Last week, I took part in a chat amongst journalists, designers and progammers on an internal e-mail list about how we work together. It was touched off by the e-mail interview with Adrian Holovaty at the Online Journalism Review.

One of Adrian’s sage bits of advice:

It all starts with the people, really. If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what’s possible.

He says hire programmers, which news organisations are doing. But even journalists – like myself – who can’t programme but still know what’s possible are important. I took one programming class, ever, and that was Pascal back in the late 80s. I dropped it after one semester when I realised that my brain just didn’t work that way.

Yet my journalism school specifically and my university – the University of Illinois – more generally prepared me well for what was to come. I learned about all aspects of journalism, including design. I got the basics, plus I did lunch with the developers who worked on Mosaic, so got an early introduction to the web. There are journalists who aren’t programmers who know what’s possible, and quite honestly we are just waiting to be unleashed so we can get on with it.

What’s holding us back? Lots. As journalists, we’re obsessed with today’s deadlines. But too often, that focus comes at the cost of innovation that, for most of the internet, happened a while ago. We haven’t burned the business cards as Jeff Jarvis suggested and are stuck with organisational structures that concentrate solely on putting out a daily newspaper or feeding the beast of the 24-hour broadcast news machine, but which aren’t flexible enough to free up innovators to work on other projects. In a world of Google and nimble start-ups, news organisations need to invest in a little R&D and give us room to experiment.

Instead, the hungry innovators get pigeonholed, even when our skill set defies categorisation. I’m a journalist, a blogger, a podcaster, a cameraman, a photographer, a hacker (albeit not a very good one). As my partner in podcasting, Ben Metcalfe, says, if I were a town, I’d be San Luis Obispo, halfway between the content capital of LA and the geek creativity crucible of Silicon Valley. Don’t try to shoehorn me into your org chart. You’re org chart is part of the problem. You’ll get less value from me in an old school position than you’ll get if you let me do what I love: Get up every morning, work like a dog and create a brand new medium.

I am passionate about journalism, and I’m passionate about what journalists, designers and programmers can achieve together when unleashed on this amazing canvas called the internet. I get excited thinking about what I can do with all of this new fangled mobile communications technology. How does that transform journalism? Live, immediate, raw, real. Must read, must see, must participate in, be a part of content. That’s what it does.

Second class citizens, still

And while you’re at it, as Adrian says, stop treating us geeks like the hired help. Adrian uses the term IT Monkey, I believe. New media isn’t new anymore. In the UK, online advertising spending surpassed radio in 2004, and it is expected to surpass national newspaper spending this year.

And notice this:

Excluding internet spending, total UK media advertising would be in recession with television, national and regional press all reporting revenue declines this year, it said.

This isn’t the lates 90s when people said of the web, “Show me the money”. The money is there. The audience is there. The news industry needs to shift its priorities both in hiring and spending.

How to change?

There are some small organisations like the Lawrence Journal World and Lawrence.com in Lawrence, Kansas (where Adrian Holovaty worked before joining the Washington Post), Nord Jyske in Denmark and many others, who understand multimedia, participatory media and are doing it really well. These are small shops where the editors, journos, developers, designers work together in a much more seemless and collaborative way.

But while Adrian is doing some great stuff when it comes to the innovative packaging and presentation of news at the Washington Post, what other possibilities are there? What could we achive when programmers, designers and programme makers work together during the whole process, rather than just the last few steps? Add in a little WiFi, 3G, radical in the field/on the ground newsgathering, and right away you’ve got a journalistic revolution.

I’d love the chance to focus on a single project, with the web at its heart and with on-demand audio and video. (No broadcast – broadcast would subsume this project. The media could be used on TV or radio, but it’s not a goal unto itself.) I’d work with a multi-skilled team with overlapping skills so they are literate in each others’ specialities and understand the challenges each will encounter. They would be the sort of people who understand that web isn’t just a publishing medium. Community and participation would be central to this project, both for promotion and co-creation. This is an X-project. A news incubator.

There are a couple of key issues that I need to think more about. Some stories would be perfect for this treatment, but not all. Some audiences would eat this up, but not all. We should focus on the right stories for the right audiences – you might call them ‘edge cases’ but perhaps ‘early adopters’ is a better way of thinking of them. IM, RSS, sharing. Mash ups. New news. News for the MySpace generation.

News has to evolve if it is to survive. And there are already journalists and geeks with mad ninja skills just waiting for a chance to show the world what can be done.

