National Writers Workshop Speech

Text of remarks to National Writers' Workshop
Fullerton, CA
April 26, 2008

Thanks, Ken. I'm delighted to be here and join you in a day devoted to the written word.

You are going to hear from a bunch of really talented journalists today who I'm certain will inspire you and give you great guidance about the craft.

My role is a little different. I'm going to get us started this morning by trying to give you a big picture view of what's going on in the news business and talk about why I believe there's never been a better time to be a journalist.

In preparing my remarks today I was looking back over some notes of a phone conversation I had with Larry, when he first invited me to speak.  And I had jotted down the words, "So much gloom and doom --  don't want that."

It's true, if you read Romenesko or just keep up with what's going on the business, it can seem a little bit like driving through a war zone: fear and loathing, fresh casualties everyday, and no apparent end in sight.

And of course it's personal:

With the announcement of the latest round of layoffs at Newsday, where I used to work, a friend wrote:

Like most us in the art department, I had no choice about whether to leave. It came a couple of years earlier than would have been financially ideal and the suddenness of it all has left a bit of a scar. But I have many interests and don't expect to be bored.

You all have your own examples. Perhaps some of have been through this drill your selves.

So, yes, there's a no small amount of gloom and doom in the news business these days. And the anguish is very real.

But it's also true that we are living through an extraordinary moment in history -- one of profound technological transformation -- whose effects are being felt literally across the globe.

Changing not only journalism, but entertainment, commerce, even governments -- with broader implications for capitalism and democracy that we only barely begin to understand.

Not since the turn of the last century have we experienced a technological shift that has the capacity to so thoroughly reshape our social, cultural and political relationships.

Thomas Friedman has labeled it the flattening of the world and predicts that it "… will be seen in time as one of those fundamental shifts or inflection points, like Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, or the Industrial Revolution …”

It is much bigger than journalism. But it is clearly having a very direct and profound impact on our livelihood.

It is at once tremendously disruptive -- that would be the doom and gloom part -- and yet at the same time enormously liberating. A time of hardship and uncertainty, but also one of full of invention, opportunity and challenge.

So how do we make sense of these conflicting tendencies?

How do we keep from being pulled into the doom and gloom? How do we stay focused on the opportunity and on the things that propelled us to become reporters and writers in the first place?

One way, I think, is to be very clear-minded about what's really going on around us.

And that requires that we separate what's going on in journalism, from what's happening to news companies. 

I make the distinction for this reason: in my position, I've got to worry about both. But as writers and reporters if you conflate the two, you're likely to get caught up in the doom and gloom that surrounds the fate of companies and lose sight of the tremendous possibilities that all this technological change presents to us as journalists.

So let's take them one at a time.

And lets start with the companies so we can get that out of the way.

What's happening is fairly simple. It's something that is repeated over and over again in the business world.

Technological innovation creates an opportunity for new comers to address a new consumer need, to cut the cost of production or gain entry into markets that were once hard to penetrate. And the incumbents are suddenly fighting an unfamiliar battle in which the costly tools that that they perfected over years of dominance in their sector, suddenly seem obsolete.

Business school case studies are filed with examples of industries that have been reordered in this way.

We may not be accustomed to thinking of our humble craft as just another industry. To us, it's a creative process; a public service function; an essential component of democracy. But there's no denying it sits squarely within the confines of an industrial vessel that faces the same risk as any other business.

At a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week -- Phil Faraci, the CEO of Eastman Kodak described how his company, along with researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology, basically invented digital photography back in the early 1980s.

Back then, it was a crude substitute for film, and it would be many years before the quality, convenience and cost would be sufficient to rival traditional analog photography. Kodak could easily afford to ignore it; besides they had a fortune invested in factories devoted to film.

In Faraci's words, they outsourced nothing; the started with "dirt" and built their manufacturing process from there.

When digital finally reached the tipping point, the end of film business came quickly. What Kodak calls the Film Products Group -- for decades the very soul of the company -- went from a 10 billion dollar business to less than a $1 billion between 2000 and this year. And the vast, vertically integrated industrial facilities that were dedicated to that business, suddenly became obsolete.

