It is a head-turner, which seems to be, at first, an only-in-Utah story. The Deseret Morning News, KSL TV, and KSL Radio, all owned by one company, the Deseret Management Co., a for-profit arm of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are combining operations.

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”.

Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”.

One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

Remove the religious subtext, for a moment, and I believe we see a model that will appear ordinary in many American cities, within a few years. Think about it. If we as readers, viewers and listeners want words, photographs, videos, and audio, and expect it to be served up in an easy-to-use, relevant-to-me way, then why would the companies that produce news in those various forms be separate?

They’re separate, of course, because those words/picture/audio used to be called newspapers/magazines, network and cable TV and radio broadcasters. Those words, though, describe the old world, those packages the content came wrapped in. In our digital world, we’re seeing delivery blur through the Internet. And, that inevitably, and now more quickly, means that single companies will produce words, pictures and sound — and they’ll find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently.

If you own the Salt Lake properties, or if you’re Tribune and own the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN radio, you practically have a fiduciary responsibility to rearrange assets that will make the company more efficient. If you own a broadcast station or a newspaper, you can more easily see the rationale in buying or combining with the other, to meet customer (reader/viewer and advertiser) demands of the coming age.

So the Salt Lake Experiment joins TBD’s (“10 Reasons to Watch TBD“) in putting together the text and video pieces. They are the next generation in this attempt to make convergence work. Call it News Convergence 2.0, with Tampa’s Tribune/WFLA experiment the best poster child for 1.0. How well the Deseret operation (or TBD) executes is, of course, the key. Journalism isn’t about white-board theories, in any era; it’s about getting the news gathered, analyzed, and distributed to readers, and doing it better than the competition.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of the Deseret decision, though. The numbers in play are curious ones, as Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert lays out a “less is more” theme in the major restructuring of his company. In fact, let’s use the more and less theme to gauge the moving pieces of the new business model.

• Less is More: Take that “43%” headline. The legacy news staff of the Deseret News has indeed been cut 43 percent — 85 jobs, including those of the editor and publisher of the paper. That number includes both full-time and part-time positions. So we’d expect a lot less coverage, right? With a bit of frustration in his voice, Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert tells me bluntly “That’s an Old Media world view. We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.” His point, and his plan: The combined operations of the remaining Deseret News staff and the sister news staffs at KSL TV and radio will operate smarter and more efficiently.“Say there’s a story on Capitol Hill [in Salt Lake City]. Right now, the paper sends a reporter and a photographer and KSL sends a reporter and videographer. That’s four people, and that story may end up on B3,” says Gilbert. “Now we’ll send one.”So, step one: “Reduce duplication.”

  So the news math changes dramatically. The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and “new employees expected to have those skills.” Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

  Step two: “Deepen coverage,” meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the “integrated newsroom,” with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. “You’re sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms],” explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite — so that’s going to be a busy staff.

  The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

• More Costs Less: Borrowing basic notions of getting cheap and free content from the Huffington Post and Demand Media, Gilbert is putting into action what he has long preached in academic and consulting circles. I’ve called this emerging time the Age of Cheap Content. That principle means that the new Deseret operation will leverage bigger-name writers (especially those consistent with its Mormon roots and values, like former BYU football star and current Philadelphia sports anchor Vai Sikahema) for little financial compensation. That’s the HuffPo model. And they’ll leverage Salt Lake and Utah reporters to address both topical and hyperlocal coverage, through the new Deseret Connect. That’s the Demand side of the idea, bringing together a large database of qualified writers — “not random bloggers,” says Gilbert — and keeping their payments low or non-existent. “Some of the best don’t write for money.”Deseret Connect already has received more than 100 applications, and Gilbert says he can see it scaling to a thousand or more contributors within the year, using management system techniques developed outside the news industry for BYU/Idaho faculty.Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum — though he’s clear to point out that people doing the writing won’t be looking to the company “as their main source of income.”

  So, looking at cost per content unit — a Demand-like analytic — the new company will be able to house lots more content under its brand, at a far lower cost point.

• More Beats Less: The Deseret play aims to bring together text stories and blogs, video, and audio. That supposes that readers want all kinds of coverage brought together for them. It’s a bet that products that converge video and stories for readers will beat the competition, competition like MediaNews’ Salt Lake Tribune, the biggest non-church-owned news presence in the state. One big question here: How will the customer experience be converged? In Washington, two ongoing TV stations folded their websites into the new TBD at launch. How separate and how unified will the DeseretNews.com and KSL.com sites be?

