I’ve been asked to speak at several events in the last year, discussing how technology is reshaping the media landscape.

One recurring meme in my talks is this: social media has changed the expectations of many people in terms of media, and if news organizations don’t adopt those principles they will quickly be left behind by those who better get the landscape.

This is usually met with either guffaws or blank stares. I’m not sure the editors, publishers, reporters and advertisers grasped that I wasn’t just a crank spouting off opinions. We can look at the research from Pew or the traffic numbers from ComScore or the financials from the SEC to track what companies are doing well in the new media economy.

It ain’t traditional news organizations.

Forget those numbers, though. The best illustration of that meme — that journalism will be left behind unless it embraces these tools — may have come in the form of The Orting News, an online-only newspaper started by an advertising agency and run entirely by citizens.

Yup. Journalism as run by an ad agency. No editors. No reporters. None of the precious infrastructure journalists believe tantamount to running an organization (namely themselves).

I get the irony, of course, that I found The Orting News thanks to this story in a traditional outlet (although in all fairness to me, I found it online through a social network called Wired Journalists).

The group uses software called Topix, which aggregates news in one place. Think of it as a localized RSS Reader, pulling information from various sources — television sites, newspapers, weeklies — and allows others to publish information along side those news stories.

Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not; however, if people are able to launch their own sites — and if these sites (like The Modern Journalist social network, which is powered by NING) offer people better tools to connect and talk with each other, that should frighten news outlets.

At the very least, it should cause them to take a moment and ask why people would migrate there (not that it’s been a mass exodus from traditional sources, at least in terms of the conversation).

That realization has been a strange for me since John and I wrote a book about video games, have a quarter-finished book about anime and the United States and we have the idea for a comic book, uh, book.

You’d think I’d spend all my time in that section. The fact that I don’t goes to how narrow and out-of-touch that section is.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the complete vacuousness of that section (and maybe local politics), the American weekly newspaper probably wouldn’t exist. Weeklies are — and I don’t mean this negatively because I started at Cincinnati Citybeat and have a fond place in my heart for it — primarily arts and entertainment listings with some stories and profiles.

Music and movies offer an interesting pathway for newspapers. That’s too much though so I’m going to start with movies.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is what people want with movie coverage. For most of us, we want to know what movies are playing, when they are playing, if we can get tickets and what others are saying about the movie.

If we think in terms of tools, then, the online version of the paper should have some version of each of those (and maybe there are more ideas out there).

If you’ve ever bought a ticket online, you’ve likely gone to Fandango or Moviefone, two online brokers that have much of what I described above.

What they don’t have is the local and social component — and in many cases, they don’t have the official trailers as well. Nor do they let people know what DVDs are coming out and when.

So if you’re building an online movie section, it’s probably worthwhile to see if you can partner for the data that is already available (and if not, you’ll need to recreate it) and localize what isn’t. If the price is too high to syndicate content from one of the ticket buying sites (and I’d be shocked if it was since they make money — like everyone makes money — by selling physical products), then your reporters’ jobs will be a bit tougher.

The user software tools are what is really important for papers.

Mashable has a post about Communipare, a widget tool that enables someone to have a side-by-side comparison of 4 movies.

Mashable discusses the downside of this particular widget, but if we think about the arts section in terms of tool building, it’s very simple to see how this might play out, particularly if your junior reporters’ job entailed getting every trailer from the movie studio.

Now you have a centralized way for people to compare movies, but that’s not enough. I’d add components that enabled people to create a friends list (and don’t get me wrong, this should use OpenID or some technology that allows your identity to follow you as much as possible), see what their friends are saying about the movies, remind the user when a movie is coming out, when it’s coming out on DVD, when there are books or games coming out related to it. In other words, it’s an information source for me about the movie.

It’s not enough to think that the review is the most important part of the information process or that an interview, landed at a junket, is the most important thing.

Movies are social. At least that’s what the Motion Picture Association of America used to tell me when I worked at Wired. They are big extravaganzas. If that’s true, then the arts page should be set up to allow people to see what their friends are doing and watching.

