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At the Müncher Medientage, I spoke to 500 German executives from my home in New York and dared to give them some advice about their fate. I urged them to learn these lessons from watching American news companies shrivel and die: Protectionism is no strategy for the future. Every company in every industry (especially media) must be reinvented for the post-Guttenberg age—for the Google era. And the only sane response to change is to embrace it and find the opportunity in it.

I have been impressed with the innovation and openness to change I have seen in German media: Axel Springer shifted a large proportion of its revenue to digital; Bild equipped Germans with video cameras to report news; Burda invested in the networks Glam.com and Science Blogs; Holtzbrinck innovated in its incubator; WAZ created a world pioneer in DerWesten.

But when the times got tough in the financial crisis, I suddenly saw German media looking for an enemy to blame for their problems. The head of the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband called for legislation to condemn Google as a monopoly, an enemy of the press. Dr. Hubert Burda, a digital visionary I greatly admire, urged that copyright law should be expanded to protect publishers, whom he said deserve a share of search engines’ revenue. Chancellor Merkel is considering such changes in copyright. A group of publishers issued the Hamburg Declaration saying that all online content need not be free (though that has always been completely in their control).

Schade. In these pronouncements, I hear echoes of American media’s funeral hymns. I see companies resisting the new reality of the internet age by trying to preserve the old rules of their old industry. Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch vowing to put all his news properties behind pay walls just because that’s how media used to operate—when that will only reduce audience, traffic, influence, and advertising just at the moment when growth is needed most. He is even threatened to block Google. That is simply suicidal.

Though I sympathize with media’s economic nostalgia, I must say that swimming upstream against the internet is futile. The better idea is to go with the flow of the internet, to see and exploit its opportunities.

Rather than fighting Google, learn lessons from it. Google understands the new economics of media. That is why it is successful—not because it exploits old media companies. Those old companies still operate in the content economy, begun 570 years by Guttenberg, in which the owner of content profited by selling multiple copies. Online, there needs to be only one copy of content and it is the links to it that bring it value. Content without links has no value. So when search engines, aggregators, bloggers, and Twitterers link to content, they are not stealing; they are giving the gift of attention and audience. Indeed, publishers should be grateful that Google does not charge them for the value of its links.

This link economy brings three imperatives for publishers. First, it requires them to make their content public if they want to be found. That is their choice, but if they retreat behind pay walls, hidden from search and links, they will not be discovered and they only create opportunities for new, free competitors. Second, the link economy demands specialization: Do what you do best and link to the rest. This specialization also brings a new efficiency that can make publishers more profitable. Third, in the link economy, it is the recipient of links who must exploit their value. That is still the publisher’s job.

Google has earned an estimated 30 percent of online ad revenue because it serves advertisers differently—and better. Here, too, Google understands a new economy, one based on abundance rather than scarcity. Publishers, even online, still sell scarcity as if the internet were print: only so many ad positions for so many eyeballs—what the market will bear. Google instead charges for clicks; it sells performance. Thus Google takes a share of the risk and that is what motivates it to place advertising all over the internet, to create more relevant positions for ads that will perform better for both the marketer and Google. That is why advertising has shifted to Google—not because it is enemy of the media but because advertisers prefer it. We call that competition.

The most important lesson to learn from Google is that it grew huge not by trying to acquire and control content on the internet, as publishers do. Google doesn’t want to own the internet, only to organize it. So Google created a platform that enables others to succeed with technology, content, promotion, and advertising revenue. That is Glam’s model, too, creating networks of hundreds of independent sites and then helping them succeed. I believe that platforms and networks will form the basis of the future of media—and much of the next economy.

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, I am running the New Business Models for News Project [funded by the Knight Foundation], envisioning a profitable future for news if regional newspapers covering cities die. Though national news brands—whether this publication or the Guardian or The New York Times—have a future, regional newspapers across America and Europe are in trouble and some will die. Yet I am confident that journalism in those cities will not die, because there is a market demand for news, which we believe the market can meet.

We believe that news will emerge from ecosystems made up of many players—journalists, citizen journalists, citizen salespeople, volunteers, technologists—operating under different motives and means. Today, in America, we see hyperlocal bloggers earning $100-200,000 a year in advertising; these are real businesses. We see an opportunity to help them make more money by creating local, regional, and national advertising networks. We see the opportunity for a new newsroom to continue beat and investigative reporting and to work collaboratively with these networks. Without the cost of print and distribution, these new news organizations become smaller but profitable.

