1. All journalists should accurately identify themselves.

2. Conflicts of interest should also be disclosed, if not avoided altogether.

3. News and opinion should be clearly differentiated.

4. Photography and video should not be doctored or misleadingly used, unless it is obvious it has been altered only to entertain or express opinion.

5. Journalism should serve the public interest rather than the personal whim of bloggers or special interests of any kind.

Finally, he says, “Too much concentration on the philosophical questions about journalism in the digital world runs the risk of ignoring the most important question before us. Who will pay for the news?”

Those seem pretty straightforward and not too onerous. I have a quibble with his third and fifth points because I’m not sure these can be accomplished in a way that convinces and builds trust with the audience, even when done by the most well-intentioned journalists. Some people know the difference between opinion and fact, and for them labels are meaningless. Other people don’t know the difference between opinion and fact even when it’s labeled, and for them labels are also meaningless. “The public interest” I think is also a bit elusive and is phrase that has been so widely used by policy advocates on all sides that I’m not sure it has much ability to build or sustain credibility. Instead, I’d replace those two points with one — that journalism should be “evidence-based” and respect the scientific method.

Aaron Kremer launched RichmondBizSense.com at the beginning of the year, and he’s now reaching more than 1,300 readers a day through his Web site and via an e-mail service.

Roush gets Kremer to tell us how he did it… and how you can, too!

The keys appear to be these:

1. Find a niche and own it. All of it. All the time.

2. Get started by sacrificing your personal time and all your money.

This isn’t a business for the timid, my friends.

I’m particularly interested to see whether there’s a disconnect between the words that hiring managers use in their postings and the words that journalists themselves use to describe online news jobs. Also, job postings are an important “leading indicator” of changing duties and skills in the industry. My survey describes the present state of affairs, and it doesn’t do a good job predicting what the future will be or what hiring managers WANT the future to be.

But at a faculty picnic tonight, my colleague Dave Cupp inadvertently gave me another old-media model — Edward R. Murrow.

I just listened to a recording of the first CBS World News Roundup. If you’ve never heard it, listen to the incredible difference between Murrow and the other correspondents. Murrow’s report is both more detailed in its content and breezier in its delivery.

Murrow’s report is packed with first person pronouns and with street-level intelligence. He has long pauses. In at least one place he stumbles over words. It doesn’t sound professional; it sounds authentic.

The other correspondents speak about the state of the cities from which they are reporting. Murrow talks about his reporting process, as a way of telling us about the state of Vienna.

I.F. Stone mashed up with Edward R. Murrow. Now THAT’S convergence.

For a long time I’ve worried about the new ability to calculate a news operation’s return on investment at the story level. With Web analytics software, we can literally calculate how much it costs to produce a particular story and how much revenue that particular story brings in. And it appears that contributed to some of the decisions about who to cut at McClatchy, according to a quote from Christian Hendricks in The News & Observer.

“That particular line of business is covered by a lot of other people,” he said. “It wasn’t really driving a whole lot of traffic to our sites, and the pages that were being delivered weren’t delivering a whole lot of revenue to us.”

I’m unclear what “that particular line of business” is, so I’ll try to find out. But the N&O story sure makes it sound like McClatchy Interactive leaders are calculating that replacing human editing and production with an automated process will be “good enough” to reduce expenses without taking a commiserate hit in revenues. While it may depress me as a human journalist, this is not an unreasonable decision for a company to make.

This effort to reduce expenses is also a driving factor in the citizen journalism movement. While “giving voice to the voiceless” may be the goal of us do-gooder newsroom types, obtaining free content against which advertising can be sold is the business model of everything from CNN’s i-Report to Twitter and Gmail.

So, what content is still worth the cost of production? Well, basically any topic that is covered by blog aggregators Weblogs, Inc. and Federated Media. Why are those good bellwethers? Because those companies are buying content in niche categories and selling ads against it. Their whole job is to calculate the supply and demand for various narrow categories of content.

What kind of journalism is not worth the cost of human production? Basically, anything that has to do with death, destruction, or politics. No advertiser wants to stand next to those skunks at the picnic. Those categories only work for advertisers if they’re part of larger ad deals across a breadth of content.

The only thing standing in the way of better collaboration had been the difficulty so far in matching the problems with the resources. We would need to create a Match.com of journalism innovation, I said, where newsroom leaders could submit RFPs and where educators could post the research and technical resources of their students.

So with 10 minutes left in the panel, I whipped open a Word document and projected it on the screen at the front of the room. I was ready to start brainstorming right there and begin making a quick list of research questions and innovation projects. Oh, the excitement of a panel discussion that would be more than just talk! The bridges that would be built!

But then we hit just one small snag. Of the hundred or so people in the room, about 90 percent were from the classroom. Somehow, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon in Washington, the Statler conference room at the Capital Hilton had transformed in to an ivory tower. We had built a bridge to nowhere.

Larry Dailey from the University of Nevada, Reno, made the good observation after the session that we probably had a marketing problem. We had the words “university” and “academia” in our panel title. We were competing against one called “Optimize and Monetize.” Not really a contest, is it?

All that said, we still had a great group of panelists I had the privilege of moderating. One panelist — Paul Volpe, the deputy politics editor at washingtonpost.com — made a dead-on observation that makes the homogeneity of the panel moot anyway. “Pitch me,” he told the journalism instructors in the room. He said he gets more proposals than he can handle every day from vendors who are trying to sell a product to The Washington Post. Some of them, he said, are attempting to solve a problem he didn’t even know he had until they made their pitch. If academics want to play a leading role in “research and development” for the news industry, he said we needed to be the ones to identify market needs and build the solutions. Journalists, whose days are more than full simply trying to deal with immediate publishing demands, don’t have time to ponder these things.

