I got a namecheck on Paul Bradshaw and Jon Hickman's podcast.
I'd asked via Twitter: "Will sites like Help Me Investigate will always need some kind of professional journalist/mentor/organiser/news cadre?"
(I could have done with someone like that to sub out the un-needed second 'will')
Here's Paul's reply:
"No is the short answer. The only difference between a professional journalist and a non-professional journalist is that a professional journalist happens to get paid.
"There are lots of examples of outstanding journalism by people who are not paid to be journalists. I'm talking about activism, engaged citizens and creative people.
"The model that we're adopting is that it needs some sort of leadership, for want of a better word, to help shape that community and establish the rules of that community. That's a lesson that the websites have learned - Wikipedia is a great example.
"But I think the idea is that the culture of the website becomes strong enough and the users have advanced to such a point that they can maintain their own culture. We'll need to wait and see if that actually happens."
I think that idea of creating the culture by exhortation and example is really powerful. I used the phrase 'news cadre' in my question. I like it. I'm going to keep it. I think journalists need to become news cadres.
Just to be clear - I don't believe you need a professional journalist to have legitimate journalism. I agree with Paul Bradshaw about that 100%.
But I think there will always be a need for news cadres. Look how groups within communities organise themselves: people come together for a specific purpose, whether it's to set up a bowling club or protest against the closure of a park. They elect people to different tasks. If their work grows, then they employ people to carry out tasks on their behalf.
Online news communities will need things done. Look at this list of skills being asked of online journalists. What percentage of the population has those skills?
News communities need news cadres that have those skills, so that connections can be made, ideas can be presented, infrastructure can be maintained, so that the community can grow and prosper and become more and more effective.

I've realised that I've been looking a lot at what's been happening in the US newspaper industry.
That's partly because that's where papers are really suffering at the moment. It's also because through Twitter I've discovered a lot of smart people in the States who are talking about what the decline of the traditional newspaper model means for journalism and how the traditional media companies there are failing to deal with the changing times.
But I saw something this week which confirms that media companies on this side of the Atlantic are just as short-sighted and uncaring about the communities they serve.
Across central Scotland Trinity Mirror is closing local newspaper offices and merging production centres. One of the papers affected is the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser.
This is one of the papers I grew up with. It would be delivered to my gran's house in Plains every week, full of local news: everything from the latest carry-on at Monklands District Council, to the real parish pump stuff from the villages. As kids, we'd look at the Sammy Squirrel page to see whose parents had stumped up the cash for them to have a photo and birthday greeting printed in the paper.
The Advertiser is a good local paper, providing a real community service. It's well-known for its campaigning journalism, with the best example maybe being the campaign to save A&E services at Monklands District Hospital - a campaign it led from the front, and won.

If the new models of journalism create ways of giving communities the power to tell their own stories to each other, then I suppose that's in line with 'Power to the People'.
But the models that survive will be the ones that do that successfully. So I suppose that's 'Power from the People'.
Here's a great example of how that power from the people can turn into an income stream.
So could ENGAGEMENT=INCOME?
I liked these thoughts about engagement. Especially this:
"every time I have watched a newspaper focus group, I felt like it never got at what people truly think and feel. The artificiality of the focus group affects what the participants say, and in the end, it’s just not the real deal. It isn’t that they’re lying, but they are trying to make a good impression — not only on the people asking the questions but also on the other participants, who are strangers to them."
That reminded me of The Wisdom of Crowds. People always make the right decisions, but only under the right circumstances. They have to be informed, have the chance to ask questions and be able to make their final decision on their own initiative without being affected by the opinions of others. Aggregate the answers and the outcome is - almost invariably - spot on.
I always though that online news community sites would a great model for that kind of deliberation. Back to 'Power to the People'.

