From Matt Thompson at the Reynolds Institute at University of Missouri comes a very sound series of questions for journalists in an era of overload. I thought it would make a strong post at year's end on the way in which we need to ask ourselves about our craft as we proceed in an environment of taxing information for consumers.

His 10 questions include:

1. . Are we making our community feel better-informed or merely distracted?

2. How important is this for our community to know and why?

3. Are we chasing the larger story, or just the latest story?

4. Are we synthesizing information, or merely aggregating it?

5. How are we serving those who know [nothing | a lot] about the topic?

6. Have we provided a clear trail through our coverage?

7. Are we using 1,000 words where a picture should be?

8. How good are our filters?

9. Will our coverage find its audience where and when they’re ready for it?

10. How are we managing our own info overload?

ReadWriteWeb has assembled a list of predictions from its cohort, and some of the ideas for 2009 are surprising.

Among them:
1. A single sign-in system.
2. Google will lose market share and consolidate its services.
3. Corporate blogs will come of age.
4. Tip'd could be a daily destination.
5. Blog posts will become more interactive.
6. Uber blogs that combine streams into one will explode.

Tomorrow I'll weigh in with some much less exotic ideas for newsrooms in 2009.

From the Global Human Capital Journal comes a study all media should evaluate: How Barack Obama's campaign team leveraged Web 2.0 to build support for his candidacy.

It's a thorough examination of the tools his team employed, how it outflanked better-financed and better-known competitors, and ultimately what lessons there are.

Among those lessons:

1. Standard-bearers need to respect the ability of stakeholders to organize and make a lot of noise. Trust them.
2. Web 2.0 happened faster with Obama than even his campaign expected, so its effects ought to spread faster in 2009 than businesses expect. Disruption is imminent.
3. Consider yourself part of an ecosystem and design plans involving social media.
4. Get to transparency and openness with stakeholders.
5. Think small and roll up many such achievements into big numbers.

Any understanding of new media has to involve redefining authority and influence.

In legacy media, these are relatively firm concepts based on the qualities of the audience (age, income, education) and market surveys on qualities of the content (trustworthiness, loyalty, likeability). In organizational new media it is interesting to see how these qualities are being adopted (age, income, education) as entities decipher the meaning of page views, unique visitors and time spent. There isn't much new imagination being asserted in reconsidering the concepts, which is strange considering there is so much imagination being asserted in reconsidering the way content is delivered.

For my money, a much more interesting area involving these concepts is taking place within personal media in the blogosphere and across social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and here is where there is much work to be done in sorting through the issues.

There are clear indices that can imply influence: the views, uniques and time on your site, the followers and those you follow on Twitter, the degree to which your content is spread socially. There is the softer quality of relevance: how your content ranks in search, on Technorati or other gauges.

(And then there's the age-old show-stopper: Just because you have an audience doesn't mean you're influencing it, and even if you're influencing it, you may not be an authority.)

I am reminded of these issues as a result of a to-and-fro in the last few days by such social media luminaries as Loic Le Meur, Jeff Jarvis, Robert Scoble and Clay Shirky on the need for a filter and ranking of Twitter followers --- and what that ranking might express as one's authority.

A rethinking is necessary that quantifies the value of an idea in this new environment and how it spreads. Given the speed of change in the methods and devices to receive and deliver, we are having trouble developing answers to these questions.

Jarvis like the formula of Message + Spreader/Author. Le Meur seems to like the idea of Message x Audience.

I like the formula of Message + Spreader/Author x Audience. I can be such a fence-sitter.

Dan Gillmor, the online journalism pioneer now powering the Center for Citizen Media, has published one of those required-reading-to-set-the-mind-clear packages.

It examines principles for new media literacy, and of all the bytes I've absorbed that push new approaches to journalism and its consumption, this essay comes as close as any to definitiveness in breadth, in pragmatism and in relevance. Which is to say a lot of other advanced thinking just couldn't find its way into the ecosystem today. Gillmor's package is grounded in an understanding of how media work and are bound to work in the time ahead.

His principles, in short form here and expansive there, involve:

1. Be skeptical of absolutely everything.
2. Although skepticism is essential, don’t be equally skeptical of everything.
3. Go outside your personal comfort zone.
4. Ask more questions.
5. Understand and learn media techniques.

For creators he has the following advice:

1. Do your homework, and then do some more.
2. Get it right, every time.
3. Be fair to everyone.
4. Think independently, especially of your own biases
5. Practice and demand transparency.

One of the most challenging, among many challenging, frontiers in newspapering at the moment is the comics section.

 In my experience it is remarkably well-read as a part of the paper (as are horoscopes, the crossword puzzles and other diversions), so any attempt to reform the package is met with an emotional uprising you wouldn't likely get in reshaping much else. Which is, as Martha would say, a good thing: People attach themselves to the paper for many reasons, but if their comic pick is one of them . . .well, fine.

