ZDNet’s Tom Foremski asks: “As the business models for serious journalism continue to erode where will we get the quality media we need as a society to make important decisions about our future?”

And warns: “Special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want you to read, but you won’t pay for the media you need to read.”

Cisco has a large team of journalists producing articles about the tech industry for its online magazine “the network.” John Earnhardt said that the reporters have just two rules to follow: “Don’t write about competitors, and don’t write anything that could harm Cisco.”

At Nissan Motors, the company has built a full scale TV studio and produces a news program with veteran journalists from the BBC and elsewhere.

“Why does Nissan want to get into the business of serious news journalism? Why not sponsor an existing news show? His answer was surprising. “I don’t have the confidence that traditional news organizations will be able to survive the transition to the new business models. Why should I invest large amounts of money over the next few years in a failing enterprise?”

If there’s a take-away from this piece it’s probably this: “Media is a loss leader, you need something else to sell. If all you have is media to sell, then you will have losses.”

“But we are in the midst of a transformative shift in the craft of journalism. Text-only stories, the kind your parents found in their morning newspapers and characterized by the classic inverted pyramid (most important stuff at the top, least important stuff at the bottom) could eventually go the way of 45-rpm records. The MP3 of journalism may be the “live blog,” which relies on the merging of platforms and weaving of text with video, audio, external links to other articles (including those of rival news organizations), blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and whatever other useful information is available. It doesn’t matter if information originates from a New York Times article, a tweet from an eyewitness on the scene, or someone offering astute commentary and curating links, a video shot by a protester or produced by a team at CNN. Because in the live blog format disparate platforms become irrelevant, and the walls between these separate silos of content simply dissolve.”

From article at Fast Company

Clay Shirky argues we need for the news business to be more chaotic than it is because ” there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.” Here are some excerpts from his latest essay:

Buy a newspaper. Cut it up. Throw away the ads. Sort the remaining stories into piles. Now, describe the editorial logic holding those piles together.
—
For all that selling such a bundle was a business, though, people have never actually paid for news. We have, at most, helped pay for the things that paid for the news.
—
But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared.
—
I could tell (my) students that when I was growing up, the only news I read was thrown into our front yard by a boy on a bicycle. They might find this interesting, but only in the way I found it interesting that my father had grown up without indoor plumbing.
—
News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market. Real news—reporting done for citizens instead of consumers—is a public good.
—
A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now. Any way of creating news that gets cost below income, however odd, is a good way, and any way that doesn’t, however hallowed, is bad.

Our company operates half a dozen news networks and they all have websites, Twitter feeds and –I think– Facebook pages. When I introduced our reporters to Twitter a few years ago, I made a feeble attempt to get our reporters to tweet their stories with a link back to the website. They explained they were too busy gathering and writing the news to do this, so I futzed around with RSS feeds so the stories “auto-post” to Twitter.

Since then, a few of our reporters have set up their own twitter accounts and manually post about the stories they’re covering. But for the most part, we’re still on auto-pilot.

This minor frustration was brought to mind by a story in the LA Times:

“A conversation this week in the offices of Neon Tommy, a USC student-run online news outlet, went something like this: Editor: “We should be tweeting more of the Tumblr content.” Journalist One: “You can publish automatically to Twitter from Tumblr.” Journalist Two: “But the tweets can look weird. It’s better to move the link to Bit.ly and customize it. Do your own.”

It’s pretty easy to distinguish an RSS-generated tweet from one written by a living, breathing person. The point of the story is about delivery.

“A generation ago, journalists wrote their stories and moved on to the next thing, with someone else worrying about delivery of the end product. In today’s digital world, journalists must not only create the stories but make sure they get to readers. The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism created Neon Tommy as a laboratory for these practices. Students promote their work in real time, highlight the best stories by others on the Web and repurpose old content with new analysis. That’s only a start, as they push their journalism through myriad channels to reach a maximum audience.”

So what do the folks at Neon Tommy know about serving an audience. It’s #1 among web-only college news sites (6th when thrown in with those that also produce print publications — such as the No. 1 Daily Bruin at UCLA and the No. 2 Harvard Crimson.)

I don’t spend much time nagging our reporters these days. They are no longer my responsibility. And they’re all smart people who can figure out stuff for themselves. Or not.