Away from academia, these centipede legs sometimes take me on a run, when what I really need is to pause and think. And reflect.

So I did.

Anyone can be a publisher. Everyone is a publisher. Whether you blog or Twitter or update your Facebook status, or just text or email, we all publish news many times a day. And it’s accurate and fast. When Spain won the World Cup, Twitter beat the New York Times email alert by 15 minutes – an eon in ADD Twitter years.

Each day, people take and publish millions (or is it billions) of pictures from cell phones, not because they are paid to, but because they love to and are passionate about it. (amateur=love) Facebook edged out everyone else to become the biggest photo upload site in the world, and that was how many years ago?

Everyone can be a broadcaster, by uploading video to YouTube, live-streaming video with UStream or going two-way interactive with live video and live, commenting audience on Kyte. That my Nokia cell phone could stream live video to the web was a big deal in 2008. Today? Not so much.

Everyone can find information. First there is Google, where you can find out what people did say, and now, the second-biggest search engine is Twitter, where you can find out what people are saying about any topic at this very moment, everywhere in the world.

When all the world’s a publisher, there is no such thing as meaningful market share. I am typical: I go to 19 different places for my news every day. I am fickle. I follow shiny objects, not big, grey, pulpy lumps.

So what can make news organizations or journalists special when everyone can (and is) doing it?

Journalists have access to people and hidden information. They can put it in context, make it understandable and curate the flotsam and jetsam into a meaningful exhibit that helps people understand and make better decisions.

Journalists have special access to people and policy makers. Journalists can pose questions to policy makers, and they can — via live web casting — share that access with the community.

Think about the folks who hang out in city council chambers for hours, waiting for the “public comment” section in the end. What if you could give that access to people on a periodic basis? Often, normal mortals ask the most penetrating questions. I’ve found that policy makers agree to participate in the online “town halls” when a journalist is involved.

Journalists can find things that are not on Google. Important things. Like the HTML feed for 311 calls or the PDFs of a city council measure explaining how  ADA money will fund new sidewalks in a run-down part of town, or the scanned and PDF’d copies of each council person’s expense account. All those things are online at City Hall or somewhere, but otherwise invisible. (See Deep or Dark Web )

Journalists can find those things, put them online in context, in a visually comprehensible framework, and create people-magnets.

Don’t you want to go to the map and zoom in on your block and see what people are calling 311 about, or how fast the city fixes things, or how that compares with other places?

Don’t you want to scour your council person’s or congress person’s expense account and see where the hell they went and what they claimed they spent and compare it to their peers’ expenses?

Don’t you want to be able go back to the part of the video in the public meeting where the developer told the neighborhood association that his high-rise would have friendly, street-level retail shops, and not a high wall that screams “Keep Away?”

When it comes to data, journalists can decide which bits and bytes to turn into eye candy to help the people formerly known as the audience examine it from all sides. I collect links to examples of  data visualization, and love this video of “Gapminder” data visualization software.

And then the journalists can help people annotate the information with their own stories. And they can put it in context so we know whether it is big or small, red or green, unusual or normal.

So the students need to be in newsrooms and bureaus to brainstorm and to feed off of each other and learn from you.

Teaching them to be mere news and photo and video publishers is too pedestrian. Everyone’s doing it.

They need to be archaeologists and artists, collectors and curators.

Give each of them a shovel and a crap detector (thank you Howard Rheingold!).

Tell them to dig until they find something that you don’t get on a simple Google search.

When they come up with something, tell them to examine it, and then write about it and weave a solid backbone of context around it, then make it visually understandable.

Then you curate it: Is it good enough for this most amazing exhibition?

And when it is good enough, then you put it to the people (journalists’ best co-conspirators) and say, “What do you think? Can you help us fill in the rest of this picture?”

Then you say to the policymakers, “These people raised some interesting questions.” And you give people access to ask their questions of the policy makers. So the community can be informed and people can make better choices.

I was going to add, “and Democracy will be safe,” but I don’t want to go out on a limb.

I have no idea if this is comprehensible or if it helps. But it is where I am going.

“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

But it was what I needed.

Four years and a few weeks ago when we bought the van, I’d just had my cancerous uterus removed the hard way, and needed something gentle to ride in for the 200-mile drive between home in San Antonio and the best doctor in the world at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

While I passengered with a pillow, Willie drove the van to Houston for my next surgery, then drove down again for my series of radiation treatments. The ride was gentle, and I started to secretly love the van in a very un-soccer mom kind of way.

Later that year, I got the chance to teach journalism, Web publishing and design, multiplatform reporting and interviewing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. But I didn’t want to move.

“You can commute!” said department director Ardyth Sohn. “Everybody does it.” And so I did.

I loaded everything I could think of that fit into the van; we pointed it toward Vegas and drove. The air conditioning was good and the ride was sweet, all the way across West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the Hoover Dam into Nevada.

And when I drove to the UNLV campus each day, at about the same time the third shifters were getting off work on the Strip, the van gave me enough elevation to see a couple of cars ahead so I could avoid the early morning drunks and the other crazy drivers.