• More is More: The new Deseret operation doesn’t just focus on geography — Utah’s more than 700,000 households. It’s taking a twin approach to being a general interest news site — and a new worldwide voice for the Mormon faithful of 13 million or so worldwide. In the company’s strategy, that’s described as a values-oriented approach, and you can already read that six-point values mantra widely. The six: “the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community.” They make for a strong philosophy, but in marketing, that’s quite a straddle — one that may be difficult to pull off, especially as Salt Lake City itself has become majority non-Mormon.

The economics of it are clear, though. Pay (or don’t) to get a story written or a video shot once, and then distribute it many times over. It’s basic Internet economics, with a nichy, religious angle, one of many variations we’ll soon be seeing on these increasingly popular themes.

The Austin-based news site, along with California Watch, are creating models indicative of the future of journalism.

Important Details: In the fall of 2009, Texas Tribune was a promising idea. Nine months after its launch, it’s a fledgling success. To date, the $4 million privately funded non-profit start-up has:

• Built a substantial audience: The site reached the level of 240,000 unique visitors this month, with more than three million page views, well ahead of its 2010 goals already.
• Set up partnerships with major media throughout the state: The Tribune’s work has been published in the state’s major publishers, including the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio News-Express. KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate, decided on a partnership with the Tribune before the site launched. It has now “embedded” a reporter with the Tribune. That reporter reports both for KUT on air and writes for the Tribune; the Tribune then pays KUT for time taken away from radio duties, which the station uses to pay for other political reporting. “They shared our values. We know the principles,” KUT General Manager Stewart Vanderbilt told Outsell. That embedding may have wider significance as KUT plans its own local news push in early 2011, following the lead of numerous public radio stations across the country.
• Persuaded about 1700 people to become members of the site: at a price point averaging about $100
• Signed up more than 100 corporate sponsors: each pays at least $2500 annually
  
• Produced solid journalism in key areas of public policy: this includes such current hot-button topics as health care, transportation, education, immigration, energy and the environment. The site employs 24 people, half of them journalists.
  

Evan Smith, who serves as CEO and editor-in-chief, makes the case that a focus on statewide news coverage is one of the major areas impacted by the cutback in the daily journalism workforce — and he makes the connection between under-reporting and low civic engagement of the populace. On a macro level, he points to the roll-up budgets of the 50 US states ($1.4 trillion) and compares it to Congress’ “discretionary spending” ($1.04 trillion). He then points to Texas’ own budget of $72.8 billion and the fact that Texas ranks 43rd in voter turnout.

Against that backdrop, he says that Texas state government press corps, based in Austin, is half the size it was 20 years ago.

Funding is about building a wide base,  Smith tells Outsell. “We’ve gotten AT&T, JP Morgan and a lawyer who puts out a shingle on Congress Avenue” to join up. Smith says his aim is a funding model built on thirds, a third each from membership, corporate sponsorships and earned income. The latter category incudes advertising and event programming. Already, the Tribune has broken out of the box with community-reaching programs including “Texas Tribune Conversations,” “The Texas Tribune College Tour,” “the Texas Tribune Ideas Festival,” and “Texas Tribune Sponsored Events.” In so doing, the Tribune has made a relatively big splash in a big ocean.

Implications: Outsell believes the regional news start-up model has numerous lessons for the trade. It’s clear there’s an appetite and a market for aggressive regional reporting. Texas Tribune joins California Watch, a project of the Berkeley (Ca.)-based Center for Investigative Reporting, in taking a new approach to statewide issues, and tackling them with a small, but strong and passionate, staff of experienced reporters.

Clearly, this model works best, and most easily, in big states like Texas and California. We’d have to believe though that the principles, if not the scale, are widely applicable across the US and in other nations as well.

It’s important for traditional publishers to see what these sites have and haven’t done. They haven’t reinvented the wheel, but they’ve rounded it differently. Statewide and regional issues reporting has long been a mainstay of strong, metro papers. Most of them are still doing that reporting, but less of it while the public policy issues of the states and the wider society multiply. One “secret” of the Texas Tribunes and the California Watches is the singular focus they bring to their reporting. As start-ups with newer foundation funding giving them the belief they are at the beginning of something, they’re taking a spirited approach to the issues before them.