Now, I wouldn’t go whole hog on the social networking but it might not be a bad idea to include an Upcoming or Yelp function in the tool as well, giving people the opportunity to set up group outings.

Young people do that sometimes, you know.

I’d also actively encourage site users to apply for a movie reviewer status. I’ve never actually liked movie reviews because art to me is quite personal and there’s no way to write about art without bringing in your opinion.

And I’m not advocating for the demolition of the movie critic (Okay, I am just a little. But only a little.), but I do think it would be worthwhile to have a rotating panel of citizen reviewers who were paid — PAID — to contribute their thoughts.

There’s a variety of ways to pick them but the most obvious would be to track your site’s usage, announce a contest of some sort and see who develops the biggest following with the tool.

Those people are supernodes and it’s good to reward them.

This doesn’t even touch on opportunities such as a predictive market, set up on a weekend, weekly, monthly and quarterly system, giving real movie buffs the opportunity to guess which movies would do well.

Throw in two tickets to some big Hollywood premiere or opening every quarter (thank you marketing department) and you would likely have a rather active board, one that may even attract people from outside the local demographic.

For large companies such as Gannett, owners of my hometown paper, you could pit cities against each other, for instance, with one team from each town competing in the month before the prized event.

Long-term, I would think about tying a predictive market into the software tool for comparison information, allowing people to predict what movies will do well in their individual markets.

Is there more? Absolutely. As I said, this is the area I feel least comfortable with, which is why I’m going to break down the section component-by-component.

I’m anxious to hear what are thinking.

Everything I’ve ever learned about technology started with reading Steven Levy.

Sometimes, though, I wish I hadn’t learned so much because now I expect everyone to get technology the way he did — and does.

I’m oftentimes energized by reading smart people discussing the future of media even when I’m not in agreement with what I believe. The fun part about social media is you are forced — if you participate — to wholly defend your point.

There are days, though, when it seems like I’m standing in a field by myself. Today is one of those days. As I stumble across more media blogs, I’m taken aback by the fact that smart people discussing the future of newspapers cling to the notion that the written word — their written word — is the sacred cow that must be protected against the evil doers on the Web (blogs and such).

Their Major Premise is flawed although their logic is sound. The believe the path to economic viability is protecting their stories. The truth is newspapers and media outlets must embrace the opportunities that the Web and Internet have placed before them.

Namely, successful companies build tools.

What got me thinking about this was a post at Balkinization, which said in part that newspapers should consider charging a set licensing fee for feed access to their content.

They copy, quote from, discuss, and criticize stories reported in the press far more than engaging in original reporting or linking to other blogs. And just like peer-to-peer traders of music and movie files, online readers copy and distribute stories from newspaper Web sites to their friends via email and social network sites. Especially for the young, trading copies of newspaper stories often substitutes for visiting the paper’s Web site.

E gads.

The surest way to put yourself out of business is to believe that locking up the least important part of what you do is the best path to the future.

Now, I’m not sure that the author believes that. It’s likely an intellectual argument; however, even if it’s not, I would be reticent to attack someone simply based upon a blog post.

For my purposes, though, the argument makes a good case for what I think is wrong in the industry because instead of thinking about how to lock things down (and the history of technological innovation tells us that is a very bad way to build a business model), the industry needs to focus on what can be done in the new medium that has never been done before.

I’ve been discussing this in great detail in the Newspaper 2.0 section of the site, advocating for the creation of databases with mashable information delivered on interactive maps with community editors working with citizens to highlight areas of concern while engaging in the political process.

I’ve discussed how Citizen Logistic ARGs can be used to engage the community in a variety of ways and how publishing tools can help reporters tell better stories.

You don’t need to worry about protecting your content then because content isn’t the driving force behind your site. It’s involvement and interactivity.

The one sure way to do that is to provide tools to your audience, train them how to use them and engage with what they do. Tools to make tools, Steven Levy wrote in Hackers. That’s the business lesson from technology that should applied to today’s newspapers.

If you engage in whack-a-mole, your business becomes an eternal chase to stop people. If you engage in tool building, your business becomes an eternal chase to catch up with your readers.

