Over the past month or so, I’ve been plowing through an extensive stack of resumes to fill some openings on my new team at PBS.

Many of the resumes were sort of sad – those of journalists with impeccable traditional credentials, and no clue what I meant when I asked for work samples that showed creative use of different digital story forms in service of the content.

Call ‘em The Lifeboaters:  “This digital thing is going to be huge, and I’d be proud to learn it from your team!”  Umm, sorry. The ship that you want left 15 years ago. The good news: New ships leave everyday if you’re willing to swim out to the meet them. WordPress.com offers blogs for free. Start there, keep playing, and we’ll talk in a year.

A second pile included people who are incredibly good … at a singular thing. Call ‘em the The One-Skill Wonders: Very adept at slideshows. Or digital video. Or shoveling existing text onto a page. Yes, those are useful skills (and, candidly, they’ve been enough to get very good production jobs at many shops for a long time.) But that’s not what my team is trying to do.

Happily, however, there was a third pile of those resumes: Digital natives (or digital immigrants who work hard to remain conversant) who understand the whiz-bang toys are only useful if they serve the story. They also understand there will be a new whiz-bang tool next year.

My favorite example: One of the candidates is a wizard at a certain vector-graphics program that’s hideously expensive, ridiculously proprietary, notoriously hard to learn – and incredibly useful. Which, of course, leads some to treat it as the Universal Truth to all journalism questions, and to treat themselves as priests.

Not this guy. He wouldn’t bite on my trick question (something about whether this program was the most useful skill he’d ever learned): “The technology is always changing, so I just feel like the ability and willingness to adapt is the best skill someone can have.”

Guess what? He got an interview. So did most of the others in the third pile. They’ll be the ones making up our new team.

It was hard not to notice a few commonalities among them. An awful lot of them passed through Medill at Northwestern, American University in D.C., or Cal-Berkeley. Several also received one of the fabulous summer-long News 21 fellowships.

I’d be horribly remiss if didn’t mention the excellent program at CUNY; as it happens, none of its kids choose to apply. I’d be equally remiss if I didn’t point out that some name-brand journalism schools aren’t on this list – and that’s not an oversight.

The kids in that third stack are solid reporters and great storytellers. When pressed, they talk about technologies as means to an end – tools they can use in service of the story, not as a flashy adornment to it. They also used overly long sentences to offer variations on a motto a longtime colleague used to have on his blog: Semper Gumby – always flexible.)

Of course, one of the people I hired said it far better than I can.

I hope this forms an optimistic riposte to a discerning entry from Wayne MacPhail on PBS’ Media Shift blog. MacPhail makes an impassioned observation that J-schools are failing their students by defaulting to traditional story forms, taught by traditional professors, with barely a mention of the information revolution occurring around us. He’s right.

Too many of my friends – the first-generation digital pioneers now in academe – talk privately about the battles they fight with tenured colleagues who insist that circa-1994 curricula are just fine¸thank you and have served generations of graduates with distinction!

Fortunately for our craft – and for my project – a few schools are taking another path. Some of their grads are going to help us at PBS.

But many people – traditional journalists especially – struggle to get Moore’s Law. “Half as expensive per unit of computing power every 24 months … wha?!?”

This analogy struck me today (and, thanks, Florida, for blowing my bracket on the very first afternoon): The NCAA tournament is an example of a Moore’s Law function in action. How do you get from 64 teams to the Sweet Sixteen in just four days? Simple: The number of teams drops by half every round.

The tournament grinds down 64 teams to the final four in just eight game days.

Moore’s Law grinds down a $500,000 server to under $10,000 in a decade.

Don’t let the math equations freak you. Just know that whatever kind of entrepreneurial journalism you want to try, the hardware is cheap. And it will only get cheaper. (The software, too.)

Fear the Turtle.

Dave Morgan

I’ve written before about how Moore’s Law  and its corrolaries in the software world inexorably make web tech cheaper and simpler by the year. But don’t take my word for it. A comment and a software release last week make the point better than I can.

Serial entrepreneur Dave Morgan dropped an offhand comment during his talk at the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference  in New York last week.

His first startup, Real Media, needed tens of millions in capital when it was started in 1995 just to cover technology costs.  His next, Tacoda Systems, needed single-digit millions to get launched in 2001.

His latest, Simulmedia, founded last year? About a million.

There’s a lesson in there for journalist/entrepreneurs – and it isn’t that you need a million bucks to do something.