The Tribune’s numerous outreach programs bear study as well; it is boldly and publicly taking its news mission to the public.

Outsell believes that dailies — and TV stations as well as the ethnic press — have been smart to partner with these regional news operations. On a simple economic basis, they are now able to buy “outsourced” high-quality journalism at way-below-market prices, with the Tribune in fact making its stories freely available, while California Watch charges a nominal sum. That’s a no-brainer.

Beyond that simple economic transaction, dailies can also learn the new, digitally enhanced value of statewide news sharing, and of an emerging syndication market for any good journalism created that transcends city limits. This innovation also poses a challenge and an opportunity for the Associated Press. With its long presence in statewide reporting, it’s got to assess these start-ups as to how they affect its operations and business models, and that reassessment could help both AP and its member dailies.

“It’s the legacy crap,” one veteran with feet in both camps told me. “Instead of burning it down and starting all over, they just experiment.”

“Patch expects to be the largest hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S. this year,” says the AOL release.

Let’s put this Patch push into perspective. About 400 new sites, spread out across the country. Five hundred new journalists being hired. Let’s remember, though, that this is one journalist per community, communities that range in size from 10,000 to 80,000 people. One journalist per community.

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

Still, we should take the news as good news. The more journalism, the better — especially if it can be sustained. Now-independent AOL, though, is a profit-seeking company, at the moment chastened a bit by its just-released quarterly earnings report. Patch has lots of promise, but it will have a tough slog to profitability, as mano-a-mano battle for local ad dollars only intensifies.

As we parse the Patch news, here are a beginning nine questions about the initiative:

1) If this is a big national, hyperlocal play, is that oxymoronic or does scale really help? It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

2) How do I parse the Patch taxonomy? Okay, you’ve got your sites. Each one covers a geographical area with some identity, with the sweet spot of population somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 — large enough to be an audience/market, yet small enough not to be an anonymous “metro” area. (That’s the same size as Backfence’s Mark Potts averred in the first hyperlocal go-round.) Each site has an editor, and Patch recently decided to add a 13th editor to each cluster, for back-up.  Each editor has a freelance budget equivalent to about one FTE, more or less, depending on the geography, and will pay stringers to extend what that single editor can do.

Then, you’ve got 12 sites per cluster, each cluster headed by a regional editor and regional ad/marketing manager. Expect between a dozen and two dozen ad sellers per cluster, as they try to divvy up territories to take advantage of their overlap in communities.

Then, you’ve got a block, which is two clusters. Those blocks then roll up to four editorial directors and four sales directors, who divide the country into sections, reporting back up to Patch HQ.

3) So who’s the ad competition? Maybe we should ask, who isn’t? Most importantly, in going after ad dollars, it’s a free-for-all. With Borrell Associates 2011 projection of $16 billion in 2011 local online advertising the mantra many companies repeat, the competition is intense. McClatchy is saying it is taking in $2.5 million annually in hyperlocal ads, Gannett is moving more aggressively through GannettLocal and, its recent broadcast site partnership with DataSphere and every other newspaper company sees that local merchant future. The question is how well they’ll execute on the emerging vision. Then, there are local broadcasters in general and Yellow Pages companies knowing that printed behemoths tossed on our doorsteps are endangered species. The target of all these legacy companies: SMB, the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses they used to largely ignore, but which now must be romanced with digital dreams, as bigger-money advertisers make bigger and earlier moves digital.

But, wait, that’s just the old companies.

Then, there’s Examiner.com, which has been replicating its own sites, on its national templates, served by national advertising.

It’s not 2005 anymore, so now we can dozens of local bloggers, independent sorts, scratching for their own livings, from veteran BaristaNet to sites everywhere. Most of these sites are out there selling ads and/or sponsorships. And now, there are ad networks forming. Consider the Miami Herald’s ad network around its partnership with local bloggers and the new TBD’s Community Network, a local blogger ad network out of the chute. (Newsonomics: “10 Reasons to Watch TBD“). GrowthSpur is working with TBD and others to train blog ad pitchers. Then there’s BlogAds and Addiply, among many other newer hyperlocal ad plays.

