Flipboard automatically generates a list of stories that might interest you, based on links suggested by people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends. Storify reverses the flow – it allows you to easily curate a list of readings you recommend, based on your own (or others’) social-media postings.

It’s still early-release stuff – the UI, while clean, is a bit obscure (especially the flow to save, then edit, a Storify “story.”) And, like all new tools, it’ll take a few weeks for the collective “us” to figure out how to best use it. But it’s a neat mashup of technology and journalism, and it’s worth watching.

Why? Tools like this are part of the emerging news ecosystem – how can we tap the experts out there to surface smart stories on important niche topics? It’s a problem – and opportunity – my skunk-works team at PBS is thinking about a lot.

A sample – which I ginned up in all of three minutes based on the intertwined riffs of newspaper brain drains and the reinvention of what Washington journalism can be:

OK, so a raw feed of pertinent tweets isn’t a “story” in a traditional sense. But marry this with a quick text introduction (which I, um, was a bit too lazy to write) and you’ve got the makings of useful information.

A side note: The smart folks at Storify deserve all the kudos. But I’ll point out that my friends at the Knight Fellowships at Stanford can claim godparent status: co-founder Burt Herman spent the last year as a Knight Fellow, thinking about ways to use technology to reinvent journalism.)

And a big hat-tip to MediaBug‘s Scott Rosenberg for the blog post that tipped me to Storify.

Watching all the hoopla – on multiple media platforms at once – gives us all another lesson on the folly of the paid-content argument from some traditionalists.

We’re baseball freaks in this household. I’ve been a fan of the Minnesota Twins since long before the last time they played a home game outdoors. My wife jokes that she was born within sight of Shea Stadium. Our first date included a raucous discussion of which team had denuded their farm system more badly through stupid trades. (Hint: It was the Mets.)  The poor kids didn’t have a choice.

So as the Twins open Target Field today, I’m watching via the MLB Extra Innings package on Verizon FiOS ($179 this year). If I have to run to get one of the kids, I’ll be able to keep an ear on things via Sirius-XM Radio ($12 a month, and baseball is the only reason I keep satellite radio). As backup (or while traveling), I can tap the MLB.TV feed.

As I write this, it’s three hours before the game, and thousands of fellow Minnesotans are gathered outside the stadium. (How do I know? Webcams.)  After the Twins thump the BoSox today (crossed fingers), I’ll read every word I can find, especially on the Star-Tribune’s excellent blogs by LaVelle E. Neal and Joe Christensen. I gleefully wallow in the modern media soup.

Oh – and my wife sprung for a 20-game season ticket package this year for me. Yes, I live 1,250 miles away. Your point?

What’s hard to remember is this sort of overload wasn’t always so. (I had an extended conversation many years ago with a presidential candidate right after my team beat his in the World Series. We swapped stories about the insane lengths we went to – driving to the top of hills outside town! – to pull in games on AM radio skips.)

Not so many years ago that only a handful of each team’s games were televised – maybe 50 a year, almost all of them away games. The troglodyte owners thought that allowing people to watch every game would “devalue the product” and lead inexorably to declining attendance.

They made a couple of basic mistakes: First, they assumed that they were primarily in the business of selling tickets to games – not making money through multiple channels. Second, they thought that watching a game on TV was a perfect substitute for the experience of sitting in the ballpark.

Over the past 25 years or so – thanks in no small part to the phenomenal cable-TV success of some truly awful Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves teams – baseball owners figured it out. Make money by selling TV rights to every game. Split the games up between over-the-air and cable broadcasters. Offer those feeds through any possible medium (even video on mobile devices this year).

Do all that right, and it won’t harm attendance – it’ll whet appetites.

(Yes, one result of this is seemingly absurd contracts. But at least Mauer didn’t sign with the Godless Empire.)

Here’s what this has to do with the eternal (and infernal) paid-content debate: Newspaper owners who stubbornly insist that people will pay for news on the web because, well, they should are behaving like baseball owners of old.

The results speak for themselves.

Instead of fighting to wall off the web, innovate on other platforms – not just the iPad, though that’s a start. Figure out what consumers want in different circumstances, then how to use technology to deliver that information. They won’t always pay for it – but they will sometimes, and there’s an ad model out there for just about every transmission vehicle.

Give your audience what they want – when, where and how they want it. For God’s sake – Bud Selig doesn’t even do e-mail, yet even he was smart enough to figure that out.

(OK, Bob DuPuy figured it out. But Bud let him.)

(Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s Ark she wrote for a youth group.

Scene: Noah’s sons talking after God commands their father to build an ark:

Son 1:  You know what this means?

Son 2: Dad has to make a trip to the hardware store.

I commend them. They’re gamely carrying on in the face of the implosion of their publication, and they’re doing it without getting paid.

But I’m not linking to them here because I don’t want to embarrass them. The new site is, well, a bit of a mess.  has issues.

First, it’s hosted at Blogger.com. Don’t get me wrong – Blogger is fine if all you’re looking for is a free, fast, personal site. But its functionality pales compared to the open source (and equally free!) tools like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Second, the “life boat” magazine site has a dreaded subdomain URL: (site name).blogspot.com. I won’t get geeky here, but there are subtle search-engine drawbacks to a subdomain. And a blogspot URL just. Looks. Rookie.

Third, the site doesn’t have an ad unit. Anywhere. Sustainability, anyone?

In fairness, I suspect the writers believe this site is temporary. There’s a slim chance the magazine will be resurrected. It’s even more likely the Blogger site is simply a placement – a way to keep the writers’ work visible while they put together a more-substantive site.

But the irony is dripping all over the floor (and the damn dog refuses to clean it up the way he takes care of my snack crumbs): Writers who covered the demise of an industry that couldn’t cope with technological change … aren’t using technology very well.

What to do? Well, the inestimable Mark Briggs has a boatload of useful advice at J-Lab’s J-Learning site. (my only quibble: stop calling it “newspaper” in a box! Think “niche site in a box!”)

I’ll be adding some of my own thoughts about free technology tools over at the GrowthSpur blog. (Link coming when I, um, get the post finished. Nothing like a deadline…)

(Big hat-tip to erstwhile competitor @AmyVernon for noting the irony.)

REVISED TO ADD: In a Facebook conversation on this topic, someone fretted about the technology being complex – perhaps even too hard. To which I politely say “nonsense.” I can do this.