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I’ve been having interesting conversations with a number of folks lately around a basic premise:

Webinars suck.

They seem a useful way to disseminate information to a large audience at once. But the format isn’t terribly engaging – and as a friend always reminds people, on the Internet, porn your email is just one click away.

I’ve conducted webinars that seemed engaging – yet when I looked back at the dashboard later, I’d see that at any given moment (even during my best jokes!) a third of the audience or more had some other app at the front of their screen. (Yes, the webinar system spies on you.)

So what’s better? Well, I’m playing around with that, and I’ll share results when I know more.

But along the way, a couple interesting free/low-cost tools:
– Have a PowerPoint that you really need turned into an embeddable video? Yeah, the latest versions of PPT will do that for free – but if you’re using PowerPoint 2007 or earlier, try Brainshark. (Free to try; as little as $10 a month per prezo to get rid of the nagware and open up the full feature set.)

Here’s a sample (one that happens to emphasize how cheap digital technology has democratized content):

* And speaking of video, I’m especially intrigued at how people are using overlays to add hyperlinks to video content. It reminds me of the first days of (quotes imply irony here)  “hot links.” (Or, to date myself even more, HyperCard).

Video is on the verge of becoming a non-linear, ever-extensible story-telling form … and my obsession of the moment is Qwiki. Play with it and you’ll probably see why. (And your reactions are welcomed in the comments.)

An article on AdWeek has gotten more than a little attention this week. It talks about Content Management Systems – the big hunks o’ technology that drive websites and print publications – and how most of them, well, stink.

It’s prompted some hilarious email threads, and more than a few bad memories, among some of us who’ve been at this digital-journalism thing for awhile.  But the piece misses some crucial points, I think.

First, journopreneurs should just ignore it. It focuses mostly on the difficulties in finding a single system to produce both traditional products and digital. Digital-only operations don’t have a traditional product to worry about.

So lash together a site using WordPress and a theme you like, and focus on building great content and an audience. Yes, as the piece notes, open-source systems can get creaky when put under enormous loads. Worry about that when you’re doing millions of page views a month.

(By that time, the Knight-funded Armstrong CMS might solve the problem for you. It’s already quite good, and could become the open-source solution for news if a large-enough community adopts and supports it.)

Second, I’d note that most of the legendary failures cited in the piece (and a couple others I’ve seen up close that are safely hidden in corporate files somewhere) have this in common: They start with existing print workflows and try to staple on web functionality.

That’s a huge mistake because of the differences in how consumers use the different media. The web is fluid. It requires – and benefits from – constant updating. Print is static – all efforts are aimed at a single time of publication, perhaps with some slight variations for regional editions.

Forcing one production team to adopt the other’s workflow doesn’t work. Keeping separate systems for the web and the legacy product is a pain for reporters and editors.

Hence the quest for the mythical Perfect Solution (which apparently is hiding with the unicorns, chucacabras and Super Bowl-champion Minnesota Vikings teams).

The perfect, of course, is the enemy of the practical. So I humbly suggest you dump the idea of One Perfect System. Instead, create ways for your separate print and digital systems to talk to each other.

We won’t get too geeky here (largely because I hit the limits of my technical knowledge pretty quickly). But ask your technology team if they’ve thought of breaking up the problem into a (meta)data layer, an abstraction layer and a presentation layer. If your geeks don’t know what that all means, tell them to find out – or fire them and hire people who do. (They really do exist.)*

(*And to save Scott Karp the trouble of commenting, look too at middleware solutions that can link content from your web system back to your print CMS. It’s far easier, and at least 1,000 times cheaper, than that Unicorn-designed Perfect Solution someone is trying to sell you.)

I can tell there was another round of layoffs at one of my old newsrooms: I’ve had a flurry of LinkedIn invites from former colleagues.

There’s been the usual grumbling about the heartless bastards at corporate, at how these cuts will only further diminish our Noble Religious Calling, etc. – but the reality is these cuts are only going to continue in traditional media.

The financial numbers are awful: Print ad revenue at publicly reporting companies keeps going down, down, down.  Revenue is off by half since the 2006 peak, and has dropped for 20 straight quarters.