Soon, the neighborhood florist will have to wear a flak jacket, just to ward off the dozen “hyperlocal” sales guys and gals, all rediscovering the joys of local — at the same time.

But, wait, here’s the real payoff, for those that can wait: Mobile advertising and marketing. Again, the Borrell number is causing mass salivation, and I’d bet it’s whetting the appetites of the AOL Board as they swallow the investment in Patch. Local mobile ads, which fetched $285 million last year, are projected to bring in $4.7 billion in four years (2014). (Interesting fact: At the moment, Patch, unlike TBD, has no smartphone apps ready for its sites. )

4) Who’s the news competition? Same players, more or less. In fact, we may begin to believe that some local communities will soon be better covered by journalists (though metro coverage still suffers) in this digital age than they were in the analog one.

Examiner, with those hundreds of templated local sites, displays a growth trajectory a year ahead of Patch’s — and so its audience stats, provided by The Nielsen Company — greatly outpace Patch. The gap, though, is narrowing. And in sessions per month, and maybe time on site, Patch may be moving ahead. That would show that readers are seeing some value from Patch’s truly local news push, as compared to Examiner’s often shared-content across “local sites.” (Newsonomics: “Examiner: New Local Competitor or Faux Local?“)

5) So how do we make sense of Patch and whether it’s good for journalism? It may be too early to know. Patch is hiring hundreds of journalists to do journalism; that’s novel. Those journalists include 20-year veterans as well as twenty-somethings a few years out of school. It has provided new opportunities for editorial leadership jobs, and that’s a good thing since journalism-schools-as-refuge may have reached a limit.

Most importantly, for the moment, readers will get more news.

The question, here, is one of sustainability. Certainly, there’s the question whether Patch can sustain itself, as its parent AOL struggles to find a new identity and growing business model. Then, there’s the question of the sustainability of hyperlocal journalism already being done from coast to coast. These are true start-ups, often one-man (or -woman) bands, invented by journalists truly passionate about community coverage. Pre-Patch, it’s been the fledgling blog ad-and-distribution network experiments that gave hope that more money could be found to support these ventures. Now, we have to wonder whether Patch — which will link to other sites it finds useful, but won’t network them — will make the sustainability of these more organic, non-templated local blogs more questionable.

Once again, we’ll come back to the question not of how much coverage a community needs, but just how those doing it are going to be paid.

6) What’s in the secret SEO sauce? Wouldn’t a lot of legacy publishers like to know? As I pointed out in a quick post on a breaking Bay Area story covered by both Patch San Ramon and the Contra Costa Times, Patch’s story appeared at the top of Google (web & news), though the CC story was more detailed and more recent. Check on many local news stories. Time and again, Patch and Examiner will rise to the top, besting newspaper content. That’s the mastery of search engine optimization, a science too many publishers still flunk. Maybe the Knight Foundation, in its quest to bolster news content generally, should move up on its to-do list tools that help publishers finally master SEO.

7) Is there any connection between Patch and AOL’s Seed, beyond the garden-metaphor-approach to naming digital start-ups? Yes, in fact, though, just in the testing stage. Seed — AOL’s Demand-like, Associated Content-like Pro-Am news business — may feed freelancers into Patch. As each site’s editor decides how she wants to use that freelance money, one logical place to check will be Seed’s database of contributors, which, of course, is geo-tagged. Consider this a work-in-progress, but one way AOL will seek to connect the dots within its content-creating business, now including AOL Finance, Politics Daily, Engadget and more.

8) Who may the biggest winner out of the intense hyperlocal competition? With all those new players in action, we’ll see lots more content, even if the ad battle is brutal. So, look to the aggregators, like OutsideIn (partnered with Tribune+), FWIX (partnered with New York Times+) and OneSpot (partnered with Wall Street Journal+). Creating content is expensive; aggregating is cheap.

9) If hyperlocal is such a good idea, how come Rupert Murdoch’s not investing in it? Murdoch is ubiquitous in the talk of journalism’s future — Alesia bundled content site, new platform for tablets, a tabloid tablet product, pay walls and lots more — but we don’t see him in the hyperlocal space. Does he know something Tim Armstrong doesn’t? Or is the retail of block-by-block selling from Portsmouth to Pleasanton just too small potatoes?

