Boston Globe: Media entrepreneurs test new ways to get the message across. Boston was home to the first American newspaper. A Medford radio station was among the first to try selling advertising to support its programming, in the early 1920s. Researcher Ray Tomlinson was working in Cambridge when he sent the first e-mail over the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, in 1971. Each innovation created a huge industry, and changed the way we communicate.

Now, at this moment of tumult in the media world, entrepreneurs in Boston and the wider New England region are trying to develop the next successful models for conveying information. But even as advertisers and consumers spend an increasing amount of money and time on the Internet, building a profitable digital media business isn’t exactly a cinch. Some local start-ups have already had to reduce their staff, and others will find themselves hunting for additional funding later this year from reticent investors.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

There’s so much wrong with this essay that one scarcely knows where to start. In one critique, Alison Fine grasps a key reason the proposal lacks weight: Its “fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable” is absurd on its face.

The piece drew plenty of other attention from journalists and industry watchers including an interesting question from the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward, who wondered how much it would cost “to sustain every American newspaper in perpetuity as non-profit organizations” — and, after consulting with Alan Mutter came up with a guesstimate of $114 billion. Cough.

This is to save only the editorial staff, mind you. Journalists have an unfortunate habit of forgetting that other people also work in their organizations; and the logic here is that what we want to preserve is the jobs of the journalists who report the news — never mind that the people who still buy newspapers don’t do so entirely because of what fills the news columns, but also to see the ads and non-news features.

Seward reasonably points out that we’d be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

We’re unquestionably losing something important as the newspaper business model implodes. As a shareholder in three of those companies I’m unhappy about it, but I’m also not going to suggest that I blindly invested. Over the years I’ve made much, much more on my newspaper shares than I would lose now even if all of them (not a chance) were to fail tomorrow.

But we’re already seeing some models for the future emerge. One, just one, is nonprofit.

The idea that philanthropists should get into the community information business is not new, nor bad. It’s come up a number of times, most recently with the Knight Foundation’s funding support, along with community foundations, of local initiatives. (See also David Westphal’s recent Online Journalism Review piece on this larger topic.)

And not-for-profit media is hardly new. PBS, NPR and many other organizations don’t aim to make profits. But nonprofits are enterprises, too. They require business models as much as any for-profit enterprise.

Nonprofits generally exist, meanwhile, to ameliorate failures in the for-profit marketplace. Markets do fail, and they do so frequently. (I’m not talking here about the financial meltdown we’re experiencing, which is all about society’s failures in a much wider way.) Bill Gates’ worthy philanthropic efforts to rid the planet of diseases that aren’t profitable for the medical industry speaks specifically to this issue, as do countless other such enterprises.

The market failure most notable in the newspaper business of the past half-century was felt not by the journalists but by the buyers and sellers of products and services in communities. This was due to newspapers’ monopoly status, leading them to extract outrageously high profits from advertisers who essentially had no alternatives. Ask anyone who used the classifieds before eBay and craigslist and other better, cheaper competition came along — they’ll tell you what a failed marketplace looks like.

That era was good for the editorial staffs, which enjoyed long-term, stable employment and, in many cases, some distance from advertiser influence over the contents of the news pages. However excellent the journalists were, however — and many were truly superb — this was not a climate that bred risk-taking and innovation beyond imagining how to be better reporters. Improving the journalism was a great thing; but becoming conservative in other ways was not.

We’re seeing an explosion of innovation now. Some of it is coming from inside news organizations. But the majority is, from my perspective, coming from outside, from people inventing or adapting business models as well as journalism and information techniques. (Jonathan Weber at the wonderful New West Network is one of the people I’m counting on to help figure this out; do not fail to read his brilliant response to the NYT op-ed, probably the best of all the commentary on this issues.)

Do we need funding sources for these new and adaptive projects? You bet. Some has already been committed or is in the pipeline now. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

I’ll wager, with little fear of losing, that a great deal of the community information we’ll get in a few years will come from for-profit sources. But that will still leave vast territories for two other models: volunteers and nonprofits. Sometimes these will overlap.