More than a few editors have encountered a tripwire in assuming they can cancel one comic strip and introduce another. If there's a general rule of thumb for any editor, it should be: Just add, don't take away. If you have to take away, ask your readers to help, then find other ways to deliver the strip to those who really wanted it retained.

These days the other challenge is that many strips aren't making an easy transition to online. Their creators aren't animators terribly often, so the production online of a static strip isn't competitive in an environment of video. It's a bit like watching still photographs on TV.

The New York Times has a good look at the evolving economics of comics strips.

Syndicated services representing cartoons are finding they need to immerse themselves into social media functionality or risk never attracting a new audience, but the economics of this approach are risky. Putting portfolios and archives online free, with advertising underwriting, isn't necessarily going to yield the revenue necessary to move forward.

Some are moving into mobile applications, animation, sound or other online-friendly features.

It's certainly not a field standing still.

Mark Cuban, the dot-com entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner, has proposed a novel approach to deal with the economic stresses of newspaper sports journalism.

In essence it comes down to hiring beat specialists that would be editorially independent and on the team payroll. In exchange there would be guaranteed space --- a page a day in season, he suggests --- to display the content. Cuban argues that good sports journalism is far more helpful to pro teams than advertising and that a team needs newspapers to create and nurture a profile.

He takes the necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention route. Newspapers in the U.S. are facing difficult times, their Web site growth is slowing, and the strong journalism that propelled sports franchise brand awareness and support is under some threat.

Cuban believes the economics of such a plan are not onerous, considering the overall sports team economics.

His proposal, spelled out in his Blogmaverick site, might leave a few threads loose.

He doesn't tally the cost of travel, for instance. I think it's because he assumed the writers would only cover home games and depend on their counterparts to cover road games. But a beat specialist will tell you that the best coverage emerges from traveling with the team, because that's when you have greater access.

He is a little legacy media-oriented. The blogs, video, and other multimedia assets on newspaper sites right now suggest more than writing is needed in the time ahead, and any proposal would have to accommodate and encourage that.

A cooperative sounds like a good idea, but each outlet for that cooperative wants a distinct approach because sports newpapering is often the best brand marketing of all aspects of journalism, so blandizing coverage in a market might not be a solution.

And he assumes franchises would permit independence when it's clear their licensed broadcasters often have to bite their tongues. Would a team really permit a concerted editorial campaign to change the lineup, the management or the ownership? That would take thick skin and to date I haven't seen teams display anything but low emotional intelligence when their performance is subpar.

But is there a real harm in examining what he's suggesting? Advertising in sports sections of newspapers has never been substantial; they're reader-aimed sections and among the most costly of any newsroom. Creating a cooperative --- a wire-service, say --- to cover the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB. U.S. newspapers, in particular, are facing considerable strain and may face bankruptcies and closures in the years to come. In that context, is any idea a truly bad idea until fully explored?

It has been an extraordinary year of developments in journalism, but the Pew Research Center for People & The Press may have saved the most interesting for last.

New research indicates the Internet has surpassed newspapers as a source for news in the United States. For young people the Internet now rivals television as an information source.

The data indicate not so much newspapers in decline as the Internet in ascendance. The survey by Pew suggests 40 per cent get most of their news from the Internet, while 35 per cent get most of it from newspapers. Television remains the top provider of national and international news.

While the U.S. election clearly shifted the Internet into a prime information role, people said the top story of the year was the economy, not the vote.

Edward Roussel, the digital chief of the Daily Telegraph of London, generates a strong essay for Nieman Reports that identifies 10 paths for newspapers. In essence, the message is get with it or get out of the way.

Roussel's points:

1. Invest in editorial content that can't be found elsewhere, and go deep. Stop the wide focus.

2. See yourself as part of the chain of content, not the end of it, and curate good content from elsewhere (particularly in areas in which you are weakest).

3. Align resources to when traffic is highest.

4. Embrace reader engagement.

5. Take the reporters with the greatest connection to the community and let them guide your blogging activities.

6. Embrace multimedia.

7. Create a nimble cost structure.

8. Push leaders out of the way who aren't embracing digital.

9. Invest in the Web and don't expect its growth to mirror the newspaper decline. In other words, keep returning the revenue into investment.

10 Experiment.

Roussel acknowledges this flies in the face of newspaper culture. He just doesn't see any other way around it.
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Joe Mathewson of the Medill School at Northwestern University makes an argument in Editor & Publisher for U.S. newspapers shifting to a non-profit model, either through the donation of shares to a foundation or having a foundation buy the paper and repay debt through revenue.

 All the while the U.S. taxman is making life easier.

Matthewson said the new paper should be free, with a generous online presence, and patterned on the St. Petersburg Times model under the Poynter foundation.

The argument is bound to gain greater attention in the year ahead, when it's expected some major U.S. newspapers will face creditor pressure and require financial restructuring to make ends meet. In Canada and Europe, the challenges are not nearly as pressing.