Which got me thinking about the growing gulf between the metros and the small-town press. I heard it in talking with smaller town publishers at this year’s New York Press Association. We’ve seen in the increasing circulation disparities between large and small. Most of the paid content experiments are happening at smaller papers.

We know there’s something here, and the movie theater metaphor helps explain it. Community is a constant and one that doesn’t scale well, above some thousands of people. Community sites from Mark Potts’ Backfence to Tim Armstrong’s Patch seem to focus on communities of 30,000 to 60,000. And even smaller is better, if harder to make work financially for publishers.

Just like people will go to the Roxy no matter what’s playing — “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”! — people will read the local press even if it isn’t Pulitzer-quality journalism. Show “Alvin” on a cross-country American Airlines flight, to which I was recently subjected, and you get groans from the crowd. Show it at the Roxy, and people just feel better about it.

The small town press, online and off, looks to have a far different trajectory than the metros. Re-creating the Roxy, in news, may be as good a guideline as any to chart the future.

On YouTube, the 2007 video has now gotten almost 400,000 views.

This week, though, also saw an impressive report from another of the key players in the local journalism game — a foundation. The William Penn Foundation (assets: around $2 billion) commissioned J-Lab, an energetic newer media provocateur largely funded by the Knight Foundation, to figure out what was going on in local news, and what could be done about it. J-Lab’s recommendation, encapsulated in a readable, short-form report:  A Networked Journalism Collaborative for Philadelphia.

Most of you will nod as you read the key findings, my own emphasis added:

• The available news about Philadelphia public affairs issues has dramatically diminished over the last three years by many measures: news hole, air time, story count, key word measurements.
• People in Philadelphia want more public affairs news than they are now able to get.
• They don’t think their daily newspapers are as good as the newspapers used to be.
• They want news that is more connected to their city.
• People from both the Old Philadelphia, anchored by the city’s union and blue-collar workers, and the New Philadelphia, representing tech-savvy, up-and-coming neighborhoods, want to be involved in helping to generate that news.
• The city is awash in media and technological assets that can pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.
• There is strong, but guarded, interest in exploring a collaborative journalism venture.
• A significant number of Philadelphia’s new media outlets have expressed interest in pursuing a collaborative media initiative.
• Any collaborative news effort must validate and support the fiercely independent mindsets of the city’s new media makers.

Philly’s a special place in some ways — argumentative, feisty, proud of many heritages — and, in some ways, it’s like many other cities. While daily newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy (13 in the U.S.), proclaim profit and swear that the ad revenue bleeding is lessening (though they are taking in less revenue in 2010′s first (recovery) quarter than they did in 2009′s (near-Depression) quarter, many outside of daily newspapers believe they’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t include the dominant, near-monopolistic presences of daily metros that it used to.

So we see re-grouping everywhere. J-Lab’s report, like Len Downie’s last year, deserves credit for describing the reality well: Less is less — and it’s not enough. Foundations are redefining local journalism as a public good, like education, health and the arts — all community benefits that nobody expects the market to completely support. They’re pouring dollars into experiments, as are angels like Warren Hellman, the financial force behind Bay Citizen and Buzz Woolley, instrumental in getting Voice of San Diego off the ground. Entrepreneurs are testing models like TBD, as Allbritton (a TV veteran and innovator of Politico) believes a profitable enterprise can be constructed that’s digital-first, community-connected and tech-forward. The FTC continues hearings, roundtables and inquiries to see what can be done to “save” American journalism.

One big question that the Philly report begins to tackle is how to connect up diverse local media in any metro area. That seems like an academic question — the cliched herding of cats multiplied — but it’s not. Clearly, we see metro futures in which local news media will be far more diverse — public radio; news start-ups; commercial broadcasters; reduced, yet still substantial daily newspaper-based operations, plus a host of ethnic media and hyperlocal blogs. Connecting them smartly is key for two big reasons, ones that are the currency of the digital business: distribution and revenue.

Findability — the discovery of the local content — is key. Everyone from Outside In and FWIX to Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL is trying to lasso local content, seeing the findability problem. Aggregation is happening, though it’s ungainly. Readers don’t yet know where to look for the best aggregation of diverse, yet trustworthy local news. Research I’ve done with Outsell confirms that while we’re all quite used to using aggregators to get to national and global news, we’re still stumbling around as we look for local, tepidly sampling newspaper and broadcast sites, without forming strong time-on-site attachments.

