Here are three profiles I knocked out for the WeMedia folks. The occasion was their annual conference in Miami — and a fine affair it was, full of great folks and interesting, inspiring dialogue. (Also loved the push to expand ideas about innovation in media.)

“To The Rescue: The American Red Cross Online”
How does a classic “legacy” nonprofit with a mission as urgent as ever adapt to the emerging online medium? Just fine, thank you very much.

“Francois Ragnet Deconstructs the Document”
Francois is a fascinating individual, working at Xerox, with some great ideas about how documents are becoming at once dis-integrated and evergreen in the online medium.

“Tom Stites and the Banyan Project: The Forest for the Trees”
Stites is a colleague and mentor. Banyan is pushing forward an idea about a consumer co-op for journalism; may it sprout and effoliate!

[Download a PDF of this press release]

Newsdesk.org, a program of Independent Arts & Media, has been selected by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation to receive a $25,000 grant in support of the nonprofit, public-interest news service News You Might Have Missed (NYMHM).

The Foundation’s generous gift will be used to develop NYMHM as a daily service that can earn income through syndication; this will support the production and promotion of important but overlooked news, and help improve coverage of underserved communities.

A Vision for New Public Media
Syndication is at the heart of the LOCAL.NEWSDESK.ORG proposal to create new public-media infrastructure for local/regional journalism, at a time of crisis for the news industry.

Local.Newsdesk.Org is a 2009 finalist in the WeMedia/Changemakers “Pitch-It” contest. It envisions a network of independent but affiliated online news bureaus that put professional journalists to work, and connect them more effectively to their communities. The bureau network will function in some ways like a wire service, yet will also report and publish news at the community level, and add resources to the work of local and regional journalism partners.

Prototype: News You Might Have Missed
NYMHM has been published Wednesdays since February 2002, and examines national and global issues through the local and regional lens. Its rigorous, hard-news format drives an average of 25,000 unique visitors monthly to Newsdesk.org, on the strength of only one home-page update weekly.

With support from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Newsdesk.org will recruit and hire a full-time Staff Editor to turn NYMHM into a daily service — the first step in developing revenue through syndication, in support of the Local.Newsdesk.Org vision.

Financial oversight is provided by Independent Arts & Media, a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor and “shared back office” for commercial-free media/culture programs and producers. Indy Arts services include operations and bookkeeping, promotions, networking events, and support with grant seeking, fundraising and strategic planning.

Contacts & Further Details:

• To make an individual donation or matching grant, contact Clarisa Morales Roberts, Executive Director, Independent Arts & Media: 415-738-4975
• For Newsdesk.org inquiries, contact Josh Wilson, Project Director: 415-738-4975
• Newsdesk.org, NYMHM and Local.Newsdesk.Org
• The Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation

(Roundtable #3: Technology & Innovation)

PART ONE: THE VIEW FROM TOMORROWLAND

We’re blogging to you live from the future, and it’s very exciting here!

I mean, we’re having this meeting at Google HQ, in the middle of Silicon Valley — the place embodies much of the hope and imagination for the future of our democracy, our economy and our world.

It is — or will be — better here in the future. As soon as we can figure out what it’s all about. As soon as we can figure out how and why people use information technology, we can build the perfect device that will seamlessly integrate their information needs with hyperpersonalized delivery mechanisms — speaking of which, can’t you wait until the iPhone costs as much as a transister radio?! — then everything will be fine.

The economy will grow robustly and sustainably, because in the future it will all be running on clean tech.

Deepening efficiencies will drive down costs — which means all the lower-rung workers who have been effectively organized by Raj Jayadev to join unions will be earning the wages necessary to fully engage with the immersive mediaweb through affordable wireless technology.

That’s the problem with the future. It’s look-at-the-stars solutions are indeed thrilling, but it’s ankle-deep in the mud of today.

PART TWO: A MOVING TARGET

Forget about the future. The future is not where it’s at. In the future, we are going to be in the exact same place that we are now — Planet Earth — but things are going to be worse. The climate is changing, the oil wells are drying up.

We can’t be living in the future, when there’s so much that needs innovation today.

Living in and for the future can bite you on the behind.

Panelist Chris O’Brien notes that the ambitious Mercury News project to “blow up the newsroom” and reinvent how a print paper navigates the new media economy was canceled in January.

