First, Politics Daily:

Here’s what Melinda Henneberger, Editor-in-Chief, says about Politics Daily’s reporting style:

“What PoliticsDaily.com offers is effectively counter-programming; instead of attempting to dominate the 10-second news cycle, our goal is to offer a thoughtful take on events. We value writing at a moment when the conventional wisdom says that nothing could matter less.”

And here are a few examples of Politics Daily stories in News Exchange today that any newspaper could run in print tomorrow:

Obama, Jan Brewer Talk Immigration, Promise Cooperation
White House correspondent Alex Wagner covers President Obama’s meeting with the Governor of Arizona.

Louisiana Congressman Launches Petition to Fire BP CEO Tony Hayward
Patricia Murphy’s story covers Charlie Melancon’s online petition and the response to it so far.

Brian Sandoval, Sharron Angle Lead for GOP Governor, Senate Nods in Nevada
Bruce Drake covers the latest polls in Nevada’s election races.

Subscribe to the Politics Daily newswire and connect your News Exchange subscriptions to your print publishing system via authenticated feeds or FTP to easily bridge the gap between the Web and your print edition.

Next, in-depth coverage of health policy from the independent nonprofit Kaiser Health News newswire:

Laurie McGinley, Executive Editor for News at KHN, spent 27 years at the Wall Street Journal, and was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for AIDS coverage.

Here a national story your newspaper could run in print, for free, tomorrow morning:

Obama’s Health IT Leader Says Doctors Will Embrace Change
Irene M. Wielawski (another Pulitzer Prize winner, from the Los Angeles Times staff that covered the 1992 riots and 1994 Northridge earthquake) talks about Electronic Medical Records with the Obama administration’s National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Subscribe to the Kaiser Health News newswire now, and run this story in your print edition for free tomorrow.

Finally, The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization based at Columbia University focusing on in-depth education coverage:

Richard Lee Colvin, Editor at The Hechinger Report, has reported on education for the Los Angeles Times, Oakland Tribune, Hayward Daily Review, and the Associated Press.

Here’s a Q&A on a controversial issue with a member of the State Board of Education in Texas:

Q&A: Texas board member says ‘the Founding Fathers would be proud’ of controversial changes
The Report interviews David Bradley, a Republican member of the board from Beaumont, Texas, about the board’s decision to approve a social studies curriculum that encourages high school students to question the concept of the separation of church and state.

Subscribe to The Hechinger Report newswire today, and run this story in print this weekend as a sidebar to your local coverage of education, politics, or religion.

Ready to get started? Log in now at Publish2.com and search for newswires that suit your news organization’s needs.

Want to syndicate your own content, or share it with partner newspapers in your state and across the country? Create your first newswire and give your subscribers and partners permission to subscribe to it today.

New to Publish2? Register now. Publish2 News Exchange is the easiest way to share and distribute content for print and Web publishing.

I recently led a session on this at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. It began with a brainstorming discussion on different types of thinking, which were mapped in the graphic below. My Publish2 colleague, Lauren Rabaino, also took extensive notes (there’s summary of coverage at the end of this post).

Mindmap by Aram Zucker-Scharff

My interest in different types of “thinking” came as I researched computational thinking, a concept outlined by Jeannette Wing, then a professor at Carnegie Mellon. This term “represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use,” she says.

Wing, now at the National Science Foundation, said in her 2006 article:

“Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking includes a range of mental tools that reflect the breadth of the field of computer science.”

Some “everyday examples” of computational thinking that she outlines include:

“When your daughter goes to school in the morning, she puts in her backpack the things she needs for the day; that’s prefetching and caching. When your son loses his mittens, you suggest he retrace his steps; that’s backtracking. At what point do you stop renting skis and buy yourself a pair?; that’s online algorithms. Which line do you stand in at the supermarket?; that’s performance modeling for multi-server systems. Why does your telephone still work during a power outage?; that’s independence of failure and redundancy in design…”

A few days after BCNI Philly, I came across a May 2009 piece by Kim Pearson that relates the concept to journalism. In it she articulates some insightful points, including that “computational thinking is more than digital literacy.” Also,

“I’m not saying that journalists need to become programmers. I’m saying that we need to be able to reason abstractly about what we do, understand the full palette of computational tools at our disposal, and collaborate to deploy those tools with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.”

This ties in to something I said at the session, in response to a comment about what it means to bring computational thinking to journalism: It’s not about turning the reporting process into a rigid, scientific formula — journalism incorporates both art and science. It’s about taking the concepts, ideas, practices, etc. from different areas of thinking — including computation — and applying them to do better journalism.

There’s so much more that could be done — and at a more fundamental level — to improve our journalism with this additional way of thinking. Though he doesn’t identify it specifically, computational thinking is very much at the heart of the ideas outlined by Stijn Debrouwere in  We’re in the information business and the rest of his series on information architecture for news):

“Let’s not kid ourselves. A new way of doing journalism requires new technology to support and foster that innovation. That technology should reach right into the core of our journalistic endeavors, not just touch the periphery…”

And a new way of doing journalism means incorporating new ways of thinking.