The van has more .edu than I do

We drove the van home in December, back to Vegas in January, then home again in May.

I did the “commute” until 2008, when the van and I came home to San Antonio without a single scratch.

The van’s acquired some learned trappings along the way.

Above the UNLV sticker on passenger side of the van’s windshield is a parking pass for the University of the Incarnate Word. The van parks there while I swim laps weekday mornings at the Natatorium.

A Saint Mary’s University parking pass dangles from the rear view mirror, because the van hangs out there on Tuesdays and Thursdays each semester while I teach the class formerly known as Print Journalism.

A year ago, I was persuaded to take a leadership role in a new community journalism startup called NOWCastSA.com. We planned, strategized and budgeted for video cameras, a TriCaster and people. As it turned out, getting all of that stuff and staff from here to there, where we do our thing, requires … a van.

Gear in, seats up, people in, doors close and we fly to our assignment with the Interwebs. In the past few weeks, the van clocked 250 miles on NOWCastSA.com alone.

Monday morning, I’m heading to Houston again to see my favorite doctor at MD Anderson. I have no doubt I’ll be told that the cancer’s still gone. Endometrial cancer is like that. Overwhelmingly, we are survivors.

While Willie drives, I’ll be online and working, thanks to bluetooth, WiMax 4G, the sizzling good cell connections on Interstate 10.

And thanks to the gold van that is my Giving Tree.

In every session there were from 13 percent to 29 percent women.
I chronicled the ratio in every session I was in, to the dismay of one South Austin cretin (please click to see what an idiot he is.)
It’s my birthday, I’ll count if I want to!!
The tally tells me how far we have come. Thank you for such a meaningful birthday present!

It is important to maintain a calendar of events

What in the world are you thinking by delaying my mother’s cancer drugs???
Given the discussion in Congress and across the country, it is important that people know what you folks are up to.
My mother’s treatment is being delayed by Caremark CVS and that delay is threatening her life.
It’s time for me to make a documentary movie and post it on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and make you famous for your incompetence, callous, idiocy and your cold-hearted bottom-line mentality.
I promise to quote you accurately when (if) you respond.
I put my real name and address here because I am not a coward, like whoever stalled her treatment and didn’t have the courage to let her know or sign their name.
Call me. Don’t hide behind fake HIPPA BS.

Here’s what we like and why.

Because video is an important element of the site, we’d like to be able to feature it prominently. Perhaps it might look something like UMass Amherst’s student-run television station site:

Another site with a nice video slider is LinkTV. Here’s how they do it:

The heart of our site is neighborhood stories, news and information, and we think the best way to indicate that is with a map that shows stories by location.
We like the way Richmond.com uses Outside.in to display stories on a map:

Another nice approach is the way Juump has information laid out, including tabs that let you choose people, places, groups or events:

Underneath the map, we want to feature a “river of news” that shows stories of all types – a waterfall of information. AnnArbor.com does that well:

We want everyone who comes to the web site to get the message that we’d like them to help us build this community. We need a toolbox to show people where to find help, and something very inviting, such as these buttons on the NowPublic site.

In a right sidebar, we’d like to show the community conversation in a FriendFeed or Echo stream of Twitters and comments. Over at PBS, they do that in a very simple way.

For many people, the calendar of events is the heart of the matter, answering the basic question, What’s happening, where?. Over at Fast Company, there’s a nice graphical interface, although it doesn’t work as nicely as it could:

Jen Wagner made this image using the speech text and Wordle.net

What you see here is a word cloud, created in Wordle.net of the 50 words President Obama used the most in the remarks prepared for his chat with school children tomorrow. Here’s a link to the text of the prepared remarks. (The cloud image links to details of how it was made.)

Here’s one message from the speech that resonated with me:

You can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.

There’s something here for all of us to learn from.

Yup, there have been a lot of failures.

But what’s getting lost in the discussion is a very real record of some game-changing innovation and achievements.

Progress, it seems to me, depends on getting a clearer and more accurate picture of what did work – even inside the failures.

By way of background, Alan Mutter started the sin thing by claiming that newspapers’ Original Sin was failing to charge for content. He’s wrong. Many of us worked for newspapers that charged for online content back in the mid-1990s. It didn’t work, and it’s not worth repeating. But it is worth remembering and learning from.

Then Steve Buttry weighed in with a thoughtful piece saying newspapers’ Original Sin was failing to innovate. He’s right, although many of us did innovative online work for media organizations. More on that later.

Howard Owens entered the conversation with another thought-provoking piece, saying newspapers’ Original Sin was keeping online units tethered to the mothership. Thanks to a history lesson from Steve Yelvington, we know there were several successful and independent online spinoffs that used little or no content from the mothership. More on their fates below.

Buttry countered that “Organization is not as important as mindset. And spinning digital operations off did not change the mindset.“

Jeff Jarvis offered a variation on a theme by Owens, saying the real sin was not running the online unit as a business.