The most essential role for nonprofits is almost certainly going to be in addressing the new market failure. This is the category I call “eat your spinach journalism,” the reporting that we all agree we need but which requires money and time to do. Certain kinds of investigations and watchdog reporting, including such basics as keeping an eye on what the City Council and local/state agencies are up to, may not support for-profit ventures, and we’ll desperately need other sources of funding for those.

That the New York Times used its valuable op-ed space to showcase such shallow thinking by the Yale financial guys is depressing. At least their essay sparked some conversation. But please, let’s move onto realistic possibilities.

We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of intellectual ecosystems—including blogs, websites, magazine excerpts, speaking gigs, consulting and more. In the future those various activities could become part of a business ecosystem as well, where all work to the benefit of each other in more direct financial ways. This suggests collaboration on the part of everyone in the chain – author/speaker, publisher, book agent, speaking agency, et al – and sharing the wealth from the hopefully greater total value that’s likely to be created.

This is part of the future for media entrepreneurs: partnering with established companies to fill in gaps and take advantage of existing clout. Good for both of them.

Consumers are having their Web browsing intercepted and Web sites are having their computer code altered by NebuAd, a company that provides targeted advertising for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), according to a technical investigation by Free Press and Public Knowledge.

This is remarkably sleazy behavior, if it’s happening the way the report suggests — and the technical ability of the researcher wins him high credibility.

If this is happening, and if it doesn’t violate some federal and/or state laws, then it’s long overdue for Congress to deal with it.

This kind of stuff gives digital media entrepreneurship a bad name.

Reinventing comics online is an expanding arena. Mark Fiore and other talented folks have been blazing digital paths to revive a once-tired form. Adding online community is a natural extension of going digital.

Before I continue, several disclosures: Steve Outing (pictured at left) is a longtime associate and friend in the online journalism world. He’s written about my work, and vice versa. I also was an investor in his now-closed company, the Enthusiast Group.

Needless to say, I empathize with Outing, having had a business letdown of my own, a failure that taught me more than just about anything I’ve ever done. Steve has jumped back on the horse, I’m glad to see, with this new project.

In a conversation about the new comic site and other current work — which includes consulting on an as-yet unveiled venture to help newspapers regain some of the classified advertising revenues they’ve lost in recent years (ahem, good luck…) — Outing described some of the ideas behind techGRL.

He and Kearsley worked together on the San Francisco Chronicle years ago, both in the art department. Their collaboration on techGRL is classic comic-strip talent-sharing — Kearsley draws it and they work together on the dialogue — plus social dimensions.

The look of the strips, currently published Mondays and Thursdays, is what you’d see in any newspaper, and that’s no coincidence. “It would be great if we got syndicate deal,” Outing says. But the syndicated strip field is “incredibly competitive, so we’re not counting on it.”

The innovation, he hopes, is in the team’s adding of conversational and social media to the mix. A Facebook application is in the works, for example. And each strip has its own blog posting, “written” by Lexie, the 15-year-old lead character. “This gives readers a way to get to know the character. beyond just the 10 seconds they might spend looking” at the strip, Outing says.

Which raises the obvious question: What do two middle-aged men know about the lives of teenaged girls? That was the first question someone named Jill asked on Outing’s personal blog when he announced the project. Here’s part of his response (from a third-party commenting site that serves comments on his blog):

Despite the name, the comic is not just about “techGRL.” “Lexi” is our 15-year-old main character (coincidentally the age of my oldest daughter), but her dad is a David Pogue-like tech reviewer who brings a lot of technology into the household, and he’s an equally important character. So we think it’s broader than being “just” a teen girl comic. We’ll have both teen and technology themes.

Some of the characters are “real people in our lives,” Outing says. And visitors to the site are invited to become characters themselves via a survey, and to help create other new characters.There’s much more at the site; take a look for yourself.

What’s the business model, assuming there is one? It’s unclear. Certainly advertising may play a role, especially if the site takes off in any remotely serious way; teenaged girls spend a lot of money in this country and are a much-favored demographic. Perhaps tech-oriented dads will also become faithful readers.