Kodak has replaced that revenue and avoided total collapse by moving into digital imaging and printing. Faraci boasts that with so many early patents, there isn't a digital photograph taken today that doesn't touch some Kodak-developed intellectual property or process, somewhere along its life cycle. But it's been a tough transition.

One of he things he emphasized is that the speed with which the decline can come is underestimated by most businesses. That seems  particularly so with newspapers, which ignored the warning signs for years and whose critics, in many cases, assume that historically fat profit margins give them a substantial cushion against a fall-off in their business.

But plug a few basic assumptions into a spreadsheet and you quickly see the peril. With revenue plummeting -- because ad dollars that once went to traditional media are now seeking other outlets -- for the first time, what's been a gradual erosion, suddenly accelerates.

Assume a $100 million business with a 15 percent profit margin; let's say revenues start to decline at a rate of two percentage points a year -- a far slower rate by the way than we've seen in the past few months; expenses meanwhile continue to creep up with inflation until real cost-cutting sets in. In just three years, that 15 percent margin has gone to zero an you're in the red.

Now of course you've got a growing online business to help offset the decline. But it's still a fraction of the total revenue. Ten percent in this model. And it's growth is slowing. Let's call it -- optimistically -- 15 percent a year; continued investment means expenses are growing at maybe 8 percent.

Things look a little better on that front, but put those two pictures together and this is what you've got. You've bought yourself two years, but you're still out of business in year five.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that these companies are all going to be out of business in three to five years. But that business math -- oversimplified in this model-- is why Chris Harte, Publisher and Chairman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a remarkably candid memo to his employees earlier this year, announced that he had hired a restructuring firm to help figure out what to do with the company. In his memo, Harte said revenues had declined 90 million since the year 2000 -- $75 million of that in the last two years alone -- while expenses had increased 10 million. Classified revenue was off by half. And free cash flow had been cut in half too, in just two short years.

How this plays out across different properties will depend on a lot of variables; their ownership structure;  how well managed they are; whether they have succeeded in attracting and retaining employees who can deliver real innovation; whether they've made smart acquisitions; their debt service load; and whether they are well diversified.

Companies like the Washington Post -- privately controlled and dependent on media for less than half its revenues; or News Corp -- widely diversified across continents and media types, seem to be a relatively strong position.

Others, like the Philadelphia Inquirer, heavily leveraged and without a diversified structure; face much tougher challenges. David Carr, in a recent column in the New York Times, quotes Philly's new owner, Brian Tierney as saying, “I’m an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on."

When you boil it all down - looking at the relatively short time frame in which these lines can cross -- companies face two options. They can cut expenses or raise revenues.

On the expense side, there are two courses. You can operate as you always have, at steadily diminished capacity. But in the long run, that's probably just a prescription for taking profits out until, as the Journal Register did the other day, you collapse entirely; the other way, as Harte suggested, is to completely restructure your business, cutting strategically, if you will, and in effect trying to morph your operation into a new business.

The other way out is to grow the top line. And there are at least two choices there as well. You can sell of assets to buy a little time -- what appears to be the Sam Zell strategy. Or, if you've still got enough free cash flow or credit, acquire or build lines of business that make up lost profit in other areas -- clearly the most promising option.

In looking at these various scenarios, one of the things that becomes apparent is that neither the savings nor the growth required to replace old newspaper revenues is likely to come from news alone.

Online news may have a strong future, but it is not going to reverse in short order the kind of revenue slide that newspapers are facing in the years ahead. In other words, journalism alone is not going to save what have long been regarded as journalism companies -- at least not at their current scale.

That's going to have to come from other lines of business. That's why you hear Don Graham laud Kaplan -- their testing and education unit -- and Gannett brag about it's moms, music and pets sites.

And so the role of the newsroom -- as a dominant voice of the institution -- the heart and soul of the brand, may well be diminished.