And it’s not the economy, stupid (sorry, Carville). Digital ad revenues at most shops continue to grow and the overall interactive ad economy grew by an astounding 23 percent in Q1 vs. the same period in 2010. Does anyone need more proof that the long-predicted seismic shift in ad-spending patterns has happened? Does anyone really think the financial picture will automagically improve? Buehler?

So: what should my newly unemployed friends do?

My erstwhile colleague Mark Potts offered sage advice in this neatly packaged 2009 blog post: 10 Tips for Suddenly Unemployed Journalists.  Some of my former colleagues must have already read it: The LinkedIn tip is No. 5.

I would add only a couple additional thoughts:

1) Start on all of Mark’s tips now – before the Reaper comes.

2) Keep backup files of everything – beat notes, your story ideas and especially your Rolodex. I know too many people whose employers locked their access to their email accounts the moment the layoffs took effect, and who suddenly lost years of carefully organized contact information. (My bosses were kind enough to extract it from Outlook for me. As a printout. Um, thanks.)

3) Get digital. Now. To paraphrase a delicious job-interview story,* there are two kinds of journalists these days: digital ones, and unemployed ones. Start a Tumblr blog, follow Andy Carvin to see  how Twitter can be used as a reporting tool, join ONA – just get in the damn pool.

The future of new is being invented right now, and plenty of traditional journalists are part of it.

But most of them aren’t at their traditional organizations anymore.

*OK, so that’s far from the most-elegant line I’ve ever written. But it gives me an excuse to tell a great story.

Years ago, just before the Great Collapse, a hot-shot job candidate was interviewing with the interactive corporate staff at the place I worked. She was an articulate, high energy MBA from a seriously good business school, and she totally nailed every interview. The team wanted to hire her quite desperately.

So in one of the final meetings in the process, our uber-boss makes an effort to impress her. He looks across the table, and intones in his most sophisticated and leaderly air: “You know, we’re in the process of turning this place into a digital media company.”

The candidate, who by that time had clearly and correctly decided that we were doomed, snapped back: “That’s good – because in about five years, there are going to be only two kinds of media companies: Digital ones, and dead ones.”

I’ve often commented that the future of news will be distributed among smaller, nimbler and collaborative organizations. And when anyone can publish, the point of  “sustainability” – the amount of cash each needs to keep going – will vary wildly.

My former colleague Buddy Nevins today writes about the perfect illustration – an independent blogger in Deerfield Beach, Fla., whose work has led to three indictments of sitting city officials. (Which is, um, three more than my old city-desk staff managed during my tenure.)

Particularly noteworthy: I doubt that Chazz Stevens would fit your definition of “journalist.” Heck, he might not even accept the title if you offered it to him. Nor is his site – the aptly named My Acts of Sedition – anything more than a labor of passion.

My takeaway: If you’re a traditional media operator – or even an entrepreneurial journalist – you have to recognize that others out there can and will survive and publish on far less than you need. Rather than fight them in a race to the bottom, embrace them as potential members of loose content (or even advertising) networks.

H/T to Buddy for his original post – and for the fine, independent journalism he continues to inflict upon* offer to South Florida.

(*I’m betting he’ll consider that a compliment.)

My friend and former colleague Bill Day and I just finished a great six-week course in entrepreneurial journalism for 18 graduate students in American University’s Interactive Journalism master’s program.

We set out to be intentionally provocative, because Bill and I have seen too many great ideas for projects and products turn into smoldering wreckage because of miscommunication between journalists and business folks. (OK, and partly because Bill and I just like being provocative.)

So we taught it as if it were a master’s level business-school class. We used case studies about interesting media start-ups. We taught the ABCs of financial statements (yes: We made journalists look at numbers) and the grandular details of different revenue models. And we required every student to pitch a sustainable news-and-information venture.

We heard some terrific ideas. But as Tom O’Malia*, a serial entrepreneur and director emeritus of the Lloyd Grief Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC,  reminds anyone who will listen: Ideas are cheap.

