I sat down with Steve Woodward this evening (@oregoniansteve on Twitter) at Bailey’s Taproom in Portland to discuss a whole myriad of topics, including the supposed “death of journalism,” how and why the internet is disrupting other industries, and why now is a great time to be alive. In the interview I did at the end of our conversation, I ask him what he thinks journalism is and about the project he’s currently working on, a mashup between InfoLiberator and OpenMicroBlogging. Their goal is to build a “Costco for data,” aggregating local information from a number of sources and then feeding it to you based on keywords, location, and other meta criteria. Watch all of the way though for a coincidental appearance by a drunk, and how he too applies to the project Steve is working on. I’ll work for better audio next time.

Of the many significant takeaways from the conversation, I’d like to record one: we are so done with the “newspapers are dying” conversation.

This video is the first in what I hope to be a series of interviews, discussions, and arguments with various people I find interesting. I’m posting them to Vimeo right now, but might be switching/cross-posting to Blip.tv if I can convince it to upload my content. Blip is pretty cool, in my opinion, because it offers an instant video podcast but Vimeo has better HD. It’s definitely a first-world dilemma.

What is journalism? Every conversation starts with a foundation, or core premises, and I don’t believe we’ve gotten to that point yet in this shindig about newspapers dying. Considering it’s a fundamental paradigm shift we’re going though, I think it’s going to be important to start at square one and build up.

The model for the ideal digital news organization. There’s a lot of ideas bouncing around as to how newsrooms should change, what the business models are, and what their websites should look like. It would be really sweet to come up with a master list of all of these ideas (and then have someone experiment with them…)

Transparency for building trust. The first group to take the concept of an “open source organization” and apply it to journalism wins five dollars. I’d enjoy covering strategies and techniques (a la the CoPress Team Blog) for completely opening a news organization.

If you can’t make it, we’ll be livestreaming and liveblogging the whole day long. It will be epic.

On the 21st of February, 2009, we’re bringing a regional edition to Portland. The Daily Vanguard has generously provided space at Portland State, but we’ve still got a lot of planning to do between now and then. If you’ll be in the area and are interested in helping out, please leave your name on the wiki and sign up for the Google Group. Personally, I’ll be satisfied if I get to spend a day jamming with like-minded entrepreneurs on these ideas:

• What are the core competencies of a news organization online?
• What is journalism in 10 years? How does journalism evolve with technology?
• What would a local news startup look like?

Being back in the States on the 21st also means I’m ending my work in Peru prematurely, but CoPress has really taken off and I’m stoked to get back and be able to take it to the next level.

Dotters-Katz and Papailiou’s proposal would add two justices to the existing five-member court and require it to submit rules changes to the Senate for approval. It would also re-establish the Elections Board as an independent entity to avoid conflicts of interest that Papailiou said were endemic under previous administrations.

There’s something wrong with this picture. I’m not talking about the proposed changes, rather it’s in the way that the information is presented. Reporting in the “traditional” news brief format, the reader (me) is left more confused than informed. There is almost zero context associated with the article, and I haven’t the faintest idea what the information presented actually means.

Such is the old paradigm. Newspapers are dead; long live newspapers. I’m of the opinion however that the new paradigm, the one that everyone’s afraid of, is actually improving journalism. Go figure.

For instance, if the Daily Emerald had the innovation, talent, and tools, I would have been presented an array of options to expand my knowledge about Dotters-Katz, how the ASUO runs, and why he proposes a change to the Constitution. There would likely be a list of previous posts on this issue, a small topical wiki in the sidebar synthesizing the pulse of ASUO, and curation of student blogosphere reactions to the announcement (like this one and one from the Oregon Commentator), among other forms of information.

Instead, the readers get nothing better than a press release and I have to use Google, coincidentally, to educate myself further. Google is taking the place of the news organization largely because the newspapers are flailing. Get with the times, please, and use the infinitely useful and flexible platform the internet gives you to empower your community with information.

Oh wait, the Daily Emerald runs College Publisher. Make sure your CMS is open source, and then innovate.