It is what has led some to observe that editors are losing custody of their papers and what prompted Meredith president Jack Griffin to declare, “We don’t hire editors anymore,” he said. “We hire content strategists.”

OK, so right about now you're saying, I thought this guy said he wasn't going do the gloom and doom thing.

Remember, my point was that it's important to separate questions about the future of journalism -- it peril and promise -- from questions about the future of news companies; and to do that you first have to be clear eyed about what's happening to the business.

And see that the very forces that are sending the business into a tailspin may hold real journalistic opportunity.

How's that possible?

Ken Doctor, a media consultant and an analyst for a leading analytics firm offers a wonderful metaphor for the unusual moment at which we find ourselves today.

[S]ick as they are of the industry’s downturn, journalists at all levels have a love/hate relationship with the craft. Once a journalist, always a journalist, on some deep level.

So maybe the metaphor here is two roller coasters passing in the night.

One reached its apex at the turn of the century, when newspapers were fat. That coaster is headed for the historic registry, and it’s started its downward descent, picking up speed each month.

The second is making painfully slow clack-clack-clack noises, climbing fitfully, rung by rung, giving both its passengers and spectators a wonder of whether it can keep climbing. In its first "national" car are such pioneer passengers as ProPublica, The Politico, HuffPost, Talking Points, Salon, Slate and the brand new Politicker, among others.

Its second "local" car holds, among other others, the tiny staffs of CrossCut, Pegasus, MinnPost, the New Haven Independent and VoiceofSanDiego -- and few pilot passengers with unannounced business plans.

Two coasters.

Uneven velocity.

Treacherous track.

And power supplies that can’t be called uninterrupted.

How many of the journalists jumping out of the descending coaster, he asks, will make the leap to the slow-moving ascending coaster. How many of them will bring some funding with them? How many will find new ways to practice the craft?

In the amusement park that modern news media is becoming, these will be two rides to watch.

To my broader point, those who see in the demise of the traditional newspaper model nothing more than an erosion of traditional journalism values; those who merely see the story-telling diminished, are likely to ride the rollercoaster to the bottom or simply bail out the side.

Those on the other hand who see in the turmoil and disruption new possibilities for journalism, new opportunities to reach readers, new storytelling opportunities, new ways of bolstering the watchdog mission -- well, they're likely to make the leap.

The lucky ones among us may be able to do all that without switching employers. For others it may mean a move to a startup or a news company that has done a better than average job positioning itself for the future.

I wouldn't pretend for a moment that it's an easy call. There are house payments, and college tuitions and pension considerations tied to that descending rollercoaster; and the uncertain journalistic promise of that other car isn't necessarily going to pay the bills.

But in a separate post about a new foreign-reporting start-up called Global News Enterprises, Doctor notes that one thing that really seems to separate the two roller coasters is the enthusiasm of the passengers.

"It is one of the common denominators of all these site founders, and the 45-year-old [Charlie] Sennott's got a good case of it."

He quotes him saying,

"I leave the Globe April 4. I start [on Global News] on April 7....I want to be in the revolution. I want to jump the barricades... Global News will be a dream team of reporters who are at places they don't have to be, ready to commit themselves..."

So what are the possibilities? What get's the Charlie Sennott's excited?

There are, of course, the opportunities to use light portable reporting tools to combine text, audio video, Flash graphics and the like into new story-telling forms.

If you want a quick demonstration of that power, just look at what Mobulus can deliver.

What you're watching is the equivalent of a seven-figure TV studio running off my laptop. The camera is connected via a USB port to my PC. A web interface allows me not only to deliver a live stream, but edit the entire package.

And it's being streamed, with hardly a interruption, to my browser, running over a wireless connection.

[Demo]

In some ways this is just technology speeding what we already know how to do.

There's no guarantee that the journalism produced with this technology will be superior to what comes out of the traditional control room.

But the opportunity it opens up for someone who ten years ago could only hope to send a letter to the editor; who five years ago could only blog; who today can only upload a modest video to YouTube. There's no telling what kind of potential it has.

Had I had a tool like this at my disposal as an aspiring freelance journalist in Africa 30 years ago, my career might have taken a very different turn.