Which sound more sustainable?

I’ve been threatening to review Joe Trippi’s book about his role with the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, the campaign that tapped into the social media networks emerging online to not only raise more money than a candidate had ever done before but also to galvanize voters by going around traditional media outlets to speak directly with voters.

The book is one of the first I recommend to lay people who want to experience the joy — and fear — associated with social media, which effectively removes control from one centralized location.

That mind-numbing fear that comes with that isn’t just limited to politicians, though. Everywhere I go, the one constant I hear is that people are afraid to cede control of their network to the masses because if they do that, the argument goes, bad things can happen.

And there’s nothing that anyone can say to make that fear go away. But this book does a good job of explaining what can happen if you can embrace that experience.

Trippi also does an good job explaining the development of communication technology without going to far down the nerd path that oftentimes overwhelms those trying to get just a grasp of what is happening online.

Chapter 4: The Moment is — for those with limited time — the best chapter to read in terms of understanding the tipping point that happens with these networks.

In Chapter 5: Vermont, though, he most clearly identifies the problem facing media companies today.

Forty years of reliance on television advertising has atrophied creativity, forcing everyone to approach every problem the same way.

The media — and maybe the culture — repeatedly has tried to replicate itself with this emerging medium, hoping to create a template for innovation instead of embracing the ideals and principles of the Web and the Internet’s history.

If you don’t get it (that historical view), I wrote in my notes, you can’t possibly get it (what you can do today).

Trippi goes on to describe the disconnect between what was happening online and the length of time it took for that to translate into real world success, another key point to the book.

Too often, people try something online and within weeks of a launch they are ready to change again. The driving point behind the book is that you have to build this just as you would any other system and then allow time to train the people who are using the system.

Results are not immediate even online.

No, at least in February and early March, there wasn’t a single rally that we could point to, or an endorsement, or a poll that suddenly showed Dean moving up. There was this sense that people were gathering, deciding to get together. There was just this hum of excitement and activity, the sound of people beginning to ask what was possible.

When it works it’s a groundswell, I wrote in my notes. You have to have your ear to the ground to hear the horses hooves banging to know that there are riders coming towards you. Otherwise, the social explosion appears to be from nowhere.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened to the traditional press. Dean’s campaign appeared out of nowhere because to groundswell was not anything they expected — or even knew HOW to expect.

Trippi is currently working on an updated version of the book, which I suspect will come out later this year — probably around election time.

The more I read about them, the more excited I am about the possibility of news organizations incorporating this community-styled project to engage in its readers.

Today, my old publication has a story about a research lab designing a game to help create potential protein vaccinations for HIV and the story points out a concept that we’ve been discussing in part on the social network: computers crunch data and people add context.

The game, called Foldit, is part of Baker’s vision for the future of protein engineering. His algorithms are good at the nitty-gritty of generating completely novel protein sequences for a particular purpose. But humans, who are better at seeing the big picture than computers are, could improve computer-designed proteins by playing the game.

The idea of melding reality and virtual worlds to solve actual problems is something that Chris Graves from the Enquirer posted on the social network. She’s a former crime reporter and proposed creating some type of game around unsolved crimes.

Set up an ARG around real life facts of a cold/unsolved case and ask folks to “play the game” to solve the crime.

Complete with suspects, forensics and crime facts and police investigatory files. As Brad knows, I really don’t know much about games and gaming .. but it seems to me if there were layers of puzzle solving related to this with the end quest toward assembling the puzzle pieces, one might arrive at a ‘likely” suspect.

I’m not sure how effective a game like this would be because it involves privacy and legal issues, but the idea is intriguing enough. These are types of ideas newspapers and other organizations should be kicking around as they try to parse out what community involvement and interactivity looks like.

The issue that papers — and labs — will face is administering this. It’s important that they recognize the need for technical and community manager support personnel to make sure everything runs smoothly. These need to be dedicated staff because nothing kills a community more than unattended and non-functioning technology.

Still, we’re seeing a growth in these types of scenarios and that’s encouraging.

One of the most interesting propositions for newspapers is the overhaul of the business section.

