The winner of the “I Am The Future Of Journalism” Contest receives a prize that we know is increasingly valuable in journalism due to shrinking supply — a job.

It’s a job with Publish2, a start-up focused on helping journalism thrive in the digital age. We already employ two incredibly talented journalists, Tammi Marcoullier and Josh Korr, and we want to expand our team. Included in the offer is a $1,000 signing bonus.

But since we can only hire one journalist, we’re going to promote all entries to news organizations and media companies that are looking for journalists who are focused on the future and who want to help journalism evolve.

To enter the contest, you can submit a video, a slide show, or a written statement (or all three) about why you believe you are the future of journalism.

“I am the future of journalism because…”

That’s all the direction we’re giving. We want you to define the future and how you want to be a part of it.

Get all the details and enter the contest.

The contest finalists — and those who get the most attention from other prospective employers — will be chosen by you. Please lend your fellow journalists a hand by rating their entries.

The contest is open to submissions until December 30, and entries can be rated up until January 9.

Why are we running this contest? Well, we wanted to do a promotion. We thought about giving away a laptop or something. But we thought this contest would mean a lot more.

Journalism right now needs to focus positively on the future. That’s what Publish2 is all about.

This was a lot more work, but we think it will be worth it.

Enter now. Tell a friend. Spread the word.

You are the future of journalism — get inspired, get noticed, get hired.

But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:

From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:

In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.

Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.

Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:

I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.

The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.

All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.

But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?

That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.

Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.

In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.

This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.

What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.

But not just any links — the “best” links.

Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?

Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.

An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.

It’s all a matter of scale.

Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.

Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.

We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.

Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.

There’s much more to this vision — such as a solution to the problem of rampant gaming that plagues Digg and Google, and the value of link journalism as content (as Jack has discovered) — but I want to see if the networked link journalism meme catches first. (If at first you don’t succeed, try another meme.)

About two weeks ago, I emailed Jack Lail with the seed of what became the Publish2 Election News Network. We brainstormed by phone on Tuesday afternoon about using Publish2 to aggregated primary election news headlines from around Tennessee and around the web and publish them on Knoxnews.com. The primary was a week away at that point, but Jack said let’s do it.

Even before I could give Jack our javascript widget for publishing the headlines, that evening he emailed me a link to a mock-up page with the an RSS-to-HMTL conversion he created with a hacked Perl script. Wow.

He had also hatched a plan to get some bloggers in the Knoxville Blogger Network, which Knoxnews.com publishes, to pitch in with the journalists. In less than 8 hours, we had not only an experiment in news aggregation but a pro-am networked journalism experiment as well.

The next day, with the help of Knoxnews.com reporter and blogger Mike Silence, they rounded up a team and got them registered and set up on Publish2. Jack had a great instinct for keeping it simple enough for everyone to easily and quickly understand — he called it a “group link blog,” which is exactly what is was.

This page went up on Knoxnews.com on Wednesday, and we were off to the races. (Check out the subtitle: “Links to the best election news we can find” – can’t make the value proposition clearer or simpler than that.)

Elapsed time — about 48 hours.

Jack also wrote a piece about what they were doing, calling it a “ground breaking experiment.”

“Experiment” has not traditionally been part of the print publishing vocabulary, where the costs to try something and the costs of failure are great. But now, as Dave Cohn tirelessly points out, “Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it,” i.e. the costs of deciding whether to experiment — and missing opportunities — is actually greater than experimenting and failing.

So now that Jack is in the mode of experimenting with Publish2, he’s coming up with lot’s of ideas for quick and easy innovation. Yesterday, he emailed me this:

An example of a simple one-time use of the publish2 bookmarking system.

I wanted some blogger reactions to go with this story

http://knoxnews.com/news/2008/feb/09/parks-gun-ban-under-fire/

(Obviously, the nation’s most visited park, The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a big news interest in our area.)

I searched around blogsearch.google.com and some other sources and bookmarked a few links with a “parkguns” tag and reformatted the rss feed with a modified version of the perl script I used for the election headlines.

Quickly, I had a “react” block of headlines I could add to the story.

Jack didn’t call a committee meeting to debate whether this might be a good idea — he just did it. And now he has a great example to show editors and reporters.