One of USA TODAY's pop culture bloggers -- whose audience includes a sizeable number of fans of the TV show Lost -- plans to use it to provide live commentary -- and reader feedback -- during the show's commercial breaks during the remaining four episodes.

This is but one example of the many technological breakthroughs whose power lies not in their gadgetry, but in how they've begun to transform the way in which news and information is controlled, disseminated and absorbed -- and by implication, the role of journalists in that universe.

For me, this realization has come in a series of small epiphanies -- a few of which I'll share to illustrate the point. But they are merely examples. And mind you, they are not examples of great journalism. That's not the point.

Rather they are breakthroughs that illustrate a development or trend that has the potential to completely transform the way in which we author and consume information and indeed the way we interact with other consumers of that information.

The first came when in September 2005 when I was in San Francisco attending the second Web 2.0 conference, which is credited with having popularized the term.

It was Fleet week, and I had spent a Saturday afternoon at the top of Broadway and Fillmore watching the Blue Angels perform their acrobatics over San Francisco Bay.

That night, back in my hotel room, I went online to see how the Chronicle had covered the event online.

What I found was this.

[SLIDE]

Three photos, briefly captioned, largely unremarkable.

And then I tried searching for photos on Flickr, which had been launched about a year and a half earlier. And this is what I found.

[SLIDE]

Epiphany No. 2: A year later, my daughter -- then a senior in high school -- is attempting to pull together a collection of music for my 50th birthday. One hit song from each year I've been alive. She's got the 90s down, no problem. The late sixties and early seventies aren't too hard. But what about the rest.

She goes on Facebook, puts the question to her friends and within hours has a full list to choose from. She goes on iTunes, samples the best of it, and within a day has burned them all to CDs.

There were other early epiphanies: Early Google mashups -- one of the best of which was

Adriaan Holovaty's Chicagocrime.org.

Music services like Pandora, which analyzes your music taste to suggest songs it thinks you would like and create entire "stations" devoted to those selection.

One of the bigger ones came with the appearance last year on YouTube of the Hillary 1984 video --
a  riff on Apple's iconic Macintosh ad --  which aired just once, during the 1984 Super Bowl, but went on to become possibly the most memorable television commercial of all time.

Apple's original ad, itself a play on the George Orwell's vision of totalitarianism, sought to differentiate  Apple's newly introduced Macintosh from the monolithic machines of Big Blue. Let's watch.

The Hillary mashup was remarkable for a couple of reasons: the fact that the original Apple ad was freely available on YouTube; the professionalism of the production values; the fact that it was produced and distributed in a matter of hours by a single individual of only slightly better than average technical skill; and perhaps most importantly that it garnered an audience of over 3 million viewers in a just a few days. Those are what used to be regarded as television numbers.

Each day, it seems, brings new examples of how technology is changing our relationship with news and society.

The Obama contributor who blogged the San Francisco fundraiser where he talked about embittered working class voters clinging to guns and religion. Was she a journalist? Bound by the rules of on and off the record? A witness to an event? Or a contributor whose journalistic instincts trumped her loyalty to the candidate?

Or the journalism grad student, arrested in Egypt two weeks ago, who alerted friends to his detention -- and soon won his release -- by sending Twitter messages over his cell phone.

So what do all these things have in common and what do they mean for journalism?

There are a number of common threads here.

One, of course, is the ease with which information can be authored, shared and exchanged. All of that has led to an explosion of content on web: with the number of blogs logged by Technorati doubling roughly every five months; sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia, growing exponentially; YouTube emerging from nowhere to become one of the most visited sites on the web.

But just as interesting as the ease with which that content can be created, is the effort that is going into organizing that information and networking together the people who are creating that information.

The real revolution is the combination of those three things:

[SLIDE]

Authoring information.

Organizing information.

Connecting people.

The power of the Flickr example I showed a few moments ago is not that I can self-publish my photos so easily.

