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.

Take a look at Steve Yelvington’s post -  Continuing the participatory revolution, in which he revisits a theme first offered back in 1999.

News is no longer just a report. It’s a conversation, a broad process in which many people contribute to varying degrees.

In my own experience with reporters and editors, this idea is very slow to sink in, where it sinks in at all.

For example, every time the topic of reader participation arises, discussion quickly diverts to article comment policies, a relatively minor and already ancient piece of the participatory picture.  Even this nod toward interactivity is often a sinkhole. For in most cases, journalists don’t actively participate in their own articles’ comments, but instead treat comments as a lowbrid Letters to the Editor section of their Web site.  Little wonder that comment feeds can be a race to the bottom of public discourse – if you don’t cultivate the garden it’s going to be weedy.

There remains this sense, prevalent,  that newspapers are the authoritative and professional source, the diamond in the internet’s rough. Until this idea is tempered, talk of ‘emerging business models’ among newspaper folk  is mostly quaint.  Good online journalists will always be needed, but those who camp out under the shelter of the newspaper tradition? Lunch meat.

As 2010 approaches, rumors continue to circulate that Apple will soon roll out a tablet device, sort of a hybrid between their laptop computer and the iPhone/iTouch line.  Newspapers and magazines are watching this scenario closer than most, as some believe that a page-sized mobile device represents a better-than-ever way to display digital content.

Apple’s track record is one of polished usability, simplicity, and performance, so count me as one who believes that if any company can turn a tablet device into a new standard, it’s got to be Apple.  There’s even speculation now over whether the new product has a name. A few more weeks or perhaps months will tell if this is all the result of mere gossip, or Steve Jobs’ next big stamp on modern communication.

I truly like the idea of a tablet. Ever since Amazon brought out the Kindle some three two years ago, I’ve looked forward to a theoretical device, larger than a smart phone but sleeker and simpler than a laptop. For the majority of Web browsing, it could be ideal. If properly done.

Whether tablets are a cure for print media revenue woes, though, is another matter.

Jack Shafer at Slate points out the variety of reasons why the tablet computer – and some recent impressive demos from Sports Illustrated and Wired that are clearly based on tablet computing -  are likely another mere hype-wagon for big media companies to climb aboard.  Shafer’s brief history of big-media forays into digital distribution doesn’t throw a wet blanket on the tablet as savior, but it certainly puts the whole idea into a reasonable perspective.

Time Warner famously squandered millions on the mistaken belief that its ultimate Web portal should be populated with the magazines it published. The site was called Pathfinder.com…… That’s not to say that the tablet has no future. It’s just if the past is any guide, the future of the tablet won’t look like the SI or Wired prototypes—any more than Pathfinder turned out to be the future of the Web.

It’s nothing new.  Media companies tend to get exhiliarated by anything that preserves their established methods while mapping them onto a new medium. Problem: the evolving audience isn’t nearly so attached to those established methods.

Still, the concept of media organizations as curators can’t be ignored as a means of connecting long-held skill sets with the expectations of digital natives.  I’m intrigued by this conceptual video from Bonnier R&D. Eschewing the “page-flipping” gizmo that is so often used in presenting PDF-style editions – a gizmo that ceases to be interesting or useful after approximately 20 seconds – this model promotes free-flowing, nearly page-less technology.

Moreover, as Jason Kottke astutely observes, the demo video itself is innovative in the sense that narration and video aren’t automatically co-mingled.  It’s true, we don’t always need to be told what we’re seeing.

In the runup to a new year, blogs and other social media are flowing with speculation on where journalism goes in 2010, and where technology goes.  These tend to be separate discussions. I continue to believe that certain individuals will find ways to bridge media and tech with innovation that is, above all else, useful to its audience. And they’ll do so by focusing as much on what to leave behind as what to include.

An article in UK’s Financial Times claims that Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft are in talks to wall off News Corp content from Google search, granting index of the relevant news sites to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  Microsoft would presumably pay News Corp to index content, a practice never tried at this level before -  and, it should be noted, an utterly vapid one.

Murdoch’s activities in the old-school business world are watched closely – executive bean-counters jump at his heels like puppies.  But his track record in the online world is weak.  He bought MySpace, and just a few years later, the once-dominant social network has been crushed by Facebook and is increasingly looked upon with scorn when it’s looked upon at all.  More recently, Murdoch has been promoting the notion that general news content should be restricted to paid-only online subscribers – oh, and that Google is evil and “stealing” his newspaper content.   … All folly, of course.

For Microsoft, this idea would certainly be about undercutting Google’s command of the search business. While Microsoft’s Bing has received decent reviews and has surely shown an increase in market share, early indications are that Bing won’t heavily erode Google’s advantage.  For Microsoft to be taking these talks seriously, there would have to be someone in Redmond (and maybe his name rhymes with Steve Ballmer) who thinks they can draw a large segment of “big media” content exclusively into the Bing realm, relegating the rest of the Web’s unwashed content to purgatory.

It’s quaint that they might be thinking this way. Quainter still might be media companies looking on with wonder.  From the FT article:

But the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

And this:

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

So, the new model involves reputable news organizations bestowing quality links unto Microsoft alone (to start), and then cashing their checks.

The desperation is thick. And now, unclean as well.

I’ve taken part in many Web site redesigns, including a LOT of newspaper site remakes, and the process is often akin to making sausage.  Yesterday I read a post on the subject from Steve Yelvington, and now I’ve got a primer to print out and distribute before my next “group redesign” of a newspaper site.  It’ll be required reading for any participants, and I’ll even have a pop quiz on it before that very first committee meeting.

Yelvington describes how groups, often hindered by unclear roles and misplaced skillsets, twist themselves up into the minutiae of design at the expense of usability discussions.  Worse, the conversation hovers over one element of the site, which he notes with proper sarcasm:

All of this happens around a consideration of just one page — the home page, the Web’s equivalent of the holy Front Page, the focus of all power and glory in any newsroom.

Yes, the home page needs attention in any redesign, but most often it gets all of the attention.  With search, feeds, and viral links now a common way for people to enter your site ‘through the side door,’ focus on the home page need not be excessive.

I may go a step further and require that my newspaper site redesign committees ignore the home page until interior-page content is fully addressed. …Well, okay, maybe best to just start with the pop quiz and then play it by ear.