But this time around, bootstrapping, not investor financing, is the way of making it all happen. It doesn’t cost much to try these days, and that’s a big advantage for creative folks.

As noted, Steve Outing’s last venture didn’t work out financially. When he and his partners decided to shut down the business, he posted a long and extraordinarily thoughtful analysis of what happened from his perspective — and, vitally, his lessons learned about citizen media — on the Editor & Publisher website, where it now languishes behind the E&P paywall. (Read it here instead.)

(Photo from steveouting.com)

We have an opening at Arizona State for someone to work with me at the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. Here’s the official listing (feel free to pass it around):

Business Development Coordinator, Digital Media

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication seeks a business development coordinator for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The center, which was established this year, is devoted to the development of new media entrepreneurship and the creation of innovative digital media products. It is funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The ideal candidate will have experience as a new media entrepreneur and possess a solid understanding of business planning and principles. He or she will work closely with the Center’s director, Dan Gillmor, and with students from journalism, business, engineering and other schools, singly and in teams, to plan, prototype and, if possible, launch new-media projects. (This is not a fundraising position.) The business development coordinator will report to the director of the Knight Center and will hold the faculty rank of lecturer in the Cronkite School.

Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree and experience in the business development of digital media.

For more information on the Knight Center, click here.

To apply: Submit cover letter, resume and three (3) professional references and contact information to:

Search Committee – Knight Center
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
PO Box 871305
Tempe, AZ 85287-1305

Applications may also be submitted via email at jjobs@asu.edu.

Applications must be received by 5:00 PM, March 1, 2008.

Arizona State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth.

But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero.

This is one reason that communications of all kinds are being disrupted for business, in both methods and models. Traditional media-related enterprises, including journalism and advertising, are feeling the effects earlier than most, but everyone is vulnerable.

Still, one person’s vulnerability – in a world of low-cost experimentation – is another’s opportunity.

Clay Shirky, a New York University scholar and writer, points out that a person holding a good idea “doesn’t have to convince anyone else to let them try it – there are few institutional barriers between thought and action.”

As a result, the research and development that the news industry should have done years ago is now being done in a highly distributed way. While some is being done by people inside media companies, most is not – and increasingly it won’t be. It will take place in universities, in corporate labs, in garages, at kitchen tables.

So while the old career ladders are disappearing, there may never have been a better time to become an entrepreneur in media. But there has also never been a greater need to instill entrepreneurial thinking in the next generation of media people.

This is one reason why I’ve just embarked on a new project, creating and running a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Our goals are simple: to help students understand the value of intelligent risk-taking; and to help them create new kinds of products and services in the media sphere.

Is PR a part of this? You bet it is. The PR business has just as much a need to think entrepreneurially as any other.

Much of what’s happening, happily, is made to order for the university environment. Universities provide time to think, research, build and iterate, and to do this with others who are on the same mission.

At the same time, semesters have start times and end times. The students also have other work to do besides our course and independent study projects. Entrepreneurship is about many things -and focus is one.

In the end, most of these projects will “fail” – fail, that is, in the traditional sense of the word. This is just like the real world of startups.

But the people who work on them will learn enormously valuable lessons. They will find themselves becoming more valuable to future employers – and they will understand even better the virtues to be found in taking intelligent risks. Maybe there are lessons here for businesses, too.

Demo is probably the longest lasting of the tech conferences, justly so. Each year a host of companies — 77 this time — demonstrate their products on a stage in front of several hundred technology folks including venture capitalists and other investors.

There are occasional triumphs. I was in the audience at this gathering in the mid-1990s when Palm Computing launched the first Palm Pilot. I wrote in my column that night that these folks had cracked the code for handhelds. A few years later, TiVo became one of those aha! moments.

I’ve also witnesses some spectacular flubs, where demos utterly failed, humiliating the companies’ presenters and pretty much killing their futures, at least in front of this crowd. I’ve had my own speaking messes, so I emphathize.

Will something leap to public conciousness this year? Unlikely. But the array of ideas I’ve already seen this morning, in just the first few products, is already fairly impressive.

