As you probably know, the debate about blogs and journalism is a controversial one, and has really been going on for years. The emergence of social networks has really only fueled the debate. Considering reports that most Twitter users are looking for news, the debate will not likely be cooling down anytime soon.

Solis began by suggesting that new media is outperforming traditional media. Lemon jumped right in and disagreed, saying that people go to CNN to find a trusted source, and that people get their info from them and other sources and then go and re-tweet and blog about it.

Rosen spoke about growth in the industry and said that the pieces are starting to get filled in. The live web has enhanced it, but also made it more competitive, he says, noting that in the beginning new media was similar to old media, but not anymore.

Hewitt suggests that there are plenty of growth opportunities, but for new networks, it’s hard to get noticed and will be even harder in another ten years. There are numerous questions, such as: where are the jobs going to come from and how will journalists get paid?

Lemon says traditional media and new media need to work together. They shouldn’t fight. Earl agrees.

Rosen says that before news breaks, the facts and verification have to be there, but it’s not true that only professional journalists do this. Hewitt agrees, adding that new media evolution involves the human aspect.

Solis asks the speakers if the "statusphere" (status updates) is the salvation for traditional news. Lemon says that traditional news organizations took a while, but are now being transparent, and that "big media" gives new media understanding.

Rosen says that new media is shared more horizontally as opposed to the former vertical way from big media, and that part of that horizontal shift is humanizing it. "Give bloggers and regular people credit." It needs to be a "mutual" relationship. Lemon says that bloggers can’t be as responsible as the original journalists who researched topics.

When asked if the school of journalism has a place in the future, Hewitt says in his experience, they’re teaching irrelevant tactics. Rosen says they used to segregate between newspapers, magazines, and broadcast, but not anymore. Now, he says, they combine and incorporate the web and yield a new media system.

WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report from BlogWorld.

 Dean Singleton

"We understand that these are both difficult and historic times for the industry," said Singleton.  Later, he continued, "[Y]ou may be surprised to know that AP now receives only 28 percent of its revenues from member newspapers.  In 2009 it will receive less than 25 percent of its revenues from members.  Broadcasters, Internet companies and international subscribers now provide the lion’s share of AP revenue."

The AP isn’t cheering on old media’s death, of course; Singleton announced a number of price cuts that should benefit almost every form of press, and perhaps newspapers in particular.

However, the AP’s chairman added, "We are able to deliver these adjustments only because AP successfully has controlled costs while growing revenue and modernizing its technical infrastructure."  Which might be interpreted as a nudge for newspapers to do the same.

Finally, in vaguely related news, Dean Singleton managed to slip up and ask a certain presidential candidate about "Obama bin Laden."

 John French

All cost-cutting measures will likely remain in place "[u]ntil we see indications of bottom-line improvement," according to a memo written by CEO John French and reprinted by FOLIO.  This seems reasonable enough – from a worker’s perspective, it’s certainly preferable to layoffs – but doesn’t say much about Penton’s hope for an economic recovery.

Also, even though some of Penton’s problems aren’t necessarily recession-related, they are the sorts of things that will affect a great many companies.  "This year we are facing significant increases in some of our largest, fixed operating expenses including the cost of postage and the cost of paper," wrote French.

So old media in general is getting seriously squeezed, from the sound of things.

Penton’s CEO promised to write occasional updates, and as long as he does so (and the leaker of this first memo does his or her part), we’ll try to keep you informed of the situation.  In the meantime, at least the Dow is down only $16.93 so far today.

Old Media, Time To Find The Missing Link

But maybe in the New Media, we’re talking of a different animal. The New Media is more about conversation and cooperation than it is about competition.

Maybe. You still want to be the number-one go-to resource in whatever niche you’re in. But it seems unrealistic (or perhaps overly-optimistic) to think that media hasn’t already fragmented into a million pieces.

News Flash: Readers now how have unlimited sources, and yours is just one of them.

Writing for CenterNetworks, Allen Stern criticizes WashingtonPost.com for publishing an article on the 20 best travel websites but not linking to a single one of them.

"The newspaper sites still don’t get how to join the conversation," he writes. "It starts with something as simple as a link to the sites and blogs who provided the content. In this case, the links should be provided to the travel sites that are mentioned."

In fairness, though, WaPo has been pretty aggressive about incorporating blogs into its everyday content, and linking out is standard practice among them. The same goes for the New York Times. However, in their main "newsy" articles, they’re both stingy with the link love, usually opting to link within their own sites rather than out to somewhere else.

That, and you have to tell them your life story via registration to view that content, another cardinal Web sin. Other sources often let their content expire, which is a prime cause of "link rot." Click on a link from an older story to find that newspaper site’s content is no longer available.

And this is really too bad, mainly because it is really an old-fashioned, Old Media approach to the New Media.

Note also how WaPo and the NYT are still attached to their serif fonts, as though reading from a screen and reading from paper are the same. I’m with them on that; I dig the little tails – they look nicer to me. But sans-serif makes for speedier reading online.

This isn’t so much an essay on where the major newspaper sites have fallen short during their online migration as it is a treatise on usability. I’ve written before about how the editorial process is changing because of the Internet.

News Flash #2: The end user doesn’t want to hunt and gather more than he has to. Information overload is no joke, and the easier you make the discovery process, the more likely the user is to return to you.