So whoever can best aggregate any single metro’s news content — in a way that’s logical, useful and fun (think iPad here, for instance) — can drive a big audience. That big audience, of course, will drive the revenue, revenue for the aggregator, and in the Philly model and some others, revenues that will fund (not just form a sick trickle down) the local content producers. It’s arithmetic that’s just forming, so it’s hazy to see.

It leaves us, for the moment, with these kinds of questions:

• What indeed is a daily newspaper’s role in these collaborations? The Philadelphia operation now run by publisher Brian Tierney and editor Bill Marimow seems old-school in seeing their papers’ roles in the community. Yet, in other cities, we see the Miami Herald, Seattle Times, Charlotte Observer (all three funded by J-Lab) and Seattle PI.com actively reaching out to other local journalists, forming big tents of various constructions.
• If not the local daily, then who may do the organizing? TV broadcasters could do it, but it’s not much in their DNA, though a few national leaders like Raleigh’s WRAL show leadership here. Public radio could do it, and it may, spurred by local innovation and Project Argo-like national encouragement. The New York Times (or Wall Street Journal) could do it, if it decides its Chicago (Chicago News Cooperative) and/or Bay Area (Bay Citizen) models make broad financial and journalistic sense. The start-ups themselves could do it, but most are more oriented to doing the journalism, than organizing it more widely. The big aggregators, Yahoo foremost among them, have seen the coming, big local ad play, but may not have the patience and provision of resources for what will likely be a laborious bringing-together of local media. The Outside Ins and FWIX’s are tools companies, able to offer good software, but unlikely to do the aggregating themselves.

The magic word here from a business perspective: Roll-up. Whoever figures out how to roll up major audiences and monetize them wins. J-Lab’s report holds out hope that may come about somewhat organically. History, though, teaches us that it’s more likely to come by dint of more singular zeal.

In Philly, the next steps sound more foundation- than journalism-like, three Penn Foundation grants directed at planning, enterprise encouragement and creative use of technology. J-Lab Executive Director Jan Schaffer, herself an Inqy alumnus, notes that the enthusiasm the study encountered is palpable: “There were people that wanted to start tomorrow.” What does the project need? “The right editor,” says Schaffer, one that combines the savvy of the old and new news worlds. They are out there.

The newest start-ups show that. In D.C. TBD’s head, Jim Brady (Poynter’s Steve Myers good piece on Brady and his push here) is one of them, as are two of his key hires, Erik Wemple and Steve Buttry. Jonathan Weber brings three lives of news experience to Bay Citizen. Soon, there will be lots more.

The New York Times’  Miguel Helft — With Hirings, Yahoo Steps Up Its News Coverage — notes how Yahoo’s news operation has newly hired a dozen well-pedigreed journalists, like ex-Politico’s Michael Calderone,  ex-Business Week’s Jane Sasseen and ex ABC’s “Good Morning America” Anna Robertson.

It’s a further reminder that  — soon? — more experienced journalists may be working outside legacy brands than inside of them. There’s a lot of good in that, as journalists port over their skills and principles, diversifying the base of journalism. It’s problematic if their new homes don’t back up solid journalistic principle — without fear or favor — especially when push comes to shove, notably from advertisers.

What I’d like to see:

• Professional meeting places, online and off, that aggressively mix and match journalists from older and newer media orgs;
• Standard disclosure on a standard part of news pages, as to journalistic standards, influence (or not) of advertisers;
• Top leadership public endorsement of journalistic independence. News publishers, even as they complained about the scruffy news types, knew the business principles they were supposed to maintain, and the separation of the business and the news production. They’d reassert that point from time to time. I’d like to hear that from Carol Bartz, for example, and the heads of other newer media companies now hiring journalists.

• New West has covered a group of distinct states, within a the Mountain West region. The BANP will cover a group of distinct cities, within a region. What what’s regional/what’s local learning can you apply from your New West experience?

Certainly we have found there is a lot leverage in the local & regional approach, i.e. the regional coverage helps make for a very powerful local offering. Even though the conventional wisdom says people are most interested in what’s most local, we have found that good coverage of regional issues, and especially coverage that “connects the dots” and finds the points of common interest/ impact, resonates very strongly. For hyper-local, attentive cultivation of community contributors is key.