He make a good point. If universities want to be R&D shops, then we need to start being the places where services like Pluck or Inform or Apture are born. We need to be the places to create original sites like Slate or MediaStorm or Everyblock. Why not? In Chapel Hill alone we have incredible resources to foster and incubate these kinds of projects — resources like Carolina Launch Pad and the Carolina Challenge. Shoot, we have one of America’s best journalism schools at what The Princeton Review has called the most entrepreneurial university in the country.

The other two panelists are tackling the newsroom-classroom partnership from two different angles. Jay Rosen is getting ready to launch Studio 20 at New York University and Retha Hill is gearing up for her second year as director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Rosen said he was trying to shake the metaphor of j-school as boot camp and replace it with the metaphor of the studio theater — maybe like the one at Yale. “If you imagine yourselves that way, people will treat you that way,” he said.

Studio 20 aims to partner with a news organization around a specific project. That project will then get taken “in to the studio” and become an integrated part of the curriculum. In fact, it becomes the whole curriculum. Everything about the Studio 20 master’s degree program is centered around these projects. If the Studio had been up and running this year, for example, Rosen said they would have partnered perhaps with Talking Points Memo to do a project.

When the program gets up and running next year, it will have 15 master’s students and three instructors. Rosen also said the program would have visiting fellows from the profession who would help lead some of the projects.

Rosen’s suggestion for academics who want to make better connections to industry:

• Make a personal connection to a decision maker by teaching that person something. Become a one-on-one tutor demonstrating that your expertise can fill his or her need.
• Offer to build something for free for that decision maker’s news organization.

Hill’s program in Arizona is already up and working with clients such as Gannett and AZCentral.com. One of the products they’ve created is a Facebook application for the Arizona Republic’s coverage of high school sports.

Clients approach the New Media Innovation Lab, the students consult with the client and then provide a demo.

At ASU, the experience is extra-curricular. Hill pays her grad students $10.75 an hour and her undergrads $9.75 an hour. Each works about 20 hours a week in the lab. The students come not only from journalism, but engineering and finance as well. For each role in her lab, Hill said she has six or seven openings, with anywhere between 10 and 40 applicants for each role. One of the challenges, she said, was that some of the more experienced programmers and designers can easily make more money by taking their skills outside the university.

One thing that struck me is that while students in these programs are doing a great job creating products, there isn’t much time left for creating knowledge, for creating broader theories from the specifics of the project and engaging the research faculty to better understand the broader lessons about how or why a particular product works or fails.

Retha and Jay ARE building bridges. Paul Volpe has some great ideas about creating a place where students can train alongside newsroom veterans who want to re-train. And I see more and more examples of these kinds of partnerships every year.

So what if we didn’t get to create our database of newsroom client needs and academic resources yesterday. I’d like to do it here. You have a resource in your classroom, or a problem in your newsroom? Post it to the comments are here and we’ll keep the conversation going.

Also, on Friday at 2:30 p.m. I will be moderating a panel about the possibilities and challenges of newsroom-classroom partnerships.

Full coverage of the conference is here. UNC-Chapel Hill junior Alex Kowalski is one of the student journalists staffing the event.

They say: “We plan to highlight innovation, chronicle setbacks and analyze the business side of college newspapers. We also plan to look at how college journalists are lending their voices to the big stories of the day.”

A good idea, methinks. Congrats, Sara and Andrew. You and your blog subjects are the Future of News.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t also give a shout out to a great new multimedia site just launched by Tar Heel students. Andaman Rising is a collection of 15 student-produced multimedia stories about life in southern Thailand after the 2004 Asian tsunami. This kind of excellent multimedia documentary work is becoming so reliable here in Chapel Hill that I take it for granted. Congrats students. You, too, are the Future of News.

The lesson, Thames writes: “The more you post, the higher your numbers will climb.”

Yes, and there’s a good reason for that.

It’s important for journalists to understand that the way people read news online is fundamentally different from the way they read in print. Put simply, print is appointment content and online is incidental content.

Print is delivered in a package at the same time every day. Online is delivered in drips and drabs in an ongoing process throughout the day. Yahoo News — essentially the AP wire repurposed — is the most popular news site in North Carolina and the United States.

Online news is consumed by an at-work audience. Online news readers sneak quick peeks at news while they should be crunching the latest spreadsheet. They are reading news on the sly, in short undetectable bursts. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, online news consumers spend six minutes a day in that medium while newspaper readers spend 15 minutes a day with the dead tree edition. The number one threat to journalism in America isn’t the decline of classified ad revenue, it’s the potential that corporate American will one shut down access to news sites and blogs.

In the great debate about whether the unlimited space of the Internet will encourage more in-depth reporting or whether the bottomless news hole will create a world of news briefs written in 140 characters or less, the latter has won.

Among the online news audience, more people say they go online for “breaking news” than “in-depth coverage,” also according to Pew.

How Did The Pilot do it?

Staff Size: 14

Increase in Online Resources: Made the sports editor the go-to online guy. Gave him a video camera and tape record and made the Web his top filing priority.

Decrease in Print Resources: Eliminated one copy editor position.

Change in Workflow: Stories are now published first online if they break on a day when The Pilot doesn’t print.

That, of course, begs the question — did The Pilot trade a perceptible decrease in quality for a perceptible increase in quantity? Certainly they increased their risk of error, but isn’t that the hallmark of a good business — knowing when to take calculated risk?