That means not delaying discovery with registration pages, making it easier and speedier to read, linking out to related sources, and keeping your content alive forever so the reference doesn’t die. 

So, I disagree (a bit) with Stern’s assertion that the major newspaper sites don’t get how to join the conversation; I think they do (finally) get it and are trying. Where they’re failing, though, is tailoring their design and content with the end-user in mind. It’s a new end-user they’re not used to dealing with, one that reads from a screen and not from paper. 

Whether they be about rumors of witchcraft, sightings of public debauchery, or accusations of questionable lineage, the early days of journalism were often little more than unfounded and unfair gossip.

The Associated Press itself was formed to reign in the madness of competing journalists, all of them racing each other in rowboats out into New York Harbor to squeeze every last drop of Old World information from immigrants before they could even disembark into the New World. Rowboats, waves, and large ships are a deadly combination.

Unionized or not, there was still competition between newspaper magnates, names we revere today, Pulitzer and Hearst, scratching at each other with ridiculous headlines to build empires of pennies.

But eventually that madness subsided, for the better part of a century, and the news business became not only routine, but entrenched, elite, and virtually unchallenged.

Howard Owens, once himself a newspaper publisher, describes how the business of news settled itself into that certain way of doing:

We have developed “news judgement” (how important a story is) based on our need to order news within the confines of a certain package size and design.

We developed inverted pyramids both to fit wire service needs and because the nature of the print package sometimes required stories to jump, so we wanted to get the news up top.

We developed certain professional standards related to the content of the story because with mass production, we essentially had only one chance to get the story right. We had to put a premium on accuracy and fair mindedness.

But Owens goes on to say in that insightful post  that times have changed, and are changing rapidly, at once progressive and regressive.

Competition between news providers is steeper than it has ever been with so many avenues for delivery; eventually radio, broadcast, and cable would step into the picture and fall in line with a certain integrity, an integrity increasingly worn thin by fragmentation of available sources, the desperation created by both too much competition on one side (the receiver side), and media consolidation on the other side (the sender side), so that as the public seeks more options, the message creators seek to whittle them down, providing fine fodder for the conspiratorial minded.

(Or maybe you haven’t heard of Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone’s evil plans?)

And then you have the bloggers. Disorganized, unschooled, undisciplined, unbeholden to editor, publisher, or conglomerate, but rather, under the direction of their own conscience and the immediate response of their readers, who will and do respond immediately in the comments section, adding their own information and commentary to the fray.

An information free-for-all the world has never seen.

Thus you have the Great Media Divide. Journalists and Old Media with their pesky responsibilities, self-imposed regulations, advertiser sensitivities, and publisher/owner biases, a public that’s rather sick of it, and bloggers with nothing but what Freedom of the Press was intended for in the first place: blowing the whistle on abuses of power.

And it’s worse than that. Because Old Media has become a large chunk of said Power, it has lost much of its ability to hold Power accountable.

So how does journalism survive itself in the age of New Media? The way it has in ages past, the way everything survives: it adapts. In Owen’s aforementioned post, he recommends journalists become, or at least mirror their greatest threat.

Think, behave, report like a blogger – while, somehow, keeping with your standards and practices, your professional pedigree, your certifications, your piece of paper that says you know what you’re doing. Adopt, understand, and use the new technology before you. But above all, you must engage the audience where the audience is, and come down from your marble hill.

The dust of the Wild West settles eventually, and when it does, the successful ones will have taken the storm in stride, even added bits of it to their arsenal. The world is changed again, an you must change with it.    

Dramatic, isn’t it? True as well, it appears. News Corp magnate Rupert Murdoch, a wealthy man many times over thanks to his newspaper publishing, sees the bright white light and hears the ghosts beckoning to print media publishers. Come to the light, they intone.

The Economist painted a picture of the future of newspapers that do not embrace the Internet. Murdoch assailed newspapers last year, the story said, as he unmercifully called those who fail to grasp the reality of changes around them as “remarkably, unaccountably complacent.”

It’s why millions of News Corp’s dollars have flowed to Los Angeles over the past year, where Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn has had as much fun picking out an Internet lineup as Joe Torre does every time he goes to Yankee Stadium. Having a deep-pocketed boss who loves to win and will pave the street with cash to get there makes the job much more enjoyable.

Other newspapers have been spending like they were the Kansas City Royals – low on resources, tight budgeted, and seemingly unable at the ownership level to figure out how to compete. Or even to care.

The article described one success story, hailing from Oslo. Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, has come a long way from its 150-year-old origins as a news printer. They have built Scandinavia’s first- and second-ranked websites, built a classifieds portal, and even constructed a search engine that contends with the all-powerful Google.

Place the blame squarely at the feet of newspaper publishers who entrenched themselves against the onslaught of the Internet. When they chose to send out their writers and reporters, The Economist noted they selected younger and cheaper talent and kept the experienced and best on the print beat.

They may be able to save themselves, though. It will require a blend of quality writing and focusing on the local market, rather than the interminable drumbeat of news from the Middle East that online readers can get quickly from numerous other sources online.

This passage from the report may have summed up the key point best, when it comes to maintaining relevance for print in an increasingly online world:

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.