Liquid Planner has promise, for example. It’s yet another web application, but this one is pretty intriguing for people who plan complex projects. It’s taking what the Basecamp folks do to a much more granular level, including Gantt charts that reflect uncertainty in scheduling.

Citiport, another web app (most of these are) is a bottom-up aggregation site, created mostly by users, of local favorites in cities people visit. People share information about the places they’ve lived and visited. (Note: I have a conflict here, as we’re encouraging people in Dopplr, a company I co-founded, to do this too, though that’s not the main purpose of Dopplr.) Like other things of this sort, Citiport’s entire business depends on achieving a critical mass of users.

LeapFrog, an interactive tool to help kids learn to read, looks dynamite. It’s getting some buzz in the room.

I was interested in SkyFire, a new mobile web browser, until I discovered it only works on Windows Mobile handhelds. The company says it’s going to support Symbian (good for my Nokia N95), but it’s not remotely competitive with, say, Opera Mini, which runs pretty much everywhere. SkyFire is about mobile multimedia more than anything else, as far as I can tell. And it’s pretty good at that. But this is not my primary purpose in using a mobile, and the comparisons the demonstrators are making with other phones are therefore not quite fair. Interesting app, though…

Joggle, from a company called Fabrik, shows you your own data from a variety of places in a central view. it aggregates from local and remote sources — “access to all your stuff,” as a demonstrator explains. This is on the track of something valuable.

SpeakLike does almost real-time chat translation, though not always instantly, with what’s described as a hybrid of automation and human translators. The idea is fascinating, but there are a lot of potential gotchas. This service will need plenty of disclaimers, but there’s great potential.

The first mini-flop of the day: A demo of noise-cancelling system from Step Labs, which didn’t work well enough to make me want it — yet. But there’s some interesting work going on in that company, and I’ll keep an eye on what they do in the future.

I’m getting too much email about NotchUp already. This is company that claims to pay people for interviewing for a new job. You set an interview price. The security problems are obvious. What if your current company finds you here? You can block one domain, but if your company’s recruiters only use their own email domains they’re idiots, and no doubt they’re also using third-party folks to scan for employees.

• (Rex Hammock Twitters with a three-year-old post: The reason you’ve heard of podcasting is because no one first “demo’d” it at a conference and no corporate marketers were involved.)

New portal: Education.com — for parents to help figure out the education system and get resources for their kids. “All in one place” seems to be the mantra.

Tokitumi’s demo had problems. It’s an interesting PBX-like application (Windows only, stupidly) for small businesses

Video conferencing is getting serious attention here. Avistar Conference does multi-person Windows video almost as well as iChatAV on the Mac, with bandwidth management features to boot, according to the company.

Movial’s Communicator is fascinating, a mobile phone app, all about presence, that I’m going to try.

Ribbit? A web voice system that is “an extention of my mobile phone” — looks like it does nice organizing of calls. It syndicates itself to other sites as an applet, and imports what others are doing. Intriguing…this one’s getting a lot of buzz, in part because it has the potential to inspire an ecosystem around it. Looking forward to trying it out when I get access to the beta.

LiquidTalk, not to be confused with LiquidPlanner, has a number of features, but I’m not exactly sure what it can do for me. (Needs better elevator pitch…) It’s aimed at enterprises, that much I get; the CEO keeps talking about “Sam the sales guy” as the prototypical user…

Zodiac Interactive introduces Zodigo — downloadble mobile content. Podcasts, videos, tickets, coupons, etc. Uh oh, “fantastic merchandizing experience” — repeated twice now — the coupon feature is a bit Minorty-Reportish. Well, I get the business model, anyway. The company has an API, like several others, aiming to build an ecosystem.

Voyant is about money: web-based financial planning. The timeline is cute, and maybe even useful. Good graphics show shortfalls coming up, smart. Looks sophisticated, with simulations that show what-ifs in dramatic ways. Data security will be a big issue for these folks.

Aha, a really useful mobile app for wine drinkers: Review2Buy‘s text messaging about the wine you’re thinking of buying. It’s not just wine, but a variety of products. Includes price comparisons, locally and on the web. If they could marry this to the bar-code reader that comes with some new phones, they’d really be onto something.

