Two must-read blog posts from erstwhile colleagues prodded me into finishing this entry, which I started far too long ago.

It’s for all those friends of mine – unemployed, underemployed, or just feeling dead-ended in their traditional newsroom gig.

There’s a  type of job out there you might be good at. It has a title you’d probably never think to look for. Your skills might match it anyway.

“Product manager.” (Here’s an example.)

Terrible title. (Could it be more bureaucratic?)

Great job, though — especially in terms of influence and power.

Product managers get to decide what functionality to add to a website (think commenting and audience-photo submissions for a newspaper site).

They’re at Ground Zero of the launch of new freestanding brands (think of a locally focused entertainment product), or managing the digital equivalent of an old warhouse.

At its core, the role is about representing the customers (note the plural, please) in all decisions – designing a site, deciding what functions a mobile app should have, figuring out what forms of content and advertising a new digital venture should have.

Years ago, when I first started developing new products, I was struck by the similarity of product management to  the role great section editors play – especially over how to allocate your staff and what the highest priority was at the moment.

In other words, if you’re inquisitive, smart and decisive, you can be a great product manager.

Many of the great ones I’ve known and worked with started their careers in newsrooms. They’re always asking questions. They’re voracious readers of anything related to the topic at hand. They know what the competition is up to. And they’re always, always pitching new ideas.

I’m not the only one who has latched onto that analogy. Matt Sokoloff – a long-time product manager for the Orlando Sentinel and Tribune Interactive, now a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow at Missouri, uses it with students all the time.

“A good journalist can write a good article. But a great journalist can write a great story,” he says. In the same way, “a great product manager can build a great product.”

A couple caveats – both around the idea that you can’t simply waltz into the job and play everything by ear.

Section editors and street reporters tend to rely on experience and intuition (at least they did back in that other century, when I had those jobs).

Product managers risk disaster if that’s their main research tool. They need to use real data – and if none exists, run tests to generate some. (See Eric Ries’ excellent The Lean Startup for more.)

Second, about that plural noted above: Almost every product has multiple customers – and the ones who actually pay are highly important. For most news media, that means the advertisers, not just the audience. And even those segments have sub-segments that you must understand.

Understanding all those nuances takes enormous work. But then being good at a beat, or running the best features section in the state takes work, too.

Leftover stuff:

It’s worth noting that both of the blog posts that prompted me to finish this screed tie back to perhaps the most-brilliant piece of the year about entrepreneurial journalism: David Skok and James Allerton’s remarkably thorough three-part discussion with Harvard Prof. Clayton Christensen.

The piece takes Christensen’s groundbreaking research on disruptive technology and applies it to the business side of news. It’s a true must-read for anyone interested in the future of our business – and it’ll be required reading for the next group of students I’ll be teaching at AU.

Finally, if you want a condensed, rigorous look at those ideas, get your boss to send you to API’s upcoming session on disruptive innovation for news, part of its Transformation Tour.

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.)