The Internet is radically transforming the definition of news so that it includes us. News will longer be just about the doings of government and celebrities — it will soon include any new information about any subject of common interest that is shared within any community. And, since our most important news is that which affects us most directly, like what is going on with our family and friends, Facebook and MySpace are now among the largest, most important news outlets. But what do we make of this strange new thing called “Twitter,” the curious microblogging service that allows users to send short messages to groups without any expectation of a response? If you are unfamiliar with it, the two-minute video below explains it well.

News now answers questions like “What is Britney Spears doing?” If that’s news, why isn’t the answer to Twitter’s persistent question, “What are you doing”? Does this mean that Twitter is in the news business? Incredibly, yes it does.

Since I am not up to the task of summarizing the tremendous amount of learning that flowed from Princeton’s future of news conference, I am grateful that the Guardian’s Kevin Anderson clearly is, as you can read here. That allows my final thoughts to focus not on what will save the news industry, but on who.

The conference taught me that those seeking to develop the future of news belong to a faith-based community that is highly passionate about news and shares a few beliefs in common: 1) Old Media news operations are unsustainable in the medium-to-long-term; 2) no one has proven answers; 3) now is the time for experimentation; and 4) there is no doubt that real solutions will be found reasonably soon. The belief we do not share is how great a loss it will be to democratic society when we lose journalism as it was. While some think of this as a minor tragedy, others say “don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”

Thinking about the panelists themselves, I see among them traits that have made them leaders in their field, and that others hoping to survive the upheaval in news would do well to emulate. The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson combines infectious passion and a can-do attitude with technical and journalism excellence. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Mark Davis is a clear-headed business thinker with the diplomatic skills required to lure newsrooms away from a self-defeating journalism culture. The Nation’s Eric Alterman is a candid and charismatic political thinker who fits well with the coming age in which news will provide a multitude of voices engaged in healthy debate. Microsoft’s Matt Hurst blends boyish curiosity with a fully mature intellect that can drive innovation. Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica are calm, reassuring figures who inspire us to dare to fail.

And, I would be remiss in not praising the leadership of Princeton’s Center for Information Policy – Ed Felten, David Robinson, and Laura Cummings-Abdo. Their program has set the groundwork for policy development at a time when too few are thinking about it.

Rather than review my remarks at today’s Future of News workshop at Princeton, I’ll refer you to my presentation slides and the excellent summary by the remarkable Kevin Anderson of the Guardian. I was intrigued by the presentations of my co-panelists Dan Gillmor and The Atlantic’s Reihan Salam, which I thought had an interesting overlap in calling for a kinder, gentler, more humble journalism.

Dan Gillmor feels that our debates about what is journalism and who is a journalist have now drifted into futility. News is no longer a lecture, but a conversation. The content providers are no longer oracles, but guides. The work of others, as represented by hyperlinks, is “God’s gift to getting it right,” recognizing that news gatherers are not and have never been infallible deliverers of verified truths. Reihan Salam spoke of the need for journalists to engage with their audiences at their level as fellow members of news communities. He paid homage to Eric Alterman, who was in attendance and served on a later panel, for taking the attitude of his audience and not his professional class from a high level of sophistication. Humility is an important and necessary step as journalists change their perceptions of their readers. Once referred to as “citizens,” readers have now been elevated to a position demanding even greater respect — “customers.”

This is a quick post to make available my presentation slides from Princeton’s “The Future of News” conference to attendees. You may download them here. More on the conference later.

In his excellent book Can You Trust the Media?, Adrian Monck suggests that with the advent of TV, audiences discovered a new way to determine whether news outlets could be trusted. It was no longer a matter of simply weighing the outlet’s track record for delivering “truth,” i.e. for making statements that survived the rigors of reality testing. It was now about “credibility,” and Monck cites Neil Postman’s position that this is a matter of the news-teller’s perceived “sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability, or attractiveness.”

This highlights another frustration newspaper journalists now suffer. Many claim the single most important advantage they have over bloggers, if not their justification for survival, is their ability to deliver truth. But bloggers who are unconstrained by the cold, objective, impersonal style required by Modern Journalism can more easily present themselves as more credible — sincere, authentic, and vulnerable. Worse yet, Modern Journalism almost requires journalists to sacrifice their credibility by insisting they always publish the truth and are objective, false claims regularly exposed by the Internet. Journalism has a credibility gap, and it must release its grip from cherished, but false ideals to narrow it.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is now cutting costs by selling, shuttering, and consolidating properties that offer limited growth potential. It is rumored that he is now looking at unloading some of his magazines, particularly those in the Southern Progress standalone group, which includes Southern Living and Cooking Light magazines. With a portfolio of about 125 titles, ranging from big brands like Time, Fortune, Essence, People, and Sports Illustrated to relatively tiny brands like Cage & Aviary Birds and Horse & Hound, why might Bewkes be focusing on selling Southern Progress?