There are more opportunities for important — and audience-capturing — features in this section than any other simply because, other than sports, the section relies more on raw data and numbers.

Traditional business papers should, first and foremost, ditch the stock and index pages. Those are much better left online since they provide the most up-to-date information.

I’d ditch much of the national news writing too, unless it was a feature-type story that covered trends. I’d do the same with international.

That doesn’t mean treat the world and the country at large as if it doesn’t matter. Instead, I’d adopt an Economist type digest that covered the big trends nationally and internationally for those who were interested.

The real rub, though, comes with the integration of online and offline properties.

My online property would look something like this:

We would have economic data culled from the census, economic indicators about the region, which could easily be dumped into a database and mapped out. This would give people the opportunity to template information across a variety of factors to see what is happening in their region.

I wouldn’t do this for the nation — although you could. I would start locally.

Next, I would begin to work with the Chamber, the Small Business Bureau, the city and county governments to gather as much raw data about workers, jobs, economics and all of that. Again, this would be my junior reporters.

Then you can — much like you could with the local section — begin to template development, money, legislation and such on to maps to see the cause-and-effect of city policy.

From there, I would create a predictive market for local business and a stock market game, just for engagement purposes, and use the local data being compiled in the office as the primary informational source for the games.

I would use third-party software to integrate a stock/financial section with a trading company, to encourage people to do their trading within the confines of our site but done through a third-party partner.

Creating Alternate Reality Game versions of Citizen Logistics for local businesses could be anything from a mapping of the coolest local businesses (taking photos, posting them on Flickr, with a pre-specified tag) to tracking down businesses that are operating illegally (a specified point total for visual proof that a company is operating illegally, once again with Flickr uploads).

Heck, it would be cool just to run a game where you listed 30 types of stores and people received points on two scales: videos of less than one minute that showcase a business open less than two years and votes from the community on which stores were the coolest.

You’d have 30 different profile-type stories from there, which could easily be turned into special data-driven sections on the site.

I would then push my beat reporters to move away from any straight financial-reporting story and look more into trends in local neighborhoods and areas, development stories and anything pulls information from the raw data and citizen participation.

In other words, think of business in the local paper not as a financial section, but as a community section — with the raw data and syndicated feeds delivering online services.

One of the rather disturbing trends I have experienced in my talks with newspaper folks is there insistence on latching on to the latest trend.

It’s easy to get caught up in the mix. After all, new technologies roll out every day and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself at the bottom of an avalanche of circuits, software and gadgets.

Video is one of those trends that frightens me. Not because it’s not important. Clearly, media of all types are important and the rise of the vlogger certainly show how powerful the medium can be.

But news organizations really need to think about their video strategy. They need to understand what does well, what their strengths are and what the best use of the video is. Not mention, what sells.

The Online Journalism Review has the best description I’ve ever read about how you should think about video.

What concerns me is what Pat Thornton wrote at the Journalism Iconoclast today: Web video isn’t hard to make.

The reason for my trepidation with video isn’t that I disagree with the fundamental point Thornton makes. He’s correct. You can bang out a video in just a few hours.

The question is: why?

There are tons of ways to create cool video stories that don’t involve sending out a videographer — or worse, making a reporter shoot video while they are out (unless it’s a breaking news situation or a situation where video does as some relevance to the story).

Community-driven video is the most obvious way. Encouraging people to upload their videos, tagged correctly, on YouTube gives you access to as much content as you desire (assuming you have a community manager and a marketing department willing to take the time to engage the community).

Now, I do agree with Thornton’s premise that news sites shouldn’t focus on aesthetics and produced packages. The brilliance of the online sphere is that raw data is still king. You don’t want to produce these pieces. You want to find the portions of it that illustrate the story, that humanize the event, that bring attention to the people who are the heart of the story.

Production online seems…weird. The point of the computer medium is that it strips away the artifice that is television. It enables us to capture a different tone — a more human tone — because we don’t require someone to spoon feed us information.

You would never see a raw, 4-minute story (like Thornton posted) of a eulogy on local news. But I defy you to not watch. It’s riveting because it’s real, raw and human.