If you are trying to protect old jobs in old structures of old companies in old industries, then you might see my vision of the future as a threat. But if you embrace change and innovation, then you will see opportunities to reimagine and remake journalism, to find new ways to gather and share news collaboratively, supported by new revenue, reaching profitability thanks to new efficiencies.

Publishers will not get to that bright future by urging government to protect them from innovators and competitors. No, if we want anything from government, it should be universal broadband to encourage society’s migration to a digital economy, and a lack of regulation to assure a level playing field for innovation.

I hope that once the desperation of the current economic crisis subsides, my German media friends will not try to retreat to their old models but will instead continue to invent new ways and to again become leaders in innovation. That is the only sensible path to survival and success.

Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, likes to say he had one of the last great rides in international reporting. He came up as a metro reporter, got sent overseas, and got to do international reporting for the paper he loved. But when he returned to Boston a couple years ago, he learned the Globe was pulling the plug on its international bureaus.

That set off some soul searching that has turned the career journalist into an entrepreneur who wants to reinvent the model for international reporting with GlobalPost.com. The online only international reporting site launches Jan. 12, 2009 and will have 70 correspondents around the world covering international news from an American perspective.

Sound crazy? I thought so. But I changed my mind after listening to Sennott. I saw him speak at the New Business Models for News Summitt in New York a couple of weeks ago (see the video above). And I got to talk with him last week to fill in some of the details of what he has in mind. Sennott is passionate about journalism, and clearly believes he and his partners have a sustainable model for a new international news organization.

“I’ve covered cops, courts, war zones, huge stories,” Sennott said. “I’ve never done a start-up. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’ve never been so excited about an opportunity to try to build something.”

You can listen to my interview with Sennott here:

Global Voices created a new website called Voices Without Votes together with Reuters. It’s a pretty massive task to undertake an overview of what world bloggers are saying about the US presidential election, but we are doing it bit by bit with the help of volunteers and colleagues at Global Voices. The project launched on super tuesday, and new content is added around the clock. Reuters are going to be using the RSS feeds on their website election pages, and we welcome anyone (everyone!) else to do the same too.

Details here and here.

Adrian Monck of City University of London’s journalism education program. He has launched a collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents and a resource that allows the public to track their FOI requests.

Martin Huber of MyHeimat.de which combines printed magazines with an online platform for hyperlocal communities and a network of 5,000 contributors/citizen reporters.

Robin Hamman curates BBC’s blog network. He also blogs at Cybersoc.com. “I guess you could say that I’m the back-office blogger-in-chief.”

10:36 – McIntosh: asks Hamman to describe difference between the UK and US online communities.

10:38 – McIntosh asks about MyHeimat’s emphasis on the free sheet.

Huber: When a media company has to deliver in the hyperlocal community is not so much content as a service, to share information. We learn from our community, we always have to learn what the community wants and we have to implement that very quickly.

10:43 – Monck: discussing partnership with SkyNews which attracted applicants from around the world. There’s another model that interests me, networked reporting:
There are interagency stories. Stories that cross borders like terroristm You need to be able to report things like this in a much savvier way. Creating networks is an important role for journalism.
We kind of need to move with the times on that.

Speaking of international, complex stories like rendition, he asks:

“How do we keep the public interested in things like that?”

10:45 Hamman: on user-generated content. “Give people the call to action, but ask people to put it online themselves and put it in a pool. I think it’s a much more honest approach than, send it to us and we only use one half percent of it.”

10:47 Travis Henry from YourHub.com asks Huber about services that make community a better place and how that works at MyHeimat.com.
Huber: we see it as a media application. You can scale this solution, if it is specific for local communities.
“It’s not only the people trained in networked journalism, but it is also the piece of software that is exactly the need of what’s out there.”
We see it as part of the user interface. The barrier to entry for some users is lower with the print free sheets.

10:51 – A question from the audience on the onerous work of maintaining and encouraging community participation.
Monck starts off by talking about disaggregating, but also says he’s of two minds
“I don’t know from enthusiasts and cheerleading to the world-weary cynics.”

McIntosh then asks Hamman about the idea of produce less, gather more. “Is that a message that people are starting to get?”

Hamman: “It’s vastly expensive to run an online community if that isn’t your core business. The ‘send us your stuff’ model is also vastly expensive.”
He says that news organizations need to do more cheerleading to show people how to post there stuff, then go find the best of it, then what to do with it once it is there.

