The virtuous circle from Digitaldickinson on Vimeo.

I spent two days last month discussing the future of journalism at the University of Central Lancashire with a group with representatives of all corners of the UK media scene. Fascinating two days, not least for the wealth of disagreement (no bad thing).

It’ll come as zero surprise to know that the way in which journalists deal with an audience that can instantly react (and even begin steering the news agenda) swallowed much of the 48 hours.

One of their esteemed tutors, Andy Dickinson, has just posted The Virtuous Circle depicting his version of how it should work.

And here’s some evidence that this is true – my first post using the brand new WordPress App.

It took under 30 seconds to set up. And if you can see this, it works.

It’s so much a part of my life that I’ve been given to Victor Meldrew-ish outbursts when they make the slightest change (remember when they introduced those God-awful drop-downs for ‘Video and Audio News’? I grumbled to anyone dumb enough to listen to me for a week).

I know every pixel of the home page’s real estate – the ‘wacky’ Also In The News feature centre right, the sports headline just beneath it, the speed-scan block of blue headlines top right. I can see the damn thing with my eyes closed.

But why worry? The BBC can afford some of the best pixel-pushers on the planet, and can organise user testing sessions that would make lesser companies gulp. P’raps it’s because I cannot wrap my mind around the new BBC.co.uk home page, which has the sniff of tricksiness about it.

Or maybe I should just accept that I’m becoming offensively conservative, and shut the hell up.

According to Yahoo’s VP of Video and Media Applications, the revolution has already happened. Ian Rodgers reckons the only option left for the music and video business is in ‘leveraging the scale of the web’.

It’s a fascinating argument. In particular, he recounts a conversation with a group of kids at a technology forum, at which he asked how many had seen the Saturday Night Live Lazy Sunday video on YouTube (a version of which is embedded above), and how many on TV (after being screened on SNL, the clip appeared on YouTube – NBC, the network behind it, asked YT to remove it). Almost every one of them had seen it on YouTube, but not one of them on television.

Says Rodgers:

Our kids are going to watch exactly what they want to watch, not necessarily what’s marketed to them. I understand this is threatening to large media businesses which are accustomed to owning the means of distribution, but I am certain it’s very good for our kids and for culture writ large. We’re all in the same business now, the business of making things people really love.

It’s not often I read an argument that so well summarises the trend that few of us have yet to articulate well. My son’s a case in point: mainstream media occupies very little space in his head. His taste in music in beyond eclectic: it’s artists that only he and a few friends have heard of. Much of his time in spent on Facebook, an Generation R closed world of exchanged links between a tightly bonded group of friends. They can cut the world any way they wish, and it’s almost impossible to force your way in.

So media producers have no choice: if I’m reading his argument correctly, the issue becomes one of smelling the coffee. Concentrate on producing brilliant things, and let them go free… you’ll find value in a chain that’s far larger than you had ever imagined. And anyway, you have no choice: they don’t have to listen anymore.

Sign up for an account (which is free, by the way), and you have instant access to a turbo-charged blogging tool that blurs the line between blog and instant messaging.

All you do is add a line of code to your site that embeds the CoverItLive console into your page. Now get yourself along to an event that begs second-by-second, blow-by-blow coverage, and log on to your account.

And it’s at this point that a good number of day-to-day bloggers will turn away from the tool – after all, how many bedroom bloggers have access to Steve Jobs’ keynotes? Well, judging by the crowds at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a growing number of semi-pro enthusiasts are gaining access to the main events. In which case, CoverItLive may soon prove to be more than a niche product.

I predict that the end of printed newspapers will happen in the time it takes for most people to upgrade their cell phones two more times. The iPhone, and its inevitable copycats, (let’s call them iClones) are newspaper killers.

When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant. Eventually, all cell phones will have Internet browsing built in. You might not have a web browser on your next cell phone, but the one after that will have it as a standard feature.

The Dilbert Blog: The Future of Newspapers

There’s one catch in this theory: a percentage of the population will always want to read a story in full, and at leisure. I now trudge around with an iPod touch in my pocket. While its web browser (same as that in the iPhone) is guaranteed to make you giggle, it doesn’t transform the reading experience. Or maybe you disagree.

I hear views that magazines and newspapers should begin to emulate websites – bite-sized chunks, 50-word paragraphs, you know the kind of stuff. Snack media. Then, over the weekend, I sat in a a coffee shop thumbing through the latest issue of Monocle. There are words in it, lots of them, and they are sized to be read. It works. It’s also evidence that there was a counter school of thought – print should do what it (still) does best, namely present the written word in a way that allows you to follow a narrative for more than 30 seconds.

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. 

Web 3.0, the official definition.I can grasp that. I’ve watched Facebook and the like grab headlines, but wondered what will happen once they become everyday. So you can now share your thoughts and habits with friends, and find new ones. Er, big deal – you’ve been able to do that since donkeys wore hats – the online social networking boom has simply facilitated it in  using a new platform.

For the web developers around me, the buzz has been in the software: Facebook and its brethren have given birth to a whole new breed of tools that they want to play with in the context of our sites.

This is not to disparage the major league Web 2.0 sites: many do what they do very well, and have doubtless showered benefits on thousands of people. Great.

But what’s needed now is the true implementation of the Mullet Strategy (oh, you know that one, don’t you? Business at the front end, party at the back…). I’m convinced that people gravitate toward knowledge: a well-researched, well-presented story will always win in the end.But its his final observation that had me leaping onto my chair and quietly punching the air…

Also of note, is what Web 3.0 leaves behind. Web 3.0 throttles the “wisdom of the crowds” from turning into the “madness of the mobs” we’ve seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts. Web 3.0 leaves behind the cowardly anonymous contributors and the selfish blackhat SEOs that have polluted and diminished so many communities.

I’ve been referring to Read/WriteWeb as a “media business” or a “media property”. R/WW used to be a blog, back when I was the only writer and I blogged in the evenings. But sometime last year, it became my full-time job. Then it became a business, and now it’s a media property. Let me clarify one thing though – I’m still a “blogger”, as are Marshall and Josh and the other R/WW writers. But Read/WriteWeb has evolved into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person.Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of blogging, also says that the voice must be unedited. This is clearly not the case with R/WW, which has multiple bloggers and also a strong editorial stance. The same is true at Techcrunch, Gigaom, PaidContent et al.  

Beyond Blogs: Old & New Media Converge

As an employee of an established publisher making its way in a new landscape (quite successfully, I should add), I find the fledging steps being taken by the New Blogs fascinating. The term ‘blog’ must be replaced soon: it is still tainted with the image of a loner in an attic recounting adventures with his Airfix kit to an audience of zero.

The New Wave is far closer in cut to traditional sources: the likes of ValleyWag and Read/Write Web are investigative and authoritative. Their writers live in their markets, and show care in providing a sound service for the reader. They are far closer to being specialist news services than they are blogs.

On a purely physical level, one thing that defines them as such is their page structures: a multi-post landing page, followed by linked single pages (unlike CNet or the Beeb, which are driven by industrial strength databases). I don’t doubt that the New Wave will ditch their restrictive formats, as soon as money allows.

There’s one other factor that distances them from traditional sources, namely the more pervasive inclusion of analysis. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for the mainstream press: the bloggers hitting prime time have kept their conversational approach, preferring to inject some of themselves into their tales.

At their worst, they vanish into internal debates that have no relevance to the audience. But at their best, they offer a narrative that purely objective news delivery cannot equal.