Aceisis is “point of care” health-care software, aiming to replace pens and paper in medical care. It’s a web app with desktop functionality (Mac and Windows). Very smart demo of filling out a form, with templates and tablet functionality. Customizable, too, because the user can create the forms on the fly. This one could be a winner. Will they get doctors and medical groups to use it? The learning and using curve could be a barrier. Ugh, they say “Health 2.0″ — please…

blist is not aimed at programmers, but is a database “for the rest of us.” Unlike Filemaker? This one’s a web app, looks a bit like a spreadsheet with visual aids. You can store lists, photos and a variety of other information (and kinds of information) in various cells. Looks quite adaptable. There’s a single-record view, of course, and planning calendar. Visual query interface, drag/drop values into new window. Good potential. Unfortunate name, though.

CellSpin is about sharing content from your mobile phone to a variety of sites including Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and even eBay. It doesn’t support enough popular phones and operating systems, however. I’m trying ShoZu, in the same vein, but that app is ruining the performance of my Nokia, so I’m about to uninstall it. I do need something like this, but still haven’t found anything that works right.

FlyPaper, a company based in Phoenix, lets you do fairly sophisticated Flash presentations (and video files, etc.) using a downloadable (Windows only, sigh) app. There are models — designed templates — that the users can apply to their own interactive projects without knowing Flash programming. Some interesting possibilities here, but this one needs a Mac version or at least a web-based version.

GoldMail puts links to multimedia into emails to “bring messages to life.” I don’t want more multimedia attached to my mail, do you? (Part of the demo is unfortunate — someone’s young daughter letting her father know that she just lost her first tooth. And dad’s not home for that? Uh, oh…) But as an app for sharing slide shows with audio online, this could be quite useful in a media production sense.

Sprout Builder is about building Flash content — web-based, yay — create multimedia and interactive media, the best widget-builder I’ve seen so far. Rich development tools, working inside Firefox, include a variety of components such as RSS readers and other things. There’s a mashup tool, too. The code is embeddable in a variety of online sites, with tracking tools showing views — “portable living content” with many potential uses. Prediction: Sprout will be one of the big hits here.

Ooh, I like the idea behind the Green Plug universal power adapter. A chip in a power supply will tell it how much juice to give an individual device, and then shut down the power supply to a device that’s fully charged. Here’s their problem: Manufacturers deliberately sell individual power supplies, because the make lots of money on them from their customers. They have every incentive to keep screwing us and not cooperating with initiatives like Green Plug. Increasingly I look for devices I can charge from USB ports, period.

Celsias aims to solve global warming, “one project at a time.” The project-builder uses social media and technology to help people create their own green projects, and is an aggregator of those initiatives. The community features look promising. Think of a content-management and social-networking platform with the environment in mind, but obviously if this works it has wider application.

A session with two university professors who have created companies based on their research (with the help of the Kauffman Foundation (see below), is about connecting academia to the business world. I am obviously interested in this. More in a separate post later…

Wow, LiveScribe combines pen computing and paper and audio and a lot more. Just look at the site to see what’s what. Big applause for this one…

Loic LeMeur is showing Seesmic (disclosure: I’m an early investor). Good job.

Moli is designed to let you manage multiple online identities and profiles. Settings are public, private or hidden (and somewhat granular). At first, it sounds great. But wait. Are we supposed to upload our lives into Moli — why should we trust this site above all others? I can’t see why we should. In the end, this is more of a marketing tool than something end users will need. Truly portable data and what Doc Searls calls vendor relationship management strike me as vastly better approach.

iVideoSongs is a site aimed at teaching fans how famous artists play their songs. Great idea and implementation. Still, why do people want to totally mimic what others have done? The entire idea of learning a song is to do it your way, isn’t it? Ringer alert: They have John Oates doing a demo.

Note: The Kauffman Foundation, co-funder of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s journalism school (my new gig), is a major sponsor of Demo this year. This is an interesting branching-out for an organization like Kauffman.)