10:59 – Chris Anderson of Columbia asks: British media landscape is very different from American media. Does that have an impact on what bloggers do?

Monck – UK media is incredibly centralized. He points to the BBC and says: on one hand it is fantastic, but on the other hand its sort of like a nanny. “Why blog when everything is provided for you?”

You can’t deny that BBC does wonderful things, but on the other hand it kind of disempowers people and says this is only for big guys.

Hamman (of the BBC) responds by talking to the BBC blogs trial and changes to the BBC homepage.
We are starting to turn things around a bit.

Hamman then talks about DailyKos and HuffingtonPost visitorship going upwards of 500,000 unique visitors a day.
“I think, my god, our whole blog network gets that much.”
The audiences for blogs in the US are huge and that’s a big difference between US and UK.

I run City University (London)’s journalism education programme, the UK’s biggest, with over 220 journalism postgrads.

We have two projects that might be of interest:

A doctoral collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents.

Maintaining and developing a database of FOI requests in association with MySociety – allowing the public to track their own FOI requests

What are your goals?
To look at how participation works in practice on a real issue like a general election – problems, successes, lessons for the future. Obviously we are really, really hoping Gordon Brown doesn’t call a snap election…but I have a feeling he will.

Also to upskill journalists and get them thinking about new ways to leverage and even organize the people they serve. We are a not-for-profit, so we are excited that the industry is moving in our direction (just kidding).

Notable achievments

We’ve always done a kind of networked journalism. We run a small radio station involving residents from deprived local communities as programme makers and participants, so the idea of expanding involvement in journalism is nothing new. What is new are the tools that take the geography out of that networked participation, like wikis.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
Connoisseurship is a huge mistake. As professionals we develop a whole range of tastes that are irrelevant and indulgent. They are the things, ironically, that give US a sense of community. We need to find a way of keeping them without forcing them on the audience.

Participation is onerous. Not for nothing do democracies only require it at long intervals.

Money and the future?
If I knew the second, I’d be making the first.

Looking forward to hearing from people with a clearer view of the above than I have, which includes you Dave!

Charlie Beckett is doing Networked Journalism and thinking hard about it. He is an award-winning TV news and current affairs producer and programme editor who swapped the BBC and ITN’s Channel 4 News to found a new journalism think-tank called POLIS at the London School of Economics. Charlie Beckett is also the launch editor for an IPTV project which aims to create an intellectual internet news analysis platform and discussion programme for thinking people in the UK and internationally.

Networked Journalism is a key concept for POLIS. It ran a series of seminars for news practitioners that will lead to a policy report and conference in 2008 on Networked Journalism in London. Charlie Beckett is publishing a book on global Networked Journalism called Super Media (Blackwell 2008).

What are your goals?

We want to create a journalism think-tank that promotes the best kind of networked journalism internationally. POLIS is already leading the debate in the UK about the social and political role of new forms of journalism around the world. We have lectures, seminars, conferences, policy reports, fellowships, and major research projects.

I want to combine that think-tank work with my own journalism. We believe our IPTV project is a viable business model for high-quality networked journalism. I want to take the best of the journalistic values that I was part of over the last 20 years to create a new journalism. POLIS wants to provide the thought-leadership for the ‘Next Media’, but also to convince society to invest in public service networked journalism.

Notable achievements?

I am an award-winning TV news producer who has always been at the forefront of broadcasting new technology from digital editing to multi-skilling and interactivity. POLIS has already redefined the understanding of journalism’s future role. I have created the most successful academic journalism blog in the UK and brought Networked Journalism to the United Nations as well as to the London School of Economics as a series of taught courses and a research subject. Our Future of News seminars were unique in bringing different sectors of the news media together to debate Next Media, while our Media and Africa conference and report was a remarkable meeting of journalists and development activists which put new forms of journalism at the heart of movements for political and economic change.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

The launch of POLIS has shown that thought leadership is a critical part of media literacy. We have been amazed at the appetite out there for serious discussion about journalism. People know that we need a better media. But until now, the media has been treated as a force of nature like the weather, rather than a part of civilised society that has to be shaped and supported. But for news markets to function they have to attract investment rather than altruism.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

POLIS works with a variety of partners from government to NGOs to business. We make money by creating exciting intelligent journalism courses. We provide our sponsors and partners with a product they don’t have – independent, authoritative, professionally-informed analysis of contemporary journalism. Our IPTV project has the support of a commercial backer who combines an ethical ambition with a sense that there is profit in clever online journalism.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We want to get serious international Foundation funding to create a major centre of research in to Networked Journalism in Europe to balance the excellent work happening in the US. Journalism is now global and so we have to understand more about its effect and potential around the world.