It was live from North London as I did a ‘webinar’ Tuesday night on the nitty gritty of how we do a global interactive radio programme five nights a week on the BBC World Service. Francois Nel from University of Central Lancashire invited me to take part in their Journalism Leaders Forum. You can watch the whole thing here.

First off, we try to eavesdrop on conversations around the world, virtually get a sense of what people are talking about in cafes and around water coolers the world over. What are the most viewed, most e-mailed stories on major news sites? What are bloggers talking about? We check Global Voices, the global blog network based out of Harvard. What are the stories coming picked up by BBC Monitoring, our global media monitoring department? We do a roundup on our blog and ask the audience what is important to them.

With the help of our audience, we settle on topics to discuss that day. We often post debates on the Have Your Say section of the BBC News Website. We use a discussion system based on Jive Software. People can not only comment, but also leave an e-mail address and phone number. Personal information apart from name and place don’t appear on the public site, but we can log in and see those contact details to invite people to join our on air discussion.

Our blog is beginning to gain some momentum. We’ve got on average four comments per post, and I’m really pleased on how the blog allows the conversations to continue long after our on air discussions finish. This is what I meant by saying that blogs can overcome the limits of linear media. We’ve only got one hour on air, but our audience can explore other threads of discussion online for weeks to come.

We’ve had some amazing conversations grow out of it. I remember recently when we had a south Asian sailor calling on a sat phone from a ship in the Molucca Straits talking to another Asian Muslim living in Stockholm being asked questions by a caller from Austin Texas in the United States about recent violent clashes between Hamas and Fatah factions in the West Bank and Gaza.

We’ve still got more to do. As I said on the webinar, we’re still building community around the programme. People often say that the BBC has a huge audience. Recent figures show the BBC World Service has 163 million listeners. But a sense of community is different from a large audience. Community is a sense of ownership, belonging and participation. The greater the community we build around the programme, the more the audience will feel a sense that this is their programme. As I’ve said before, building community around a global discussion programme is difficult. Community develops around several shared things, place or a shared passions or interests.

Another question asked was how to make money with blogs. Suw often says that she doesn’t make money with her blog but because of her blog. There is a lot of truth even for us in traditional media. I remember in the late 90s people in traditional media said that the web was great but there was no way to make money with it. Now, many media websites turn a profit, a profit not necessarily that is replacing revenue lost from their traditional business, but a profit. And I believe that blogs can renew our relationship with our audiences.

It’s not simply a commercial relationship. A lot of my colleagues ask me why I blog. I found that when I wrote the blog during the US elections in 2004 that it reminded me a lot of the relationship I had with my readers when I first started out in journalism as a local newspaper reporter. I was part of the communities that I wrote about in western Kansas. That was one of the things that made journalism a fulfilling job for me.

Even though in 2004, I was writing the blog for people all over the world, I felt I was writing for a community again, not just readers. I got more response from the blog I wrote than almost anything I have done for the BBC. I think there are a lot of opportunities for news organisations to embrace blogging to renew our relationship with our audiences. While I won’t outline a business model with facts and figures about a return on investment, I know that blogs can help us create compelling content. And that is the start for any media business model.

I was at the WeMedia conference where Suw was an online curator. Our friend Kevin Marks thought her role was, “pointing out the old media dinosaurs in the museum”.

As Ian Forrester points out, my position here is pretty tricky and slightly dangerous. As I have said, I work for the BBC. I am on the BBC’s blog steering committee as one of the ‘bloggers’ who doesn’t represent one of the major divisions in the corporation. I don’t say that to say, look at how important I am. This is about telling you where I’m coming from. Transparency, which as Dan Gillmor told some folks at an internal BBC briefing, journalists need to do more often.

I’m also a journalist and have been in one way or another for more than 10 years now. I think that journalism is important in a Jeffersonian sense of the functioning of a democracy, but I don’t confuse the importance of what I do with any outsized sense of self-importance.

Dan said that while he wasn’t at WeMedia last Wednesday that his impression was that it was: “Journalists vs. Bloggers conversation No. 7396”. I’m going to stick my professional neck out and say that is the impression I also got from a lot of participants, including Rebecca MacKinnon and Dorian Benkoil, here at Corante.

Bloggers are bored with this false dichotomy, and as for this journalist, I am too. There are lots of opportunities for colloboration, and as for the bloggers that I know and work with, I’ve never found bloggers to be bullies. I found that my relationship with bloggers, citizen journalists and DIY, participatory media folk of all stripes is just like any relationship: Treat people with respect and professionalism and you get the same back in spades.