While rejecting the notion of original sin, Yelvington says newspapers failed by not confronting the basic question:

“What should we be doing to build an (online) audience without the benefit of the newspaper content?”

Welcome back to the Genesis.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, a wise scholar on the topic, reminded me earlier this year that since the industrialization of newspapers, the business model has been this: collect the largest audience, and then sell that audience’s attention to advertisers.

That worked fine until the audience’s attention fled to the Web.

“Perhaps the biggest threat to the subsidy of newspapers by advertising is the ease with which people can order and purchase all kinds of goods without leaving their desks and without scanning newspaper advertisements,” Eisenstein wrote after our discussion in May.

It’s not that Craigslist stole the ads, it’s that the Internet stole the audience!

And you need an audience to have a sustainable or profitable media business.

In our Twitter conversation the other day, Owens rejected my suggestion that TheStreet.com (where I was a managing editor) is a worthy example of a successful, independent, online-only news operation. “The Street isn’t local. Doesn’t address the problems for newspapers,” he said.

But I think hyperlocal on Wall Street has much to teach hyperlocal on Main Street.

The first thing TheStreet.com had to do when it launched in 1997 was build an audience and a sustainable business — from scratch, using online-only content. Some smart people at TheStreet.com quickly discovered that our subscribers craved tools almost as much as they wanted up-to-the-second news. So we gave them tons of tools and instant news. In 2001, we launched a 20-person microblog — evocative of today’s Twitterstream or FriendFeed — which became the hottest thing on the site. We built audience and a sustainable business. TheStreet.com posted its first quarterly profit in 2004.

Were there stumbles, conflicts? Of course. And we can learn from the entire experience — if we take the time to look and listen.

The idea of setting up independent corporate entities to let the online operation explore the waters without interference from the mothership is not particularly radical. As Yelvington and Jarvis acknowledge, several media organizations did it.

Here are some details from another example:

MySanAntonio.com was an independent corporation, half owned by Hearst, the parent of the San Antonio Express-News,  and half owned by Belo, the parent of KENS-5 TV. The converged combo was envied by others.

We paid our own rent in a separate building. We had our own servers. We had our own developers, designers and IT folks. We had our own 24/7 editorial staff and we had our own advertising sales people whose sole focus was the Web site. I was content director there from 2003 to 2006.

Sure, we ran content from the newspaper and TV station. But often the most popular things on the site were online-only creations, such as community-submitted pictures of the day it snowed, or the slideshow we updated with photos, stories and video of every local casualty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We got enormous traction from online-only tools like the Crime Database, which since 1997 has let people search their neighborhood for news, or the traffic page with highway Webcams and a widget with the lowest gas prices in town.

Our very first blogger was a retired Presbyterian minister who filed via AOL Instant Messenger from Internet cafes in Zambia where he was on a mission in 2003. We ran an online-only politics blog in 2004 that was so good it went Web-to-print.

We did a bunch of innovative things at MySanAntonio.com. And we sold a lot of ads. The company turned a profit 2005.

I know from watching closely that another indie, the WashingtonPost.com, did tons of award-winning innovative things with its online-only staff, and I am under the impression the dot-com also did well, financially. It was not only in a separate building from the Post, it was across the Potomac River in a different state.

MySanAntonio.com and WashingtonPost.com shared something else. In 2005 and 2006, both sites had about a 53% market penetration, an astonishing figure for “newspaper” Web sites.

We built audience and we built a profitable, sustainable business. And we didn’t do that by simply republishing newspaper stories online.

As Steve Yelvington reminds us, the Cox Interactive Media projects set an even higher pace of innovation. The one project I saw up close, Austin360.com, started from scratch, with no help or interference from the nearby Cox-owned Austin American-Statesman, and it did something no one had done before: It created a searchable and vibrant entertainment calender and review site worthy of the Austin music scene.

Before long, it had built an audience rivaling that of the established news organization.

But as Steve Buttry wrote, “spinning digital operations off did not change the mindset” inside newspapers.

Neither the journalists nor the business-side folks inside the newspapers appreciated the Web sites’ autonomy or innovation.

Rather than reward the innovations and business successes by putting the Web folk in charge of the future, many online operations got stifling bear hugs from the mothership and were finally merged and subordinated to the newspaper.

At the end of 2008, Hearst and Belo dissolved the MySA partnership, and the Express-News pulled MySanAntonio.com in-house. I can’t link to many of the online-only projects we created because they slipped between the cracks in the move to a new hosting and content management system.

As Yelvington described, Cox Interactive Media was dismantled, and “In the political infighting that followed, Cox threw away much of what it had learned.” Austin360, which once thrived because of its distance from the American-Statesman, now has the newspaper’s name prominently in its masthead.

The Washington Post cannibalized its Web site more publicly, as detailed in this City Paper article and interview with Jim Brady.

All of this is hardly ancient history. And it’s an incomplete list. Do you know of more examples? I know they’re out there.

Those who don’t pause to learn from the successes we had as we failed forward, face a longer journey.