reports of news organizations dividing pay based on the number of pages views an author’s work generates: USA Today deciding to base bonuses on page views, and a Forbes blogger explaining her page-view based compensation.

As an independent publisher, page views are my livelihood. If people don’t read my stuff, I don’t make money. That’s simply the reality that publishers have to deal with, and I don’t see any overriding reason why employed or contract writers always should be protected from that reality. (You might notice that I used an absolute there, which sharp readers should see as creating some wiggle room for me that I’m going to exploit in a few graphs.)

But I’ve worked as a computer developer, too, and any developer can tell you that a program always gives you exactly what you ask from it – which might not be what you wanted or intended to ask. Developers learn to sharpen the “instructions” in their programming code, to avoid errors and unintended consequences.

So it will be with publishers who compensate their writers based on the page views their posts generate. As we’ve seen in the recent controversy over school test scores, if people have an incentive and a means to game the system – people are going to game the system.

I know lots of ways to gin up page views, and any smart reporter can devise plenty such ways, too. Do you want page after page of photos of scantily clad starlets walking a red carpet? Do you want your writers posting flamebait on 4Chan? Or spamming misleading links across Facebook? (“Click here to see shocking video of Charlie Sheen and former President Bush’s pet goat!” Doesn’t matter where that links actually goes. Folks will click on it.)

All of those tactics will crank up the page views on a website. But are those page views from people your advertisers or funders wish to reach? Are they page views that bring in people who will click around and become regular visitors to your site, or ones that will bounce away as swiftly as they arrive?

If all you ask from your writers is page views, then page views is what you’ll get – with no distinction between ones that add value to the website, and ones that simply raise your server and bandwidth costs.

A smarter compensation structure rewards writers for generating posts that draw and retain targeted audience members. That’s tougher to quantify easily, but the more variables a publisher demands that his or her writers satisfy, the more likely it is that the writers just give up attempting to game the system, and simply focus instead on creating work that connects with and serves the publication’s audience – forget about chasing bonuses.

Which is what you should want, anyway.

Simple compensation gimmicks also cheat large, well-funded news organizations of one of their competitive advantages over start-ups and small shops (like me – here’s where I’m using my wiggle room, by the way). Our compensation is typically month-to-month, based on the page views and click throughs we’ve earned now. A larger news organization can afford to “borrow from the future” and employ writers on long-term investigations and community-building projects that don’t pay off in additional page views and audience now, but might in the future.

Change your compensation structure simply to reward short-term traffic, and your writers will ditch those projects in favor of the photo galleries and the link bait, instead. Because that’s what you have asked them to do, with your pay structure.

Wise managers collect an immense amount of data about their audience, their writers and what audience each of their writers is attracting. But wise managers don’t let that data make decisions for them. The use data to guide them in making their own decisions.

Ultimately, you must reward the writers who are creating the most value for your publication. But one measure of data almost never provides a true picture of value.

“We had figures that indicated that we had 2,500 percent increase in traffic; 60 percent of that traffic was from the United States of America,” said Satnam Matharu, the director of communications, in a recent interview with NPR.

From my point of view, the lack of distribution for the English broadcast, the use of technology in the unrest and the quickness of the evolving news has been a prefect combination that has enabled Al Jazeera to be a leader in coverage and use of tech.

For this week’s post, I ‘interviewed’ Online producer for Al Jazeera English, Bilal Randeree. Because of the time difference and the constant news developments, Randeree and I ‘met’ on a collaborative document to have this conversation over several weeks.

First, Bilal, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I know you and the entire Al Jazeera crew have been extremely busy. Why don’t we start with you introducing yourself, your role at AJE, and how you started in journalism? Also, while it’s clearly been a newsy few weeks… how does it compared to your usual daily routine?

Hey Robert, sounds good. Really busy with Libya at the moment – I’m sure you’ve seen all my tweets (@bilalr) – our live blog is hugely popular once again!

I’m going to give a few very brief answers now cos I’m taking a quick break from the shocking news, so here goes:

I’m from South Africa – worked in banking for a few years, based out of Johannesburg – I then moved to London, but the timing was bad cos the financial crises hit as I was settling in!

