A profile of Clay Shirky appears today on the Australian news site Sydney Morning Herald. Shirky has a new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

The tendency in newspaper offices, including those where I work, is to discount social media activity and reader participation as something less than “real news.” Editors are already tossing aside the idea of citizen journalism, often based on a few timid attempts teaching readers to approach news-gathering on the same, tired terms of 20th Century newspaper journalism. Too bad for them, they’re missing the big picture, and giving up before they’ve really started.

Shirky sees a much wider playing field, where reader-supplied content can be most important, even while sharing the grid with more trivial stuff. Here he is on a recent Ted talks:

Adam Klawonn’s Top Five Lessons from the Failure of the Zonie Report should really be retitled, substituting “failure” with “experience.” But one thing I’ve discovered is that many hyperlocal startups and their oft-one-man creators tend to be humble in their efforts, more interested in learning and sharing about emerging media models than crowing about their expertise.  And that makes all the difference in credibility, of course.

More evidence of this comes in a link relayed last week by a colleague. The Future Newsroom: Lean, Open and Social-Media Savvy compares two online media outlets at Penn State University. One is the stalwart site of a hundred-year-old campus newspaper, the other something quite new that takes a far more modern approach to the same community.  At a glance, the better product couldn’t be more clear. Still the editor of the newspaper site clings to the conventional wisdom.

Editor-in-Chief Rossilynne Skena said that while social media is “great for getting out short bursts of information,” the Collegian’s competitive advantage is “really going into depth and detail about a particular subject,” complete with perspectives from local leaders.

Let me guess. The same “local leaders” who have a dozen other available megaphones for their viewpoint every freaking day? And this provides the “depth and detail”?

Sure, sites like Onward State might hinge entirely on one or two dedicated people for stability, and can’t be counted on just yet as permanent fixtures in their environment.  But let’s be blunt. They’re doing better work, with a lot fewer resources. And that matters.

Making the rounds, including over at Signal v. Noise, is a quote taken from the recent documentary Food, Inc.

I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And if in doing so, more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.

As soon as you grasp for that growth, you’re gonna view your customer differently, you’re gonna view your product differently, you’re gonna view your business differently. Everything that is the most important – you’re going to view that differently.
— Joel Salatin

The comments underneath it at Signal v. Noise tell a story in themselves. Some get it perfectly, others just can’t make it there because the idea of purposely not growing (scaling) a business seems alien.

In the media world today, “scaling” is the default strategy for making money with the internet, displayed daily in testimony like:

• The way to revenue is more pageviews, more visitors. Throw stuff on that site to get everyone interested. Bigger traffic = bigger revenue.
• Better still, find that ripe niche market  (hopefully a niche with a hundred million participants, like Moms or football fans) and then, quick as possible, spread that niche everywhere. Take it global, baby.
• Got a product that’s working at a neighborhood level?  Real, on-the-ground hyperlocal stuff? Quick, figure a way to roll it out to every neighborhood in the tri-state area.

It’s madness, really.

How ’bout this instead? Find a market or a community or a topic for which you have sincere interest. Maybe find a few others with compatible skills who share interest (not mere financial interest) in the same thing, and go to work on it.  Tune it up until it makes enough income to keep you and your partners gainfully employed and happy with it, all the while staying true to its original purpose. Could be that it will only earn enough to be “one” of several endeavors you dabble in, but that’s okay too.

I suspect that’s where 95% of  journalism is headed – very small outfits of talented media folk, focused on a limited audience, with no expectation or even aspiration for million-dollar budgets, hiring plans, or corporate apparatus.

Derek Powazek posted this week on the matter of Search Engine Optimization – a brutal assessment, controversial, and I have to say, dead-on in many ways.   As a number of his commenters point out, the “obvious” elements of SEO may not be so obvious to non-developers. But the larger point is that companies should focus their time and budget on good Web design and, especially, creating good content. Do this well, and you’ll have little need for SEO ‘experts’ or one-dimensional boutique agencies.

Oh, and the part about SEO poisoning the Web? Yep, it’s sadly the root of most online evil …

SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam. 99% of spam comments to blogs are these kind of links. The target of these links is not the blog readers, it’s Google.

Read the whole post (and the comments too, for additional perspective).  [via Daring Fireball]

Steve Yelvington brings Seven keys to building healthy online community, good advice for media companies trying to get a grasp on community-oriented sites, and for anyone trying to create an engaging online presence.

I get the sense that a key aspect drawing the interest of executives toward user-generated Web content is the anticipation of low cost. “Why salary a journalist or editor when we can get the readers to run the site as volunteers?” This thought often brushes aside the commitment required for success, as Yelvington knows from experience.

If your goal is just cheap pageviews that you can convert into revenue, then you pretty much deserve all the abuse you’re going to collect.

Also included in his post are examples of the upfront and cooperative messages relayed to readers regarding site intentions, article moderation and user behavior.