Rather it is:

• The ease with which individuals who have no connection to one another can publish photographs to a common platform.
• The ease with which those photographs can be assembled into a organized body of work, simply by those individuals applying ad-hoc keywords or tags (Blue angels and Fleet week in this case)
• And the power of the system, through proprietary algorithms, to cull the best photos from the set (a capability Flickr calls "interestingness").
•  

In it's speed, comprehensiveness and quite possibly in its quality, it surpasses what the Chronicle was able to produce for the same event. For a fraction of the cost.

This is where I start to lose the photographers in the room; who bristle at the notion that amateur work could be a substitute for professional; who point to the absence of meaningful captions; who rightly point out that the authenticity of some of the photographs may be suspect; who point to the absence of narrative story telling.

All valid objections, perhaps, but beside the point.

In part because the very act of being able to publish MY photographs so easily and combine them with others -- engages me in a way that mere passive viewing of other people work never quite did.

That's how the audience sees it.

But even from the photo journalist's perspective, it puts tools in my hands that can either free me to do more important work -- work that justifies the higher cost of sending a professional into the field -- or I can use the tools to increase my speed to market and expand the audience for my work.

The Facebook example demonstrates the power of a different kind of network, a network of self-selected individuals who probably have some connection to one another in the physical world.  It's a simple, but compelling example of the ability to assemble, contact and query a specialized network of "experts" to answer questions that in  an earlier era might have required endless hours of listening and research.

We did this earlier this week, when we issued a call to action,

[SLIDE]

asking fans of the TV show Lost to send us heir theories about what was really happening on the show. We got over 150 really thoughtful submissions in less than 24 hours.

But we didn't just stop there. We asked the show's producers to critique the various ideas. The result was an engaging analysis of the show that no single reporter could have produced on his own.

The Hillary YouTube video shows us how amateur and professional efforts can be combined to create an entirely new work of political expression that -- with viral networks -- quickly achieves the impact that once was possible only with the purchase of a costly television spot.

Building on that idea, YouTube, two weeks ago launched a new series called “Trendspotting Tuesday," which focuses on what they call "collaboration videos". Videos in which two or more creators band together to create, as YouTube describes it, "community-driven narratives, artistic compositions created by people living on different continents, mass self-expression, even innovative ways of playing an “old world” game like tag.

Some of them are nothing more than video madlibs. There's a heavy dose of sophomoric self-indulgence.

But again, the point is not necessarily how these tools are being used in their infancy, but rather the power they put into the hands of everyday individuals and the imagined uses to which they might be put down the line.

So how does this translate to journalism; to the story-telling the motivates you to get up out of bed every morning?

Jeff Jarvis, inveterate media blogger and now professor at the City University of New York, has concluded that this capacity to author, organize and share information has moved us from an industrial-era system  where we stood at the center of news gathering and dissemination, where we took raw materials -- press releases, interviews, research, eye-witness reporting -- crafted it into words and pictures, pushed it down a production line, through a factory, onto trucks and out to a waiting public.

[SLIDE]

The public, of course, no longer eagerly awaits our report. It expects to be able to order it up on demand, customized to its particular needs.

But more significantly, the technology that has enabled that has also moved us into a different role in relation to our audience. We are merely one of several intersecting, sources of information that readers can rely on.

As with the Flickr example, it doesn't necessarily diminish our role. But it changes it. And changes the audiences' expectation of how we should function and what we should deliver.

Jarvis used a couple of stick drawings posted on his blog to illustrate the point.

[SLIDE]

Which is that reporters become part of a much larger news and information ecosystem -- one we can influence and interact with, but which we do not control.

We become authors, "curators" in Jarvis' words, synthesizers, aggregators, of a much larger conversation -- working with readers to sift through the mass of information at our finger tips and find what's relevant to their needs.

Blogs -- as a publishing tool -- are an early, relatively crude expression of this capability.

Journalists often complain that blogs merely recycle and annotate upon hard, shoe-leather reporting of the scribes in the field.

But this misses the point.

From an audience perspective, these tools deliver real value: the ability to quickly bring together traditional news content, with source material, with expert comment, can be enormously valuable.

