Future Journalists: Here's a Blook For You

How far in the future will we stop speculating about the future of journalism?

Now there's even a futuristic blook about the Future of Journalism.

Blook?

A blook is a collaborative system to fill the gap between a blog and a book. It fuses opinions from us and you to create a polished and comprehensive set of topic discussions.

Well, it's an onscreen flipbook collection of essays by academics and professionals who talk about the pros and cons of government bailouts of newspapers and citizen journalism and ... well, go look for yourself.

On the OurBlook website, you can find blooks on all sorts of topics, and read and watch video of the interviews with their contributors. Here are some that pertain to journalism:

* Future of Journalism

* The Future Journalist

* Reporters and the Media

* Citizen Journalism

* Social Media

Advice for newspapers that want to live to see the future? Nothing especially original, but here it is, in a nutshell:

Step 1. Abandon print (unless you're USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post). It's obsolete.

Step 2. "Carve out a niche that makes the paper's web site dominant, irreplaceable and one of a kind." Translation: local news. (We would add: Dynamic multimedia and videojournalism.)

Step 3. Start charging (via subscriptions or micropayments).

And, as you can judge from the book's cover (pictured) -- if you click to enlarge it, and read the fine print -- one thing we'll definitely still need in the future is editors.

Yet Another Pay-For-Content Scheme

Probably because of its high-profile partners, the newly created Journalism Online is getting a lot of buzz about its plan to rescue newspapers by enabling publishers to charge their Web audience for heretofore free content. It's also planning to help publishers negotiate licensing fees from search engines and aggregators whose existence depends on their content.

Sounds good on paper, but read it for yourself and see if it sounds any different from all the other micropayment and/or subscription schemes we've been hearing about... and if you think this one has a prayer of working.