The POLIS director’s blog is at: www.charliebeckett.org

The POLIS website is: www.lse.ac.uk/polis

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

Everyone looks great but here are some names that caught my eye:

o Ariana Huffington – HuffingtonPost
o Amanda Michel – NewAssignment
o Jeff Burkett — Washington Post News Interactive
o Jay Rosen – NewAssignment.Net
o Donica Mensing – Reynolds School of Journalism
o Steve Grove – YouTube
o Tom Rosenstiel – Project for Excellence in Journalism
o Sreenath Sreenivasan – Columbia University
o Bill Mitchell – Poynter
o Chris Anderson – Columbia
o John Bracken – MacArthur Foundation
o Brian storm
o Dale Peskin – iFocos
o Chris Tolles – Topix

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

I look after UGC on the Sky News website www.sky.com/news

What are your goals?

To increase user participation and UGC traffic, and thus build the brand.

Notable achievements?

Since I started the job in February I have moved from having a couple of staff journo blogs to discussion boards, photo boards, a quiz and more blogs – and I am planning a mass blogging exercise to launch by the end of the year.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

Too many to list here! The biggest one was to rush into discussion boards (under pressure from managers) without doing enough research or testing on either the front end or back end – usability for users and web production staff is vital.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

See above. Mass blogging exercise aimed at next UK general election (assuming it is NOT this autumn) designed to capture citizen reporting of the campaign, rolling in stills and video as well as text. Very ambitious and quite scary.

Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

Anyone who can contribute ideas for the sort of stuff we are trying to do. Jeff and Jay Rosen are helping with our itinerary.

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

We recently launched My Telegraph (www.my.telegraph.co.uk) a product that aims to give our readers dead-simple blogging, rating and news aggregating tools. It’s about introducing a new audience to blogging – 8,000 registered bloggers at the latest count. The average age of the Telegraph newspapers is 55, and many of them find the blogosphere a scary place. We also have a number of other networking tools: a popular daily debate on our website (www.telegraph.co.uk/yourview) which frequently gets several hundred posts; a daily e-poll on a polemical issue (www.telegraph.co.uk/news) and cross-media campaigns, such as our campaign for a referendum on the EU constitution (www.telegraph.co.uk/eu) – more than 95,000 signatories (2/3 in the newspaper, via a coupon, one third online).

What are your goals?

Make networked journalism an organic and ubiquitous part of our news service.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
1. Our RSS feeds suck as do those of most of our competitors. This is an obstacle to personalizing news.
2. Hard to make money our of network journalism, which makes it hard to get money to invest in the underlying infrastructure.
3. Burning appetite among our readers to be a part of the news-making process and to express their views on a wide range of issues.
4. Moderation vs post moderation – big issue for big media companies who are more tightly regulated than network journalists.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

Yes. Cisco sponsorship. But I don’t think the value of networked journalism is in advertising. It’s about what you learn about your readers and building a data base with detailed information about your readers.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Seeking investment for a broad-range of network tools across our website

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
1. Anyone who is on top of moderation/post-moderation issue.
2. Anyone who is well placed to roll out creative network tools across our website at a cost I can afford!

The rules are simple – register, follow the guidelines, post a story, get it through the banned words filter, and it’s online. On Oct. 1, we made it possible for registered correspondents to post video and audio stories. At this point, we’re not so much worried about balanced and accuracy as we are about encouraging people to post their stories.

Participation is free, and people aren’t paid for their pieces (although we are in the process of introducing tipping – visitors can make micropayments to authors if they choose to). In the 16 months that Orato has been online, more than 900 stories have been posted from 3,000 registered correspondents from more than 100 countries. We encourage the 1st person voice, sending the message that what happens to “me” is fundamentally news. We are currently logging 200,000 unique visitors a month.

What are your goals?
To empower people by providing a platform for sharing their news, to communicate the message that news is not the exclusive province of professional journalists, to increase the scope of the news to include non-traditional sources, to provide correspondents with final editorial authority, to democratize the public discussion, to make Orato self-supporting and even profitable.