Leading by example is essential to rapid innovation — it’s so much more powerful to see what something actually looks like than to speculate on what it MIGHT look like. The images in this post and the links to live examples are far more useful than any of my exposition.

(Worth noting how Jack used Google blog search to find interesting items, added his own intelligence to Google’s raw data, then combined that with original content to create a destination page for this news story that no algorithm could beat.)

I saw a similar rapid turnaround last week from Tom Meagher, the city editor at the Herald News in New Jersey.

Yoni Greenbaum mentioned the Publish2 Election News Network to Tom on the Thursday before Super Tuesday. I followed up with Tom on Friday. On Monday, he wrote me back saying he and some other folks at Herald News had registered for Publish2 and wanted to get started.

The next morning, they had an election news headline feed up on their main site and also their election blog:

At one point on Tuesday, I saw Tom and another Herald News journalist had bookmarked some items without the tag that automatically places the bookmark in their headline feed. I pinged him with a reminder, and he wrote back:

Yeah, we bookmarked some things to share with the 2008 Election topic group that we didn’t need to tag for our feed.

That is, stuff we produced that we thought was cool and others in the ENN might be interested in.

Wow — that’s precisely one of the big advantages of the Publish2 network (vs. say a private Reddit) — the ability to share content across newsrooms, and get national distribution for local content through the editorial network. (More on that in another post — there’s a huge opportunity to reinvent the distribution of local content through a network of journalists and editors.)

But I didn’t tell Herald News to do this — by experimenting with the network, an innovative approach to distribution suddenly became evident. But they never would have discovered it if they hadn’t tried it. Without experimentation, there’s no discovery.

The same thing happened when I emailed Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com last Wednesday, three days before the Washington state caucus. On Thursday, Mark started getting journalists registered for Publish2, and that afternoon he got this page up:

Of course, Mark literally wrote the book on Journalism 2.0, but he sure does practice what he preaches.

Here’s what Mark wrote about the nascent effort:

Here’s a roundup of the best Washington election coverage that can be found on the web. It’s the product of a social bookmarking experiment where journalists from The News Tribune and other area newspapers collaborate with political bloggers and others to compile a reading list of coverage from all around the web.

All of the examples above are still works in progress — as Mark openly admits in his post — the aim is not to succeed overnight, but to decide overnight to start experimenting and learning.

Many news organizations still approach innovation based on planning and development cycles measured in months (or longer), when the time frame should be measured in days or weeks.

On the web, with cost of technology so low (or, in the case of Publish2, free), innovation can happen very fast and very cheap simply by TRYING.

The news business — and the journalism it supports — can no longer afford to wait for innovation to happen in due time. It needs to happen NOW.

Fortunately, there are plenty of innovators like Jack, Tom, and Mark leading the way, and the threshold for trying something new is getting lower everyday — even as the imperative to do so gets higher.

——

If you’re interested in being part of the Publish2 Election News Network — or using Publish2 for any other news aggregation experiment — email me at scott.karp at publish2 dot com. We’ll have you up and running in 48 hours. Or less.

(And you don’t need to be able to hack perl scripts like Jack — we’ve got a plug and play widget you can put on your site — we can even customize the formating for you.)

You can register for Publish2 here.

Mark Glaser of Media Shift got into a debate with Nick Carr of Rough Type over the current state of employment at traditional media companies and news organization — and the impact of news organizations’ new focus on digital media. In the face of continuing editorial staff layoffs, Mark saw a silver lining in the increased hiring to support growing digital media businesses. Nick doesn’t see sufficient evidence to support the optimism, and thinks the number of journalism jobs is still shrinking overall.

But this debate largely misses — and is ultimately the more pressing issues — is what type of skills journalists need to survive the digital transition and thrive in a digital media world.

In a response to Nick, Mark does point out:

I also believe the traditional jobs of reporters, editors and photographers are changing. A person who used to do reporting by calling up some sources, rewriting a press release and filing it to a news desk for the print edition will likely be doing their job differently in the future. That person might write a blog, report stories, moderate a community of interested readers/participants, and edit the submissions of citizen journalists. Ditto for editors and photographers who will likely work with more part-time, freelance and citizen media contributors than full time staffers.