“The cost of  building out a massive data storage capacity for ad targeting has dropped enormously because of much cheaper, much more powerful hardware, cheap data centers, open source software (Hadoop & MySQL) v. classic DB (Oracle, etc.),” Dave wrote in a follow-up email.

Moore’s Law in action: The cost of a major tech startup has dropped by almost 100x in 15 years.

 (For those of you who don’t follow ad-tech startups as closely as the Mets, a couple bits of data: Real Media merged with a couple others to form 24/7 Real Media, which was eventually bought by ad-agency conglomerate WPP for $649 million. Tacoda was bought by AOL for $275 million. Dave knows how to make this stuff work.)

Let’s take those forces out of the realm of VC-backed startups, and instead look at the world of independent journalism sites. Their technology needs are merely a fraction of massive advertising analysis companies – and so are the start-up costs.

The radical downward trend of those startup costs follows the same downward spiral, however. A few years ago, you needed a million bucks to get solid, automated content management. Today? Close to free.

I’m an unabashed fan of the blog platform WordPress, and of the easily customized themes produced by many different developers. Even a year ago, getting WordPress to do what you wanted it often required some code tweaks – simpler than building from scratch, but still not for the uninitiated.

Now? One of my favorite development houses, WooThemes, launched a highly customizable theme, appropriately named Canvas, this week. Want to change your site’s look and feel, dramatically? Punch size and color changes into simple menus. Beats opening the underlying PHP code.

One more reason journopreneurs should stop pondering and just launch. So a question, and a challenge, for those still pondering:

What’s stopping you?

Hey, we all learn differently, right? So when friends – especially newsroom lifers – ask how they can catch up with the digital revolution, I default to books. These are some of the titles that formed my thinking about information economics and the digital revolution.

Read these and you’ll understand that “information wants to be free” isn’t religious sloganeering – it’s the logical outcome of perfect, free copies. You’ll also understand how that same force is shredding the monopolies that traditional media have always relied on to make their money.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network EconomyInformation Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy – Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian: An utter classic. The late-‘90s references don’t seem dated (as with too many business books). Instead, they serve to prove the fundamental points Hal makes in his teaching, and in his work at a Silicon Valley startup you may know: Technology changes. Economic fundamentals to not. But they do yield some surprising results when technology modifies key elements in the economic equation. Perfect for a general audience – the math is kept to a gentle minimum.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – Clayton M. Christensen: The funny thing? Bosses throughout the media business (including most of mine) read it. Then they went out and made the very mistakes it warns about anyway.

The Long Tail – Chris Anderson. Yes, it seems obvious now: When it costs nothing to stock a million books, or every CD ever made, someone will – and someone else will buy ‘em. It wasn’t obvious at the time. Unlike other business best-sellers (Dow 36,000, anyone?) this one is aging gracefully because it offers genuine insight, not just bloviation.

What Would Google Do – Jeff Jarvis. Spare me the “web triumphalist” rants. Jeff isn’t some new-media radical who secretly enjoys layoffs and others’ pain. He’s had more great media jobs than almost anyone, and did them well. WWGD? captures the essence of the link economy – and Google’s canny use of it.

Everything is Miscellaneous – David Weinberger. A lot of reporters I know succumb to the Dewey Decimal Theory of Life: Everything has a place, and only one place. Weinberger shows how the Web’s defiance of easy categorization isn’t a fault – it’s a virtue.

All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News – James T. Hamilton. Hamilton offers compelling, rational theories, based on microeconomics, for why local television devolves to crime, weather and tear-jerkers. Or why salaries for blow-dried anchors eclipse the reporters and producers who do the real heavy lifting. Or how technology is destroying the scarcity that allowed “objective” journalism to emerge. This is tougher sledding than most – this is an academic work, not a breezy business read – but it’s worth the effort.

Think something’s missing? Think one of these books stinks? Let me know in the comments.

EDITED TO ADD: In the year or so since I wrote the original version of this (for a discussion), a couple others have earned their way onto the list, both concerning the shift in media power to consuemrs:

Here Comes Everybody is Clay Shirky’s discerning look at how technology breaks down the barriers between media producer and consumer. Broadly, that allows crowdsourcing. But more fundamentally, it shatters the economic and political rules that allowed modern media empires to emerge. While scholarly and rigorous, it’s extremely well written and accessible, and a must read for journalists who want to cope with change.

In a similar vein, Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing focuses specifically on how businesses (including media) can and are using the collective knowledge of their customers to succeed.  

Despite the similar topics, each has its own unique value to a well-rounded digital-media and economics library.