(To simplify things below, I use the titles “journalist” and “programmer” below to describe a primary role. Of course, a journalist can be a programmer and a programmer can be a journalist.)

In addition to computational thinking, another important point that came out of the BCNI session is that communication and collaboration between journalists and programmers needs to improve so we can build the necessary tools to do better journalism. Understanding computational thinking is one step, but it would also be beneficial for journalists to understand more specific programming concepts. Again, not all journalists necessarily need know how to program (though we do need more journalists who know code and I, as someone learning more coding skills, would highly recommend journalists learn as much as they can).

Put another way, it would help journalists to understand the similarities between programming and journalism. As a personal example, when I served as editor of The Miami Hurricane, one of our best copy editors — by chance — was the webmaster, Brian Schlansky. I eventually realized the reason: he was accustomed to staring at lines of code and searching for errors, akin to a copy editor.

Here some commonalities I’ve drawn between journalism and programming:

• Abstraction: My colleague Daniel Bachhuber verbalized this well: This means breaking something down into discrete elements. In the context of journalism, it means breaking things down into concrete questions and then finding the answers, which you can compose in some fashion.
• Defining your variables or functions: Programming involves defining variables and functions to quickly and efficiently reference something without redundancy (ideally). As the saying goes, “don’t repeat yourself” (usually abbreviated as DRY). This is just like journalism. For example, if you’re writing about a fire, you need to explain the who, what, when, where, why, how, etc. “variables” so people understand what you mean later on when you reference “the fire.” Also, when you mention something related to the subject matter and link to more background or context. The DRY (unnecessarily) principle also applies to journalism.
• Debugging: This process of locating and correcting errors in a code is similar to copyediting (think for the webmaster-copy editor example).
• Bug and error reporting: When my browser crashes, it gives me the option to send an error report. When someone catches a factual error, we ask them to let us know. These two concepts already intersect with Scott Rosenberg’s MediaBugs, which launched in beta last week and allows users to report and discuss errors.
• Commenting your code: Leaving a comment in your code is a way of adding information that doesn’t interfere with the code and, for example, helps to explain what something is and why it’s there. This is much like how a reporter would provide context for a quote, which you can’t change without “breaking it,” so to speak.
• Learning different programming languages: On the bus back from Philly, I listened to a tech podcast on which Kevlin Henney, author of 97 Things Every Programmer Should know, asserted that programmers should learn other languages to improve inform and improve how they write their primary language. Similarly, journalists are encouraged to read other forms of composition to become better writers and watch other styles of motion pictures to become better videographers. For example, I’ve heard recommendations to take a screenwriting class and learn about that style to my enhance journalistic work.
• Refactoring: This refers to changing internal code without effecting the external meaning or behavior. Another definition that correlates more to journalism says it’s a “form of editing whose goal is to improve readability while preserving meaning. It is a stronger term than copy editing.” This reminded me of the larger structural or organizational changes sometimes needed to improve a story while still maintaining the original focus.
• Algorithm: In general sense, this is a “precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem.” A cooking recipe could be considered an algorithm, as could  the reporting process — you start with some information or questions and then do research, interview people, draft and finalize a story as the result. That said, journalism includes elements of both art and science, not a rigid process as I explained before.
• Version control: When creating software, a core principle is keeping track of each iteration of the project. In the editing workflow of a news organization ideally keeps track of different revisions, either on a single document (for The Hurricane, that would be in the WordPress admin) with a history or by saving a new document and noting who last saw it (as The Hurricane did before switching to WordPress).
• Semantic: Another word for semantic is unambiguous, David Siegel says. More specifically, ”In the Semantic Web, we declare what we mean in precise, standardized terms. Data that is semantic means exactly the same thing to any system or person who uses it.” Do we not aim for the same thing in journalism?

So, really, you could say computational thinking has always been a part of journalism — we just hadn’t labeled it as such.

Many more parallels can be gleaned from works such as this Pragmatic Quick Reference (hat tip, Chrys Wu) and The Zen Python (hat tip, Christopher Groskopf). Read the latter — included below — and consider how many of these statements could work just as well for journalists as they do for Python coders:

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Again, the point here is to show the similarities between journalists and programmers — to help overcome any perceived barriers.

But we can’t and shouldn’t wait for any magical bridge to appear. There are so many things we can do today, even as simple as rethinking our thinking. If we do, then we can more easily pick up one another’s skills and tools.

Overall, by integrating journalism, programmers and “computational thinking for everyone,” we will be better prepared to more effectively build the tools, practices and platforms we need. And, with those platforms, we will be able to further connect and innovate to do better journalism.

Other posts about BCNI Philly 2010

Where journalism gets reinvented
Random Mumblings | April 25, 2010

Peer News, emerging news hybrid in Hawaii
Daniel Bachhuber’s weblog | April 24, 2010

BCNI Philly: APM’s Public Insight Network
Daniel Bachhuber’s weblog | April 24, 2010

BCNI Notes: Howard Weaver on an emerging news biz model
Lauren Rabaino | April 24, 2010

BCNI notes from “The Insight Graph: CRM for Journalists”
Lauren Rabaino | April 24, 2010

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.