As a freelance writer at the time, I was constantly asked to cover the crises from the ‘inside’ – what I learned then made me realize that working in corporate was not for me. I went back to school and did a post-grad in journalism. It was that degree together with my experience in corporate that landed me the job at Al Jazeera as a Business Journalist.

However, after moving to Doha I soon changed over to a general Online Journalist. I write for the Al Jazeera website, and update and maintain our various social media and online platforms. The past few weeks have been incredibly busy, with most of my colleagues and I working long shifts, day after day.

Can you describe the online operation at Al Jazeera? How incorporated is the Web staff? Do the different ‘sister stations’ with different languages have different Web staffs?

The English and Arabic channels are largely editorially independent – and so are the two websites. However, there is always the necessary collaboration and exchange of information, sources and resources.

The English website actually started before the English channel, but I’m not sure how things operated back then. These days, the website news desk is in the AJE newsroom, so we interact with broadcast quite a bit.

Typically, broadcast has reporters around the world covering the news for us – they are limited in terms of time on air, so the website is where our audience comes to for in-depth coverage and analysis of international news. Together with news from our reporters, we use the main news wires as sources, together with good old fashioned telephone journalism – the Internet is a major source obviously, and we are constantly finding and using new online tools for news gathering and contacting sources on the ground.

Bilal Randeree, lower right hand corner, works only a few feet from the set.

So, when it comes to AJE, the website came first … that’s a quite different experience from most newsrooms. And it sounds like it has had some interesting effects. How would you describe the culture of the ‘converged’ newsroom?

Well, to be honest I’m not in the ideal position to answer this question, seeing that I’ve been here for a year now, and the English channel has been running for a good few years already. In terms of convergence, its a constantly changing relationship – broadcast and Web are continually finding new and better ways to work together and support each other, over and above the obvious. The most recent development, starting with our Tunisia and then Egypt coverage, has been the ‘Web Desk’ that TV hosts – they prop a presenter in front of the camera, that discusses what is going on online, how readers are interacting with us on different platforms, and also what is being shared, discussed and debated on the Internet.

Can you talk about, and perhaps list, all the different Web platforms and tools AJE employs (Twitter, Tumblr, iPhone Apps, etc.)

I have only recently started the Al Jazeera Tumblr account, but we’ve been active on Twitter and Facebook for a while now. The New Media team has traditionally been very strong and innovative, but the link between the tools they develop and experiment with, and how they are used on the News Desks was not at its best about a year ago. In that time however, network-wide training courses in Social Media were held, and the change is quite noticeable – besides the Web team, lots of other AJ people are active on different platforms.

Our live blog has been the latest hot development and we are seeing an incredible following, mainly for the hot news events that are constantly developing – first with Egypt, and now with Libya.

I tweeted that I was interviewing you and got this question from @Abdulla_AlAthba. He asks ‘Did twitter make it easier for [journos] @ AJA to track the news?’ Can you talk about how technology has changed the way Al Jazeera does its reporting?

Well, while Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic both form part of the Al Jazeera Network, the two stations operate relatively independent of each other. There is collaboration between journalists on both sides, but not all stories are covered by both, or in the same way.

In my personal experience, from the beginning, when things started in Tunisia and English broadcast was not covering the story in depth, due to a lack of sources on the ground, I was able to build up a good network of trusted sources through Twitter. While Twitter does alert us to events that are unfolding, its rare that Twitter itself will be a source – rather, a journalist can find sources and make contacts on Twitter, and then follow up with phone calls or emails, etc.

What stands out for me, when I look at Al Jazeera, is how technology is so embraced and employed in all different types of coverage. What do you think is the reason why it seems to be more open and willing to embrace technology, while other news orgs may be… a little… more reluctant. Or, is it my imagination, and Al Jazeera is facing with the same tech cultural issues other newsrooms are?

Well, I can’t speak for how other media organizations work – and for us at Al Jazeera, it’s not just the way we embrace technology, etc. that makes us stand out from the rest, but rather almost every aspect of our coverage.