As journalists, we shouldn't be threatened by this. Instead we should be asking ourselves 1) how we can be using these tools to improve our service to readers; 2) how it changes what we chose to report.

Am I providing a valuable service if I'm one of 423 reporters covering the inauguration next year? Or could I be working on something no one else has thought of?

Most news organizations, even the most progressive ones when it comes to the Internet, have experimented in only the most limited ways with this concept.

Our newsrooms -- even where print and online are merged -- still reflect to a large extent the industrial production workflows suitable to an era in which information flowed almost exclusively through us to our audience.

It's why even the most heralded online work tends to revolve around the presentation of information gathered and assembled by reporters. Us to them communication.

We're still building an online newspaper, rather than positioning ourselves strategically within the information ecosystem and using these tools to extend the power of our reporting.

An example is the series the Washington Post did this year on the deplorable state of the DC public schools.

[SLIDE]

It was a model of local reporting. Comprehensive, revelatory. Well crafted stories of bureaucratic failure and the very real toll it has taken on the district's school children.

The kind of public service journalism to which we all aspire.

Online, there were photo galleries, interviews with teachers and a marvelously detailed interactive map

[SLIDE]

that allowed you to identify which schools endured the longest delays before making needed repairs; or which  ones had the highest incidence of crime; and then overlay that information on a demographic map of the district.

And yet for all that, there was virtually no effort -- beyond comments on story pages and an e-mail address where you could contact the Post -- to engage readers in this story.

I don't mean to single out the Post; our website is often guilty of the same thing; and I think the Post is doing some of the most interesting work in the space.

I cite this example only because it was a high impact local story, one that was ripe with potential to more directly connect reporters with the community they're covering.

Others have gotten closer to putting journalism at the center of this emerging information ecosystem.

One notable example was last year's Oakland Tribune series,

[SLIDE]

which used an examination of murders in that city to spark a public conversation about violence in the community and spur local citizens to take action.

Newsday's

[SLIDE]

investigative series on the danger posed by the wide gap between station platforms and trains on the

Long Island Rail Road

included a feature that allowed readers to determine the gap at their station. It was the most popular element of the series.

Far simpler, but still effective, Bakersfield.com

[SLIDE]

has created a Google mashup that allows readers to plot the location of potholes in the neighborhood or on their daily commute.

Again, it is not hard to find creative, effective uses of the medium.

But it is still pretty hard find consistent examples where news organizations have stepped out of their accustomed role of addressing readers with a voice of authority and instead tried to find ways to effectively position themselves in this emerging information ecosystem that is developing around them and help readers discover, consume and share information.

We've got one experiment underway right now, where we hope to push the envelop on this front. We're taking one of our popular staff-written blogs -- on the subject of air travel -

[SLIDE]

- and creating a kind of robust vertical that has an abundance of tightly focused information on all facets of air travel.

As we were conceiving this, our blogger, Ben Mutzabaugh, remarked that his readers -- most of them frequent travelers -- were much like sports fans: they have their favorite teams, their favorite sports venues; but in this case it's airlines and airports.

So were combining Ben's insight and authority as a reporter, with his rabid fan base, with tools that not only provide an overview of what's going on within the air travel industry, but provide in-depth pages for every airline an every destination.

In effect, we're attempting to create a concise, efficient tool to find what's most relevant to you about air travel that is both a reflection of Ben's reporting but also a potential source of leads. And Ben, in effect, serves as reporter, moderator an curator of content that comes from many different quarters.

We tried this in an even narrower part of the site dedicated to cruises and saw an almost immediate seven-fold increase in traffic, half of which was new to the site.

If we could take it a step further, we would make all of this information portable, so it could be placed on any site where it might have utility and relevance.

Again,

Author. Organize. Connect.

So what are the implications for the craft?

Roy Peter Clark, in his recently published book, Writing Tools, quotes scholar Louise Rosenblatt to the effect that readers read for two reasons: information and experience.

And it goes to the difference,

Clark

says, between news reports and news stories.