Most of the folks guiding the project have, in fact, been let go, he told me over lunch.

Was this a vision of the future that simply didn’t match reality? Or did the great powers of the Merc’s parent company get cold feet? Was the approach too topheavy, too sweeping, or too half-hearted?

It would be fascinating to delve into the conflicted internal process that led to both the newsroom reinvention project and its cancellation.

The Merc’s misfire brings to mind the same sort generalized ambition but inadequate ground-level implementation that makes KQED — so well-financed and connected — paradoxically so out of step with the majority of the Bay Area’s diverse communities.

The problem is that these top-down enterprises, guided by the strategic goals and profit expectations of Wall Street and its satellites, may not be appropriate to the new media economy, which is massively decentralized, multisourced, and generally, from a content-production and -consumption perspective, non-cooperative with the monopoly production model.

PART THREE: INNOVATION DAY BY DAY

Chris also noted that news media thrives when it is a center of innovation — which demands the question of what, exactly, are the conditions that encourage innovation?

Independence, for one thing.

All of the successful strategies and scenarios described by the panelists emphasized the ability of media producers and consumers alike to post and access material spontaneously, without the barriers erected by the traditional gatekeepers.

This is not about technology — it’s how people use it. It’s about the social phenomenon of technology. And therein lies the keys to innovation.

Danah Boyd, one of the Knight commissioners, noted the amazing success of local blogging and text-messaging around Hurricane Gustav in New Orleans, an unmediated phenomenon that occurred in an open information architecture without interference from monopoly gatekeepers.

She further elucidated the point by noting advocacy campaigns around specific legislative issues, in which interest groups mobilize their constituencies via cellphones and text messaging to spark a flurry of calls, emails and faxes aimed at key elected officials.

Holmes Wilson of the Participatory Culture Foundation is singing a similar tune with his Miro project, an online video platform that aims to “eliminate gatekeepers” and make everyone a content producer.

We are already seeing what this can do on the blogosphere — the achievements of which are considerable, and matched only by its excess.

As Amra Tareen of AllVoices.com notes, most blogs don’t get read, which hearkens back to the initial panel’s concerns about the information glut — something that at once distracts from access to meaningful information, and fragments dialogue around it.

Her solution is to opportunistically merge media (Web, SMS, email, etc.) to produce up-to-the-minute coverage of news across the world.

Using some cool widgets, AllVoices.com triangulates on topics, pulls together a variety of coverage, and represents it dynamically on a world map on the site’s home page. Click on an indicator, and you’ll wind up with a cluster of related stories and blog postings

This approach places all its eggs in the crowdsourcing basket, and it’s good that they’re taking the chance on it.

Whether it’s the solution remains to be seen — but it’s encouraging to see the money behind the media warming up to the idea of empowering producers and audiences, and appreciating them as interchangeable.

PART FOUR: AD-MODEL INVERSION

This is a key concept — that producers and audiences together can successfully guide access to and creation of relevant community information.

The relationship between the audience and the media outlet has inverted, also, to the detriment of the ad-sales department.

Mike McGuire, a research VP at Gartner and a mainstream media guy, pointed out that content really is king, and if so, why are the content producers the ones getting the short end of the stick?

Why not start cutting sales staff at the failing media outlets instead of reporters and editors?

He asked this and grinned, and the audience laughed, as well they should.

But it’s a serious question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily.

The State of the News Media 2008 report noted that increasingly, the newsroom is the place recognized as the wellspring of innovation in media companies — and the ad-sales departments are the ones most bogged down by the failed assumptions of the past.

What sort of innovation is required to make a future we can all live in?

The initial panel was broadly focused on the topic of “unmet community information needs,” and showcased a diverse set of speakers, from local union and community organizers to city strategists, academics and community foundation leaders.

Chava Bustamante, a former SEIU coordinator, opened the discussion with a telling, if informal, experiment to identify where people are from.

“How many of you here were born in another country?” he asked. A handful of hands were raised — his own included.

“Howbout from another state?”

This time the response is overwhelming. Every hand, virtually, is raised.

“Now,” he says, with a bit of a grin, “How many of you are from here, from Mountain View, and went to the local high school?”