One reason might be that Southern Progress magazines do not translate well to online — their natural state is print. Many of these publications are tailor made for coffee tables and waiting room racks — breezy publications about lifestyle where pictures are worth a whole lot more than 1,000 words. The titles alone bring relaxing and pleasant images to mind — Coastal Living, Cottage Living, and Sunset (life in the West). Cooking Light seems like a natural for print, too, requiring photographs with appetite appeal and recipes that can be followed right from the pages. If Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is right that within 10 years all media — print, TV, and the Internet — will be delivered over the Internet, magazines that work online are more valuable than those that work best on-table.

With apologies to Madonna, we are living in a mass media world, but we are not mass media girls — or guys. Metro-area level mass media, like newspapers and TV stations, may be the most popular sources of local news, but that’s not because we’re most interested in metro-level news. Given a choice, we’d much rather consume news that more directly affects our lives, such as news of family and friends (e.g. from Facebook or MySpace), our neighborhoods, communities, schools, shopping areas, vocations or avocations. It has been the limitations of 20th century technologies that kept us from getting the news we really wanted.

And that’s what makes the end game of the bids for Long Island’s Newsday by Rupert Murdoch and Cablevision so significant. While it is true that Murdoch owns a number of suburban newspapers in the NY area, his game seems to be more about controlling the NYC market for its position as a national news center of money and power. On the other hand, as a leading cable provider on Long Island, Cablevision seems to be more interested in dominating hyperlocal news in just one part of the NY area. Murdoch is about mass media. Cablevision is about multitude media, the direction in which news is headed. We will be seeing a lot more of what Cablevision is doing in metro areas throughout the country. Stay tuned.

Today in The New Republic, we got a glimpse of what Rupert Murdoch is up to at the Wall Street Journal. There appears to be a mandate for making the paper more appealing to readers by carrying “more news, shorter stories, snappier headlines, and increasing political and general-interest coverage.” Moreover, the new Publisher, Robert Thomson, seems to be trying to change the inside journalism culture. It has been reported that he “can be disdainful of critiques from the journalistic establishment” and has also “appeared to show disdain for the paper he’s manning now.” This is not something new — we’ve seen this before, from new Tribune owner Sam Zell. He recently barked at a staffer “you’re giving me the classic, what I would call, journalistic arrogance…What I’m interested in is, how can we generate additional interest in our product and additional revenue, so we can make our product better and better.”

Murdoch and Zell are seeking nothing less than a cultural transformation of their media properties. These outlets have been mired in “Modern Journalism’s” belief that what matters most is its own principles — e.g. objectivity, verification, public’s right to know, and independence. Murdoch and Zell want to lead them toward the emerging “Marketplace Journalism,” whose principles include audience satisfaction, advertiser value, and effective competition in the marketplace of ideas. In this regard, Old Media are at a disadvantage from start-ups and other would-be news leaders, who do not necessarily need to shed this now-dysfunctional culture first before moving toward more promising business models. Old Media may now have more money to finance New Media ventures. The question is how much of it will they burn through before putting the appropriate competitive culture in place.

When comedian Jon Stewart showed-up on a Pew Center survey last year as the 4th most admired journalist — tied with Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper — it was no laughing matter for journalism. To their great credit, Pew studied the content of The Daily Show for an entire year and compared its news agenda with that of mainstream outlets. Strangely, their findings suggest that other than its satirical and comedic style, it was hardly different at all. It had a greater focus on politics, provided no coverage at all of some big events like the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and targeted Republicans for ridicule more than three times as often as Democrats. Oops, scratch that last one as a difference — there was that recent Harvard-Pew study showing that on network evening news, twice as many stories about Democrats were positive, while twice as many stories about Republicans were negative.

So it seems like Jon Stewart’s show is just like the mainstream media, only more entertaining. It may not fit Modern Journalism’s definition of news, which requires a serious, authoritative, quasi-scolding style, but who gave them the right to define what news is? In fact, cable is introducing us to a whole range of acceptable news styles including crusading (Olbermann, O’Reilly), sensational (Van Susteren, Grace), and drop-dead gorgeous (the foxes on Fox). Who knows? Maybe Couric would be doing better if CBS let Katie be Katie. Being serious all the time is no way to attract friends, nor is it a way to attract viewers.

It sure seems like NBC is beginning to recognize that local broadcast’s days are numbered, as indicated by the planned November launch of a 24-hour local cable news channel by their NY affiliate. NBC local media President John Wallace attributed this move to local broadcast’s “slow-growth,” “eroding and aging” audiences, and the “perception” that it might not be a “sustainable business long term.” Translation: he thinks local broadcast is dead — when all media converge onto the Internet, the networks will no longer need to run their profitable prime time programming through local broadcast stations, leaving affiliates’ self-originated local news as their most obvious business to cling to.

Unfortunately, NBC has not factored in how the New Media are changing news audiences’ habits. Also dying with local broadcasting will be the importance of metro area-wide news. It had never been a consumer choice, but a limitation of broadcast technology. Now with the Internet, viewers will begin to consume more news that directly affects their lives – news of family and friends, their neighborhoods and communities, local shopping, kids’ schools, local roads, vocations, and avocations. So, just at a time when consumers will be losing interest in metro area-wide news, NBC will be offering a lot more of it – 24 hours worth. In football terms, NBC is going wide when they should be going deep (H/T: Lost Remote).