"Reports," he says, "convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there."

There is within this information ecosystem I've been describing, room for both.

Yes, it's true search engines rarely tell stories -- they merely point us there.

Indeed, a piece of what I've been talking about is simply about the efficient aggregation and conveyance of information.

But by combining these emerging capabilities intelligently, I believe we have the capacity to acquire information as never before; the capacity to both report and tell stories as never before; and the capacity to interact with readers in ways that ultimately vastly enrich both our work and relationship with our audience.

Readers will value us for helping them quickly find what most important to them, amid an ever accelerating crush of information.

But they will value us more far more if that information carries with it the crucial element of experience.

If we can put them at the center of the action.

What we've traditionally done with the written word, with a well chosen photograph, has the potential to be transformed.

The combination of tools at your disposal moves you out of the third row of the orchestra, and suddenly puts you in the position of being a musician and conductor at the same time.

It may be a matter of providing context, insight and connecting the dots for readers in a particularly compelling way. It may be a matter of transparency and voice in the way you converse with readers. It may be the words themselves.

Whatever the arrangement, we've seen time and again in the best of our blogs -- and with the Travel experiments I described, that a well crafted mix of reporting, surveillance, story telling, aggregation, linking and conversation can make for both a compelling report and a compelling reader experience.

It's no longer just a matter of simply writing the best story. It's applying your expertise to ferret out important information, to tell good stories, to help people find other useful sources of information, to build valuable collection of relevant links and the foster a conversation among readers who have the most to offer.

And to build on the narratives that readers assemble themselves.

It's nothing less than a reinvention of the craft. That's bound to engender a certain amount of insecurity.

But after years of working in an environment where we controlled only our story ideas and the words on the screen -- and sometimes not even that -- I would think most reporters would welcome the liberation that comes from the easy availability of tools that accelerates their ability to do research, connects them more easily with their sources and puts the power of the printing press in their own hands.

I don't want you to think I'm a Pollyanna.

With the cutbacks we're seeing in the news business, there is a very real danger -- certainly in the short-term -- that serious reporting, the kind that provides a crucial check on government and corporations, will suffer.

And that has led some to question, realistically I think, whether democracy may be diminished in the process.

But before we get too misty-eyed about the journalism of old, its worth remembering that what I call industrial journalism had plenty of critics too.

Ben Bagdikian, writing in 1983, observed that American journalists of the era were better educated, more conscious of professional ethics, more devoted to truth telling that would have seemed possible 50 years earlier.

And yet, he noted, "as the country approaches the end of the century, the major media are extremely profitable and closely organized into a few powerful corporations. But underneath the spectacular corporate profits and corporate self-satisfaction, there is a disturbing separation of most major media from the true nature of their country's population, a separation that threatens not only the future usefulness of media, but the vitality of the American political process."

Whether one fully embraces Bagdikian's critique or not, we would probably all concede that journalism of the past half century has been wildly uneven at best -- sometimes upholding the most noble ambitions of the profession; sometimes painfully mediocre.

As we look the future, I'm inclined to believe that technology that reduces the cost of communication; that places in the hands of everyday individuals power once reserved for press barons; that makes it easier for individuals with common interest to connect across time and space; that encourages governments to digitize their records; that these things will, in the end strengthen, not diminish democracy.

This experiment too, is likely to be wildly uneven in its results --particularly in the near term.

As the number and variety of information sources explodes; the challenge will be find meaning in the cacophony.

In time, I think, the best of what media of the last century offered may be replaced by a more diverse collection of institutions and actors -- some of them not-for-profits, some of them individual bloggers, some of them newly created news organizations, some of them old familiar names, some blatantly commercial, some motivated by pure altruism. Some even extensions of government.

In chaotic combination, I think we can expect them to fulfill many of the functions that have been province of the daily newspaper for the better part of the last century: recording the events of daily life, spotting trends, and indeed holding government and other powerful institutions accountable.

No question, getting from here to there will be a roller coaster ride.

But if you can stomach the ride, it's never been a better time to be a journalist.