Reading this really useful advice for the newspaper industry from Mark Glaser was a joy and a source of pain.
It's a joy because I can't fault it. There's not one thing that I don't agree with. There's not one thing that wouldn't help newspapers re-position themselves as champions of a news community.
It's painful because Southside Media ticked so many of these boxes.
Not that we did at first. At first, my vision was veru much based on my experiences as a reporter on weekly newspapers. The dead trees and ink were important to me. I thought that was the only game in town. Our first website was a travesty - story teasers with an exhortation to buy the paper, alongside a phone number and email address.
One of the many people who helped me back then was an amazing woman called Hannah Clinch. She always said that the paper had to be something different from that model; it had to be rooted in the community, with their active participation and sense of ownership.
She got me on the road to using Open Source software and introduced me to Drupal which became the framework for our social networks.
If I'd listened to her more and concentrated on helping the community talk to itself instead of creating a paper that talked to them, things might have been different.
But, that's not to say we didn't do good things. We did. I'm very proud still, of the papers, the social networks, the people who worked on them and the people who helped us from the communities we served.
And at the end of two years, I'd say we were well on the way to looking like something that Mark Glaser would have approved of.

I think journalism needs journalists. I don't mean journalists working in the way we've worked up to now; I mean a group of people who are information miners, crafters and publishers who are able to encourage people to get involved in the news-creation process and help them organise themselves. News cadres.
I wondered how much it would cost society to have this group of people.
Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
There are around 38,000 members of the NUJ.
The average annual salary of journalists in NUJ-recognised workplaces in 2005 was £37,000. Let's be generous and say £38,000.
That's a total cost of £1,444,000,000 a year.
So what would people have to pay in order to fund that? Well, there are around 11 million newspaper readers in the UK.
So that's £131.27 per reader per year. Or 36p a day.
Which I think must be in the ballpark of being the average cover price of a daily newspaper in the UK.
Which means that - as thing stand - the public are paying enough to cover the salaries of UK journalists.
So, given that, could a pay-what-you-like model be a possible model for any of those 38,000 journalists looking to start something new?

I read this after Jay Rosen quoted from it in the latest Rebooting the News podcast.

"We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history - as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily - just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

"But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we - journalists - we can't stop doing what we do.

"As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here. That's the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight."

This has chimed with me in a way I can't explain. I feel inspired by it. but also shamed. I've a lot of thinking to do.

The solution to the news industry's problems - squeeze every penny out of the content you get your few remaining staff to produce for you.
That's my take on the views of the American Press Institute.
Other folk are doing a great job explaining how this is pretty much a declaration of war on the open web.
But for every big corporation buying lobbyists who buy politicians, there are thousands of people using that open web to come together and to stand up for a new, networked, co-operative vision of the future:
On Twitter I said I think the API's on a hiding to nothing. I really believe it.
On another point, I was interested to read this.
Evidence to support my thought that an online news community might need some professional help and encouragement?

I really, really like this.
Believe it or not, I was outlining an idea really similar to this to my long-suffering girlfriend when we were in Brussels last week. My idea was to use Drupal to build an online community around different journalistic questions. The one I had in mind was something I've covered previously for The Politics Show - why are poorer people in Scotland less likely than richer people to receive surgical treatment if they suffer from Coronary Heart Disease, even though it's poorer people who are more likely to suffer from the disease in the first place? You can see the figures for yourself here.
It's a really important subject, but it doesn't get a proper treatment in the traditional journalism model.
I did my best to explain it in a five minute telly pack. I got a graphic done showing the differences in treatment rates, I interviewed someone who had received heart surgery about the difference it made to his life, I interviewed a heart specialist. But that was it. It highlighted the issue, which is a good thing, but it didn't kick things on further. It didn't answer the two important questions - why is this happening and what impact is the failure to get access to treatment having on people's lives?

I've just got back from a trip to Brussels. My head's abuzz with ideas. There was a lot of catching up to do on Google Reader when I got back though.
So what's been happening? Well - Rebooting the News has got itself a domain name http://rebootnews.com/. As I've said before, it's well worth a listen; challenging, engaging and entertaining.

But still failing to get to grips with the online world...
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/05/26/inpublishing-survey-beh...