I would assume that compared to most other big media organizations, the fact that we are still not able to be broadcast extensively around the world, we know and value the importance of the Internet more, and hence make more/better use of it.

Can you talk about the equipment/gear Al Jazeera reporters, those that cover breaking news and file for the Web, carry with them? I hear Flipcams and phones instead of laptops.

We have been using Flipcams for a while now, and have some cool campaigns running where we give citizens Flipcams and they produce content that feeds back to us.

For reporters and producers that cover live events, there are a few different tools they use – mobile phones for tweeting, sending through Audioboos and Twitpics, from places where there is no Internet or the Internet gets blocked, we issue Thuraya IP modems.

Our New Media team also has iPhones and BB‘s that they issue out to anyone going out into the field, that has all apps and software, customized and tested for ease of use.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. I know you’ve been quite busy!

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

I’m a journalist, first and foremost.

It doesn’t matter the medium — pixels or paper, airwaves or WiFi — I want to produce it, distribute it, consume it and innovate it. Oh yeah, and I want to save it.

But the term “journalist” is a broad category that is only increasing in size, filled with diverse specialties and talents.

So, if I may, I’d like to be more specific: I’m a Web journalist.

No doubt you’ve heard of this term before, but recently I’ve notice a misinterpretation of the term.

Please allow me to clarify it.

When I first started my Web journalism career, a good friend and mentor pulled me aside and planted a concept that still guides me today: It’s not Journalism Online, it’s Online Journalism.

There’s a lot of difference between the two, besides rearranging the words. To me it is simple and powerful.

Think of it this way: Art Online or Online Art.

Take a photo of Mona Lisa, one of the most famous works of art in the history of mankind. Get a nice, hi-res image of the painting and post it onto the Web.

The single image on the Internet brings this classical piece of art to millions of people who never will travel to Paris to see it first-hand.

That is Art Online.

Now, think of art that takes advantage of, or is based on, technology and the Internet. It’s a type of art that can only exist because of the Web and the latest technology.

To do this, the artist has to be creative in both the artistic and the technical space. The artist must harness technology to captivate its intended viewer, listener‚ user.

Instead of describing it, take a quick trip and experience some Online Art here… but come back, please. Check out Jodi.org (I recommend these two pieces) or Seoul-based Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Here are two examples) or explore the collection at Turbulence.org (like this one).

On The Media did a profile on an art piece that merges the digital realm with real life. A simple device with a powerful title: “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter.”

This art piece could not exist without the Internet. Without eBay, of all things. It’s art that evolves and even generates revenue for its artist.

So, back to clarifying the journalism terms.

Journalism Online is what we use to lovingly call “shovelware,” which is taking existing “legacy” content and posting it on the Web. We know that there is immeasurable value in having the paper’s articles, radio show’s podcast and TV show’s newscasts available on the Web.

Text alone is perhaps the most powerful form of journalism on the Web.

But that is still Journalism Online.

What I do…. what I identify with… what I live and breathe is Online Journalism.

So, what is that exactly?

Well, it’s hard to explain but I look at the latest technology and opportunities only available on the Internet and try to harness them for the advancement and distribution of storytelling and journalism.

I look at FourSquare and see how we can use that to find eye-witness sources in breaking news events. I look at photo gallery widget by TripAdvisor, meant for vacation snapshots, and see how it could enrich our coverage of, say, the World Cup.

I work with engineers and see how our crafts can work together and create new experiences. Like when we took RSS feeds from around the globe and mapped them for a Seattle Times project. It was based on the addicting, but somewhat pointless Twittervision.

Think of how more powerful our journalism becomes when we crowd-source. Add some technology, like CNN did by using Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, and it captures a historic moment in a unique way.

Don’t get me started on augmented reality.

What can I say? I am a geek. A technophile. An iPhone addict.

But I’m a journalist first.

News judgment and ethics are core. Fear of and respect for deadlines drives me. The sick sense of humor we use to cope with traumatic news events is my warm blanket.

The newsroom is my home.

I’m just a mad scientist taking the latest tech to help advance the Fourth Estate.

I’m a Web journalist.

Well, at least until the new technology replaces the Web.