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This is an interview by OurBlook with Chris O'Brien, a business columnist with the San Jose Mercury News who is heading up the Next Newsroom project.
 You're the project leader for the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Could you tell us about it?
CO: The Next Newsroom Project was funded through a News Challenge Grant awarded by the Knight Foundation in 2007. The goal of the project was to research and design the ideal newsroom of the future. The project was being conducted officially on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student-run newspaper at Duke University. The university is planning to build a new campus, and offered to create a new media center there that would include The Chronicle. That created an opportunity to ask what we thought was an intriguing question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, given all we know about the transformation of the media, what would it look like?
After receiving the grant, we recruited about 30 volunteers, conducted numerous interviews, visited various newsrooms, looked for ideas outside of journalism, and then began to pull the threads of this together. One of the early insights we had was that there would NOT be a single ideal newsroom, but rather, that we were entering an era of many next newsrooms. These would include everything from metro newsrooms to bloggers to non-profits to citizen journalists platforms. So the next step was to identify a handful of principles we thought should be embraced by any of those newsrooms:
1.. The newsroom should be multi-platform.
2.. The newsroom should be a center of continuous innovation.
3.. The newsroom should place its community at the center of everything it does.
4.. The newsroom should collaborate with other newsrooms in its local ecosystem.
5.. The newsroom should practice transparency to build and maintain trust.
There's not a one-size-fits-all solution to these principles. The key to figure out how they could be applied to your circumstances to fit the way you're trying to serve your community.
The very title of your project assumes there'll be a future for newspapers. Why do you think there will be?
CO: Well, I do think there will be "newsrooms." When it comes to newspapers, if they don't learn to become truly multi-platform, then they'll fade away as major local news organizations. I hope that doesn't happen. That said, I think that despite all the problems, the major local newspaper still has a strong brand, tremendous institutional depth of knowledge and bonds with the community, and a great opportunity to remain the main hub of information for a community.
What brought the U.S. newspaper industry to the predicament it's in?
CO: Many, many things. The biggest is the most obvious: classifieds. Traditionally, newspapers on average made 50 percent of their revenue and 70 percent of their profits from classifieds. That business is all but gone, and that's blown a pretty big hole in the income sheet. It's been hard for newspapers to truly experiment or identify new revenue streams. This has as much to do with the business side as the newsroom.
All that would have been bad enough. But there have been plenty of other problems compounding things. Wal-Mart doesn't advertise in newspapers. Auto dealers are one of our biggest display advertisers and they're obviously been hurting. Price of paper continues to rise. And topping it all off, the recent rounds of mergers and acquisitions have left companies like McClatchy and Tribune with mounds of debt.
Fundamentally, though, newspapers have the same problem faced by numerous other media-related and Internet industries, including music, television, movies and Web 2.0 start-ups. Nobody has figured out a good model for making money on digital content.
What do you think of bloggers and citizen journalists? How active are they in the San Jose area?
CO: I see this mainly as extension of journalism and conversation. Yes, it can be messy at times, but that's no surprise. It does make it challenging for consumers to sort through the proliferation of news sources and figure out whom to trust and whom to follow. I think citizen journalism is important, but still very very early stage. It sounds great in theory, and there have been some great success stories. But from the early hype, there seemed to be a picture that everyone would want to be blogging and contributing to news. And of course, that's not the case. The community exists along a wide spectrum, from people who want to contribute to people who want to just receive news passively as they always have. The key from a newsroom perspective is figuring out where people are along this spectrum and learning how to engage them and encourage them.
Out here, of course, a lot of the blogging revolves around technology and Silicon Valley. But folks like TechCrunch have clearly demonstrated the power and value of the blogging model.
Are there any other points you would like to make about the press?
CO: There is a lot of anxiety about this era, and it's certainly not easy to see great institutions like newspapers suffer and so many truly talented people lose their jobs. At the same time, this is perhaps the most exciting era in the history of journalism. We've never had greater access to information, or the ability to connect with our communities. I'm optimistic that what is emerging is going to be exciting, and hopefully better and more dynamic that what we're leaving behind.
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but the closeness of the government, and its increasing big brother role over the media will mean a media revolution right now will be a gradual level of trust to help phase people trust citizens ie themselves as watchdogs. it will be gradual evolution of ourselves and our ethics, and on a profound level working together for a common good. It seems very idealistic but WE HAVE TO. Society now is been forced to.
I am trying to use this local community reporting in my own home town as it is where i am born and where i grow up all my life. for more info see 'thecastleknockprintblog.com'