In Mark’s original post, Laurel Touby of mediabistro.com observes:

While many traditional media companies believe they’ll save money by pushing out tenured staff in favor of tech-savvier newbies, Touby thinks that’s a wrong-headed notion. She said media companies are pushing out talented people who could easily have been re-trained, and that training new hires can be just as time-consuming and costly. mediabistro.com offers classes for journalists to get digital training, and the site is reaching out to media companies to help re-train people, but is facing resistance.

“It’s a hard sell because media companies have traditionally not invested in people, they don’t invest in management training programs, they don’t invest in any kind of training of people,” Touby said. “It’s a talent industry, so it’s like ‘if you’re not good enough when you get here, you’re out!’ You swim or die, and they don’t treat their people that well. They don’t invest in human capital.”

One of Publish2’s principal ambitions is to help bridge this gap, to help journalists — and through them the practice of journalism — develop robust digital media skills, to make them truly web-savvy. By “web-savvy” I mean able to leverage the web as the ultimate networked news and information medium, where everything and everyone is connected, and all publishing is dynamic.

The best way to become the type of web-savvy journalist who will help news organizations through the digital transition is to actually USE the web. Nothing has taught me more about the dynamics of the web than publishing the Publishing 2.0 blog. To understand the Web, so that they can drive the transformation of journalism and news on the Web, journalists need to get their “hands dirty,” to learn how they can make the Web work for them, for journalism, and for their news organizations.

As a journalist, here’s what Publish2 helps you do with the Web:

• Manage your professional identity as a journalist on the Web with a social networking profile designed for journalists — and designed to be the top search result for your name
• Help sources and readers find you by showcasing your best clips and recent articles, indexed by topic, and by highlighting the topics you’re currently reporting on
• Connect with other journalists reporting on the same topic (in a non-competitive context) to share sources, references, background, and tips
• Increase your productivity with Web-based bookmarks and notes — access them from any computer, organize them by topic or assignment, search them
• Share with readers what you’re reading and help them filter the Web
• Collaborate with other journalists in creating the most powerful news filter on the Web
• Help your news organizations serve their readers better by leveraging content from across the Web

Jeff Jarvis pointed to Neil McIntosh’s exhortation to journalism students that deep, hands on Web experience is an absolute requirement for anyone serious about a career in journalism:

Again, for those at the back: if you think you want to be a journalist, I now don’t think there’s any excuse not to have a blog. The closer you get to looking around for jobs, the better it should be maintained. If you enter the jobs market without one, no matter how good your degree, you’re increasingly likely to lose out to people who better present all they can do, and have the experience of creating and curating their own site.

Journalists can no longer be many steps removed from the means of production and distribution — this type of hands on Web experience needs to become part of what defines a journalist’s skill set. While I still maintain that every journalist should start a blog, creating another outlet for original content creation is still a high bar.

That’s why we designed Publish2 to integrate with journalists’ existing workflow, to help them be more productive and ultimately more web-savvy in the reporting that they do for their news organizations.

And, we designed Publish2 to help journalists connect on the Web. Many journalists have been looking to social networks like Facebook as a way to leverage the web. There are already 500+ groups on Facebook for journalists — but unlike a one-size-fits-all application like Facebook, which are designed for personal networking, Publish2 is design to for professional networking — and for journalists specifically.

This fits with a larger trend — the emergence of professional social networks tailored to the needs of specific group of professionals, as highlighted in the Wall Street Journal today:

Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.

Social software design guru Josh Porter of Bokardo adds:

My hunch is that we’ll see a lot more specialized social networks coming soon. They’ll support a unique activity and user group in ways that generic software can’t, as well as provide the appropriate privacy and membership tools to keep them high quality and relevant.

Update: Several folks have pushed back on the idea that these sites are anything new…or anything beyond the forums of the 90s. The difference is that they are now social web applications, offering tools to rate, review, track, and otherwise record various parts of activities that we didn’t have before. Another big difference is that some are person-centric as opposed to topic-centric (as in forums), so different relationships are formed, you can make connections, friend someone, follow someone, etc. All of these services are different, however, but I do believe there is a general trend…

That’s why we are building Publish2 around a suite of tools and a professional profile that help journalists connect on the web around their professional work, i.e. their reporting — to share ideas and resources, and to collaborate on filtering the sea of news and information on the Web.

Of course, when Publish2 opens in Beta next month, we’re going to be going through an intensive learning process of our own. If you’re interested in learning together, please sign up for the Beta.