What are some of your notable achievements?
Assigning two sex trade workers to cover a serial killer trial in Vancouver, which completely blew the minds of people who think you need a badge to cover a trial. Both correspondents worked the same streets as the killer’s victims and knew some of the victims personally. I think we have demonstrated that their coverage provides a legitimate and meaningful record of the proceedings. So far, there has been only one breach of the rules by a reporter at court, a professional—not one of our amateurs. We’ve also helped create a community of people around the world see Orato as their go-to news wire. We’ve harvested stories from amazing sources and places – including the musings of a former executioner for Kenya’s national prison system. Also: surviving 16 months! Logging 1 million unique visitors in 2007 by mid-September.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
It’s not YouTube, even now that we’ve introduced video. I’ve learned that encouraging people to report coherent stories instead of merely commenting or showing off raises the bar, and we need to work hard to entice people to write for little or no money. I believe that we should have introduced micropayments earlier in the development of Orato…it’s a relatively experimental element of the online information exchange but I see a lot of potential for the idea. Our correspondents are united in their desire to make a difference with their stories—it would be great to “network” their compensation.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Yes. Not much. Right now, it’s exclusively from Google ads. Soon, we hope to sell our own inventory.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Video/audio is three days old, so it’s difficult to tell if it will be as technically pain-free as text and images were. This site is not just for ordinary people; it’s also for extraordinary people who feel they have a story to tell and don’t want it filtered through the mainstream media. We’d like to attract more buzzworthy stories and make a bigger splash in the MSM in order to bring more curious visitors to the site. We would like Orato to become top-of-mind for people who want to get a story into the public discussion, be they witnesses to traditionally newsworthy events or just want to share their experiences as news.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
So many! But I’d particularly like to talk to Mark Potts, as I thought Backfence was(and still is) pretty interesting.

What are your goals?

Environmental stories offer many untapped opportunities for collaborative or crowdsourced journalism. I’m especially interested in starting or contributing to projects that provide opportunities to use more forms of media (blogging/microlocal journalism, podcasting, photojournalism, and collaborative mapping).

What are some of your notable achievements?

At Worldchanging, I was part of what was perhaps our finest hour to date: contributors from all over the glob collaborating to cover the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Contributors in India were able to make first person reports based on what they were hearing and seeing, as well as what was coming in on their own collaborative digital networks — demonstrating how important those networks were on the scene. Those of us in other parts of the world pulled together “bigger picture” type coverage on transforming disaster relief, technology to create an early warning network, etc. I wrote about the boundary of environment and economy, connecting the condition of coastal mangroves to the degree of destruction inland. (Where the mangroves were healthiest and intact, they usually absorbed a lot of the wave’s energy; where they were degraded by ag runoff from inland, or simply destroyed to make way for farming shrimp for the export market, there was weaker or no buffering and destruction was worse).

Thus far, the single most famous article I’ve personallly written is “Naughty by Nature: Ever Thought About the Toxins in Your Sex Toys?” for Grist Magazine. It’s a funny and fun piece, but beyond that it’s notable because I successfully took unusual approach to reporting on an environmental health issue (phthlate exposure), such that people would read and enjoy the information, rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

It is usually impossible to “convince” anyone that this stuff is valuable. The knowledge about the medium and what it can do has to be in place in order to get the support and resources one needs to get it going, never mind pull it off — and if it’s not there, you probably ought invest time in educating the relevant stakeholders before you get too far into it. I’ve made the mistake of entering enthusiastically into a project without ascertaining that there was enough internal support. In these scenarios, success is elusive; existing biases against the medium are affirmed; and one does not come away having accomplished much. I have learned that I have to be more thoughtful and tactical both in taking a measure of the local climate, and judging whether to accept a project. (This can be challenging when you’re a freelancer — since gigs, not tactics, pay the bills!)

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

I earn my living primarily via journalism, including networked journalism, as well as content strategy towards using networks most effectively. If you know any freelancers, you know that’s pretty amazing! As I work on the editorial side of this or that outlet, I don’t get into the revenue side much — but I suspect the revenue being generated varies pretty widely; in the nonprofits, there’s a lot of dependence on grants, donations, and “angels.”

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

I need to work with outlets and projects that are committed — with “moral” support, funding, enthusiasm and openness to creativity — to exploring online/networked journalism and pushing the envelope of what it can accomplish. Potentially I need to found such an outlet myself.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

Jonathan Landman of The New York Times

Jim Colgan and Bob Garfield of WNYC

Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center