If news companies get that, we’ll have an explosion of video online.

This is one of those cases.

John S. Carroll is the former editor of several papers and he delivered what I think is a wonderful talk. It’s a little bit long, but well worth the read.

You’ll be far smarter for having read it: The Future (We Hope) of Journalism.

So I’m launching experiment number three (the first is the blog, the second is the NING group): a PBWiki so that my sources can read the short profiles I’ll be writing on each of them.

The idea is simple: give people an opportunity to correct the flaws in my factual reporting. I’ve made it clear to everyone I’ve spoken with that I won’t be changing the general format of the book; however, if I get something factually incorrect — or worse, if I’ve shaded what they’ve said in a light that doesn’t match what they meant, we’ll correct it.

Along with that, I’ll make every interview I’ve recorded available on the site.

It’s as transparent a writing process as I can reasonably manage, and possibly one of the more open attempts at book writing that we’ve had.

How will it end? I have no idea. There will surely be lots of conversations with folks as I flesh out their stories.

It occurs to me, though, that for feature stories and long-lead stories, this should be an absolute in journalism.

I was speaking with Joe, a former Cincinnati Post writer working to launch a local news organization called CinDaily, about what a modern newspaper should look like.

Our discussions are good for him, I think, but I know they are good for me. They help me start to outline what exactly a newspaper should look like. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and scream: fix it. It’s a lot harder to sit down, pound out the details of HOW an operation should run and function.

I know. At Technology Review, the fights we had were intense and amazing as we pushed and plodded our way through the transition. Fortunately, we had a boss who was committed to the change.

So in our continuing attempt to define what that modern environment looks like, today I’m going to take on the sports page, with kudos to John Borland (my writing partner) and Joe, for helping me work this out.

Now:

The sports page is probably my favorite section of the local paper because it’s filled with the best writers, by and large. Even the columnists don’t always make me want to tear my hair out, although I think the art of good column writing has past.

The first thing I would do is set about collecting every piece of data from every high school, college and professional team (all they way down to the minor leagues, rookie ball, scout team) so that I could create a database of that. I’d have my junior reporters making sure that we had the most up to date information — maybe it’s once a week for preps and once a week for college and pro. It would depend upon what you were doing.

This is one instance where I’d look to partner with an outside group like What If Sports, which creates fantasy-type settings where you can create your own teams and play simulated seasons.

If the primary goal of a news organization is to inform and engage the public, what better way to do that than to give people the opportunity to interact directly with the “players.” Would that reach everyone? Absolutely not. The goal isn’t to reach everyone. The goal is to give your most passionate readers a chance to interact — while giving your least passionate readers an informative experience.

I’d also run ARG-type contests using Citizen Logistics where fans had to form collectives and attend local sporting events, take pictures, upload them, get autographs, interact with other fans, post updates, with the winning team getting some type of big reward (spring for tickets to the world series or super bowl or something that would truly get people excited). You want to spend your marketing budget on something that gets people motivated — try doing that.

Your community would explode.

I’d also set up a predictive market on local sports teams. Predictive markets are one of the most engaging — and intriguing — ideas for me. The people who get on these spend HOURS researching, and if you localize it, you’ve created an amazing outlet for your town. And if you add your content to the research section of the market, you’ll see a dramatic rise in page views and time on site (worthless measures, but ones that seem to be important to some).

All of this would supplement what is, I think, the best run part of most papers. People read sports. They love sports and the coverage is pretty good. I’d spend more time on local sports, covering local high schools and area conferences with the same fervor that you cover the pro sports teams.

I’d enlist the high schools to submit stories — or better yet, I’d hire a student reporter to cover each conference. And by hire, I mean pay them. Possibly as part of the community managers job. Run a contest with student submitting a column and a round-up of conference play. Post them and vote for who gets the job.

It’s a lesson in community building and it gives you the opportunity to bring in young talent while engaging the younger readership (who would come for the fantasy sports about them anyway).

I think that addresses many of the concerns local papers have: how to build community, how to engage younger readers and readers in general, how to capitalize on the emerging interactive world.