Entrepreneurial ideas are only useful if they can be refined into a workable business concept – one that has real, paying customers, and delivers clear value to those customers.

Tricky distinction, especially for reporters.

No, your audience is usually not a paying customer. (We won’t get into the tiresome paid-content discussion here – but even at newspapers and magazines, subscription fees from the audience are a small portion of revenues, and an even tinier portion of the profits. The real paying customers are the advertisers.)

We were gratified at how quickly the group caught on.

Many of the ideas were terrific, and got only better by the final pitch session. We’re going to be intentionally vague about the specifics – several folks are still working on their ideas with an eye towards actually executing them in the real world. Suffice to say our interest was piqued by proposals to:

• Mine rich internal archives of entertainment reviews at a major media company
• Connect reporters and people who have compelling information to, um, share. (“Leak” is such a loaded word, wouldn’t you agree?)
• Attack a classified-advertising niche that has largely – and strangely – been left untouched. So far, anyway.

Great. But you know what was even better?

The weak ideas – the ones that started life as “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a website!” (All credit to Mark Potts for that line.)

Over just two months, those weak ideas got better. From vague beginnings emerged sharp proposals to create:

• A unique alliance around a hyperlocal site to provide modest, yet stable, funding that doesn’t rely on local ad dollars.
• Community and hobby-driven sites that focus on narrow, but attractive, niches. (All I’ll say about one of those niches: The hobbyists scraped together $15 million to construct a building for their pastime?!? That’s a niche I’d like to capture.)
• A clever blending of non-profit status, cheap technology and Internet cafes to support women in West Africa.

The point here is not that all of these ideas will work. Perhaps none will.

The point is that 18 young people – hard-core traditionalists, inexperienced cubs, even some NGO and government types – innovated. They combined creativity, perseverance and some basic business principles to develop concepts that are worth testing in the marketplace.

And therein lies the future of journalism: Smaller, nimbler, more creative.

*(As an aside: Bill and I owe a huge debt to Tom for graciously sharing his curriculum and research.)

I’m feeling guilty about the light (read: non-existent) posting for the past couple of months.

The gang at Muppet Labs and I have been building something new, soon to arrive at PBSNews.org. So while there’s only been the sound of crickets over here, there’s lots of hammers banging and saws whirring over there.

Stay tuned – and as that project gets launched (we refuse to mention a date lest we jinx ourselves), there’ll be more here soon.

Promise.

Some of them, anyway.

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.

The very interesting social-media curation tool Storify was released in private beta on Tuesday at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. It neatly twists the idea behind Flipboard.

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.

The National Journal is making a major effort to revamp its websites, and it just made a brilliant hire, my old friend and colleague David Beard.

The Journal’s gain, of course, is someone’s loss – the Boston Globe‘s.

Sadly, this is another example of the continuing brain drain of smart digital leaders from traditional newspaper newsrooms. Many who have left talk about the exciting new opportunities at their new organization.

Dave does that – but, as usual, he’s also far more honest about another motivation: “I just didn’t want to live my life managing decline.”

Too true.

Lest we get too maudlin, however: Congrats to Dave for brilliant service to the Boston community for a dozen years, and best wishes on his new adventure.

… while I started a new gig. I’m now serving as a senior director and publisher for a news and public affairs project at PBS.org.

My time working with both GrowthSpur and Localist.com has been a blast. But the chance to work with Christine Montgomery and the crew at PBS was too much to pass up.

I remain involved with GrowthSpur as a member of its advisory board. The team there has better insight than just about anyone into the growth of independent journalism in the blogosphere (and the economic challenges those independent blogs place), and is doing vital work to help invent the future of journalism.

The same could be said about my new work, too. More on that in the coming weeks. Suffice to say that my new social-networking avatar is the guy on the left here.

Astute Muppet watchers will recognize him as Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, chief scientist at Muppet Labs, “Where the future is being invented today.” How cool is that? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

If the prospect of being Beaker-ed doesn’t scare you, I’m still looking for a couple of savvy digital producers who join the new team. Details are at pbs.org/jobs.