Not a hand was raised. Bustamante, a 40-year resident of the area, admitted that he himself was born in Mexico City, and came to America pursuing a dream of a better life.

“We are all strangers,” he said, and despite our individual and collective achievements as resettled natives of other places, his comment makes me wonder: Have we truly become natives of this new place, the San Francisco Bay Area, where we all live together, if we barely know each other?

This theme comes up again and again as all the other speakers take their turn.

There are neighborhoods, there are families, there are subgroups and subcultures and special interests — but what is it that brings us together?

More specifically, how can we engineer a communication infrastructure that can unite the divergent communities of Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area ?

Emmet Carson of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation spoke frankly on the overabundance of information sources — “too many,” he says — that enables people to pick and choose news and information according to their interests, and in doing so cut themselves off from relevant information outside of their specific “personalized” daily news feed.

“What’s useful to the individual is not always good for the common good and for all of democracy,” he noted.

While he expressed fondness for the an earlier era, when there were fewer, more narrowly focused news sources that spoke to a more broad civic agenda, he acknowledged that the old information economy did systematically exclude so many voices, including women, immigrant communities, etc.

“How do we blend and link all these diverse information channels?” he asked.

Abundant information technology is fine, but it requires us to conceive of new ways to “validate it and create discussions around it.”

He notes that this conversation is not something that takes place solely in the virtual environment, but rather, “it’s a place of personal participation.”

This theme of non-virtual engagement — of people coming together directly, in real life and outside of the technological circuit, and crossing the fragmented boundaries of our self-selecting, self-segregating information society — came up repeatedly.

In other words, what’s needed are physical gathering places to anchor the diverse conversations and inquiries of the many communities that make up a city, a county, a neighborhood, an geographical region.

According to Judy Nadler, one of the Knight panelists and an ethics fellow at Santa Clara University, that gathering place is the public library, which she described as “the new community information center.”

It was a resonant comment that anchored the high-flying ideals of the technological utopians to an earlier ideal of the public sector as a wellspring of civic engagement.

Public libraries embody both local commitment to public participation and access to information, and, thanks to Mr. Andrew Carnegie, are rooted in older American tradition of philanthropy in support of civic engagement and information self-sufficiency.

It’s unlikely, however, that libraries alone can heal the fragmentation between and within our communities — but the panelists have plenty of ideas about what else will be required.

Matt Hammer of People Acting in Community Together (PACT) spoke of the importance of getting “understandable information in the hands of lots of regular people, to help seemingly intractable problems get resolved.”

Kim Walesh, the chief strategist for the City of San Jose, described a variety of innovative municipal programs focused on engaging the “under-35 set” … and “connect the dots between young people and civic issues.”

The conversation turned at one point between media that “pushes” at people — direct mailers, for example, or traditional broadcast — and one can’t help but wonder about the value of some of that push media, which is often focused on advertisements and commerce, rather than civic information needs.

That tension, between “pushing” information at people, and “pulling” them towards civic information they need to see, remains a strategic challenge.

Each speaker presented such a diverse array of needs, methods and ideas about building and serving community, one can’t help but recall Emmet Carson’s dilemma of having too much information in the first place.

How do the threads come together? What is the weave by which we knit together this diverse, divergent democracy of ours?

The fact is, public-service journalism is undercapitalized, an endless dilemma for anyone trying to develop a nonprofit newsroom budget.

Thus, in the process of pulling together another skin-and-bones budget proposal, it seemed opportune to cut costs by strategically reducing the work week by four hours.

There are several ways to slice a 36-hour week — four nine-hour days, three tens and one six, or four eights plus one half day.

Understand that the economic rationale behind this is not one concerned with a certain sort profit-seeking, but rather long-term financial sustainability for a public resource in a hostile funding environment.

There is an important question as to whether this would reduce productivity. The answer, of course, is yes. What’s in doubt is how significant that drop is in the long run.

It’s also true that a reduced work-week or a three day weekend can be a good thing for the worker, whether a journalist with a freelance project, a parent, an artist or musician, etc.

Now, there’s also France’s 35-hour week to consider. Public opinion is predictably schismatic — loathing on the right and populist fervor leftwards.

I think that schism, however, is one peculiar to the for-profit economic mindset, or at least to the hypercapitalist ideal of Growth.

Sustainability is a different issue entirely.